RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/crt-invades-the-law-schools/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

For many years, law schools have been moving away from teaching the nuts and bolts of our legal system and toward what Professor Charles Rounds of Suffolk Law School calls “bad sociology, not law.”  I have spoken with veteran lawyers who wring their hands over the fact that so many graduates have had their heads stuffed with dodgy theories but have difficulty with legal fundamentals.

Things are getting worse, as critical race theory invades the law schools. On her Dissident Prof blog, Mary Grabar has posted an excellent piece by Professor Matthew Andersson on the harm of CRT.

Andersson writes, “CRT, along with BLM, is a pleading tool: a position taken up by an organized — or more accurately by an incited — coalition of individuals and institutions opportunistically advancing a synthetic complaint in the public forum, especially through media, universities, and government organizations. These are needed to create the impression that their argument has an historical basis and  possesses moral weight. The sufficiently articulated demands can be seen as a path to both social and legal relief through remedies of financial damages and restitution, and through policy that codifies its demands and interests — despite any constitutional violations.”

This “pleading tool” is one that will do a great deal more damage to our concepts of equality under the law.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/the-revolt-against-left-wing-schooling/

The struggle ongoing in public schools reflects a battle between the historic nation and the ideological nation.

I n the past few months, we’ve seen teachers resigning their positions with fiery letters denouncing the “tribalism and sectarianism” that is overtaking traditional liberal education. We’ve seen parents taking the stage at their local board of education meetings to denounce their school for “emotionally abusing our children” and “demoralizing them by teaching them communist values.” The 1619 Project from the New York Times was turned almost immediately into material to be included in school curricula — a really killer play at a new income stream. And several red states have worked up legislation to ban variations of “critical race theory” or the endorsement of “divisive concepts” in history curricula. We have parents denouncing anti-racist parents’ associations as “Chardonnay antifa.”

Let’s just tick off a few things right at the top. The fact that these debates involve children almost guarantees that they will be the subject of moral panic and hysteria. And we should say that, in these curriculum debates, there is a great deal of deception, hiding the ball, talking past each other, often deliberately. A school district might propose an “anti-racist pedagogy” and parent-critics will respond that they don’t want “critical race theory” taught in school. The district’s defender will reply, haughtily, “We’re not teaching graduate seminars on the thought of Professor Derrick Bell.” Parents will complain that teachers are smuggling in trendy concepts about “white fragility” or “whiteness.” And teachers will fire back, “These parents don’t want us to teach that slavery was racist.” Finally, and most unhelpfully, someone will pipe up to say, “Who really remembers what they taught you in tenth grade anyway?”

Besides the fact that it involves children, this conflict is hot for two other reasons. First, precisely like police reform, it involves a public-sector union that certain members of the community feel is staffed and run by fundamentally hostile people who cannot be trusted to safely carry out their mission — even if given new and tough strictures and training.

https://freebeacon.com/campus/critical-race-theory-opponents-win-board-elections-at-nations-top-high-school/

A group of anti-critical race theory candidates this week won seats on the governing body of the nation’s top high school after campaigning against the school’s racially driven admissions practices.

As part of the district’s push for diversity and inclusion, Fairfax County Public Schools scrapped the admissions test for Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in October, and two months later, adopted a quota system to boost black and Hispanic enrollment numbers. A slate of four candidates opposed to the school’s recent embrace of “equity” won seats on Thomas Jefferson’s Parent Teacher Student Association.

Activists who wanted to eliminate Thomas Jefferson’s test requirement also pushed for implementing “antiracism” and critical race theory-based initiatives district-wide, according to a series of emails uncovered in December. President-elect Harry Jackson, the first black man to lead the association, told the Washington Free Beacon that if left unchecked, critical race theory will tear communities apart.

“It’s teaching that white people are inherently racist,” Jackson told the Free Beacon, “teaching that other children are there to oppress you. This is not the way to go.”

Parents across the country have organized against schools’ embrace of “woke” standards and practices. Anti-critical race theory candidates have won school board seats in two Dallas suburbs. Parents in Indiana criticized one school district’s promotion of racially divisive resources, including works from “antiracism” scholar Ibram X. Kendi and an article on how white women play a “role in racial (in)justice.”

Coalition for TJ, a nonpartisan group of parents opposed to the district’s leftward sprint, supported Jackson. They also backed Jun Wang, Himanshu Verma, and Hanning Chen, who were elected second vice president, treasurer, and corresponding secretary, respectively. Fairfax County Public Schools did not reply to the Free Beacon’s request for comment in time for publication.

The Fairfax County School Board made headlines in October when they eliminated the STEM-focused high school’s merit-based entrance exam. The board set a cap on the number of students that could attend Thomas Jefferson from each of the district’s middle schools, in an attempt to boost black and Hispanic enrollment.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/06/campus_raceobsession_proselytizing_the_alumni.html

I am sitting here thumbing through my newly arrived Kenyon Alumni Magazine. Other than the obits and the class notes, it is rarely worth reading, and is usually nauseatingly predictable as a vehicle for all the conventional campus orthodoxies.  As ever, this one is full of all the woke BS that I expect to read from a hermetically sealed echo-chamber that virtually every campus has become.

As does every college alumni magazine, the College publishes these little vignettes on those wonderful alumni/ae who do all those enlightened, smart, successful things.

I see we have “Jane” (name disguised), who is doing good things in Arlington, Virginia. She is working hard to end “systemic racism,” though it is never defined and merely asserted as “must be true.” In 2017 she founded Facing Race in Arlington/White Folks Facing Race, which is designed to “connect community members who are working on becoming more anti-racist.” Are there different levels of anti-racism? Just asking. What could be finer than her continuing personal mission of “unlearning white supremacy”?

We are told that the “survival” of her “colleagues of color” depends on her work.  Can those sheeted nightriders who frequent Arlington, Virginia be but a few blocks away? So brave, so inspired; proud to be one of the 300 at Thermopylae on the Potomac. 

Note the many unspoken assumptions here.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/06/11/watch-black-florida-mother-eviscerates-critical-race-theory-in-2-minutes-n1453868

On Thursday, black Florida mother Keisha King testified against critical race theory (CRT) as Florida’s Department of Education considered a new rule that would ban CRT from public schools. The rule ultimately passed. King’s testimony went viral on social media, and even Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.), who proposed the ban (which originally did not explicitly condemn CRT), shared a video of her testimony.

“My name is Keisha King, I’m a mom of two, one of whom is in the Duval County Public School system and one in private school thanks to school choice,” the mother, who lives in the Jacksonville area, began.

“Just coming off of May 31, marking the 100 years [after] the Tulsa riots, it is sad that we are even contemplating something like critical race theory, where children will be separated by their skin color and deemed permanently oppressors or oppressed in 2021,” King lamented. “That is not teaching the truth, unless you believe that whites are better than blacks.”

Recommended: Critical Race Theory Has Sparked a Civil War in American Education

“I have personally heard teachers teaching CRT and we have had an assembly shut down because a Duval County Public School system consultant thought it would be a great idea to separate students by race,” she recalled.

“This is unacceptable,” the black mother declared, emphatically.

She went on to counter much of the leftist rhetoric that CRT advocates use to foist this nefarious ideology on children.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/how-unwoke-your-school-board-joy-overbeck/

There’s a vicious pandemic that no vaccine will cure, and it’s called Critical Race Theory (CRT.) This is “wokeness” and it is invading school districts and classrooms nationwide, infecting the minds of America’s progeny from preschool through college. It’s a relentless illness, spreading racial division and distrust with a deterministic dogma that defines all whites as programmed to be oppressors and all minorities as doomed victims of that white oppression.  

This is the story of what happened when this pandemic suddenly struck the Douglas County, Colorado, School District, which serves 63,000 students. Only 1 percent of those students are black, and black residents only make up 1.1 percent of the county population (with Hispanics at about 7 percent according to the 2010 census , the most recent available.) So Douglas County is simply not as diverse and “inclusive” as many woke left-leaners would like it to be. Still, somehow the county always rates at the top of those nationwide “great places to live” surveys. It’s full of leafy, affluent neighborhoods with friendly people and lots of dogs. The dogs and their owners’ ride of choice is a Ford 150 pickup or a domestic SUV. The predominantly white and Republican electorate is one of the most well-educated populations in the nation. The county has been untroubled by the Antifa and BLM burning and lootings afflicting the radical left hotbeds of the nation. Though a few anemic BLM marches were organized, mostly by whites from other counties, these were outdone in enthusiasm and frequency by the hundreds of Trump supporters  who all last summer and fall flocked several times a week to sidewalk honk and wave events and Trumpster car parades.  No violence or racial incidents occurred, and the fall elections produced decisive victories for all the local and state Republican candidates, as usual.  

t should be noted that for the last two years, the District’s Superintendent, Chief Academic Officer, and Chief Technology Officer have all been African-Americans.  Yet the three departed their jobs at the end of 2020. The Superintendent was placed on administrative leave following a formal workplace complaint of gender discrimination; he was ultimately cleared. Nevertheless he resigned, having previously told the Board he had another job offer. Although the Chief Academic Officer said “she experienced “microaggressions and passive-aggressive racism” almost daily, none of the three district officials had any specific complaints.     

https://www.city-journal.org/san-franciscos-bonkers-educrats

Once known for its scenic beauty and cultural attractions, San Francisco in recent years has acquired a less picturesque image as a mecca for the homeless and drug addicts, whose used syringes and feces plague city sidewalks. And now the City by the Bay can add another item to its ugly list: the public school system.

First off, there’s the achievement gap. While 70 percent of the city’s white students are proficient in math, just 12 percent of black students are, according to statistics released last year. One would think that public officials in such a bastion of progressive politics would jump at the chance to rectify this dismal disparity, but the city’s education establishment has other priorities. On January 26, the school board decided to rename 44 public schools because their namesakes were presumably more evil than Satan—or perhaps even than Donald Trump. Paul Revere, Thomas Edison, Daniel Webster, Abraham Lincoln, Francis Scott Key, and assorted other historical miscreants were guilty of anti-woke crimes. Malcolm X got a pass, however; the elementary school bearing his name will not undergo a change. Why would a one-time drug dealer, thief, and pimp be exempted? Because the school board said that he should be “judged by the entirety of his life”—a courtesy it declined to extend to Lincoln and the others. Facing a lawsuit, the board has since decided to put a hold on the renaming campaign.

In early February, the art department of the San Francisco School District decided that acronyms are “a symptom of white supremacy.” Around the same time, the city took the unprecedented step of suing its own school board in an effort to get kids out of virtual learning mode and back into classrooms. In March, it came to light that San Francisco school board vice president Allison Collins had made some nasty comments about Asian-Americans on Twitter in 2016, accusing them, among other things, of using “white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’” The school board had to do something, of course. But it didn’t fire her or dock any of her six-figure salary; it merely removed her as vice president and stripped her of committee assignments. Collins then sued the school district for $87 million, alleging that the demotion had caused her a significant loss of reputation, severe mental and emotional distress, loss of enjoyment of life, humiliation, and “spiritual injury to her soul.”

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/revisiting-classics-at-princeton

I have written recently about the Princeton classics department’s decision to eliminate the requirement that students engaging closely with Latin and Greek texts be able to … read them in Latin and Greek. The new idea is that the department will attract more majors by opening up to ideas from students who may be full of beans but just not inclined to tackle complex, ancient languages. And sub rosa, the idea is clearly – as we can see from words in the official statement like underrepresented, perspectives, and experiences – that of especial interest will be black students, especially in light of today’s racial reckoning which the department openly acknowledges was the primary spur for this change.

My disappointment with this decision is because it is part of a tradition of arguments that we do black people a favor by exempting them from certain kinds of faceless, put-up-or-shut-up challenges to entry. Back in the aughts, the classic example was brilliant, fierce black lawyers confidently arguing that because black firefighter applicants don’t do as well on the entrance exams required for the job, the exams are racist and should be eliminated. More recently there has been the idea that if black kids are rare at top-ranked public schools in New York City like Stuyvesant because few excel on the standardized test one must ace to be admitted, then the solution is to eliminate the test as “racist.” The Princeton decision is a variation: to get black kids into classics, it’s supposedly immoral to expect them to master the intricacies of Latin and Greek, languages which I suppose we can see as foreign, “white” to them as well. Rather, they must be admitted in shining expectation that their class comments will be bracingly “diverse” in good old English.

* * *

My Atlantic colleague Graeme Wood is more sanguine about the Princeton decision. He argues sagely that a certain kind of student happens to enjoy working their way through languages like Latin as a kind of puzzle (I openly admit being that type), but that there are others who don’t go in for that particular task and yet are itching and well-equipped to engage and analyze classical texts regardless. Graeme notes that we do not consider it an educational tragedy that specialists in English history are not required to be able to read Old English. (Although I wonder if this analogy would hold if the idea were someone specializing in England of the first millennium, where all of the relevant linguistic matter was in Old English [and Latin].)

I can go with him here to an extent. On the one hand, as I have argued here, to engage work only in translation is, of course, to lose a lot. Yet, in making that argument here, I was referring to my own reading War and Peace in English, as I myself was not inclined to hack through it in Russian (although my being black was not the reason for this disinclination [couldn’t help it!]). The question is how important we consider that loss to be.