RUTHFULLY YOURS

Thousands of taxpayer-supported Seattle teachers are planning to don Black Lives Matter t-shirts this week in public schools and force-feed left-wing propaganda to their students about race in an effort to draw attention to the systemic racism they imagine is embedded in the public education regime.

The shirts say “Black Lives Matter” and “We Stand Together,” which is almost identical in meaning to the Hillary Clinton campaign slogan “Standing Together.”

The Black Lives Matter cult is animated by a hatred of normal American values. Its members idolize convicted, unrepentant black militants and cop-killers Assata Shakur and Mumia Abu Jamal and have declared “war” on law enforcement. Its members openly call for police officers to be assassinated. Sympathizer Micah X. Johnson answered the call murdering five cops in cold blood during a Black Lives Matter rally in Dallas in July. Black Lives Matter, which is vehemently anti-white, ought to be designated a domestic terrorist organization for fomenting a war against police, critics say.

The October 19 event is being run by Social Equality Educators (SEA), a group of teachers within the Seattle Education Association (SEA), a local collective bargaining unit. A political faction, SEE runs candidates for offices in the SEA.

Jesse Hagopian, a SEE leader, says more than 2,000 shirts have been ordered for the event. Wearers will include teachers, counselors, paraprofessionals, nurses, instructional assistants, librarians, and others this Wednesday as part of “Black Lives Matter At School,” which he calls an unprecedented action.

The University of Michigan is going to start using an “Intercultural Development Inventory” to monitor its students “cultural sensitivity levels” as part of its new $85 million diversity initiative — and it’s pretty clearly an irresponsible use of money.

The point of the inventory — which is explained in this very creepy video — is, according to the school website, to judge students’ “ability to shift cultural perspective and appropriately adapt behavior to cultural differences and commonalities,” give students a “customized learning plan and a variety of intercultural training opportunities designed to improve cross-cultural engagement by targeting specific areas for skill development and increased personal capacity” based on their answers, and then test them again later to see if they’ve “improved.”

According to an article in the school’s official newspaper, The Michigan Daily, the school plans to spend $85 million on diversity initiatives over the next five years — in addition to the $40 million it’s already allotted to spend annually — at a school where tuition has increased 3.9 percent this year.

Now, it isn’t clear how much of this money will be spent on the monitoring program itself, but the fact is that any amount would be too much. Not only is it obviously invasive and creepy, but it’s also just not going to accomplish what the school is hoping it will. Any student at U of M, “insensitive” or not, will probably be smart enough to figure out what answer the school wants and choose that answer. After all, choosing the “wrong” answer will brand students as a “racist” in the eyes of their school — and what’s more, as Reason’s Robby Soave points out, the fact that a student’s answers will determine his or her “individual learning plan” means that “students who are judged to be too insensitive might be given more work to do.” Who wants to do sign themselves up to do more work . . . especially when it’s work that’s so likely to be patronizing and pointless? Zero people. Punishing students for telling the truth about their opinions is the best way to ensure that real discussions about those opinions will never happen — which is hindering the exact kind of learning experiences that the school claims it wants to cultivate.

The “link the report makes between Catholic media, Catholic book publishers, and Islamophobia needs to be severed,” stated ethics professor can Catholic priest Drew Christiansen at a September 12 Georgetown University presentation. He referenced a new report by Georgetown’s Saudi-funded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU) that presents new censorship dangers to Catholic “Islamophobes” who speak critically of Islam.

The report by ACMCU’s Bridge Initiative, Danger & Dialogue: What American Catholics Think and Write about Islam, found that “Catholic media outlets discuss Islam negatively overall” despite Islam’s supposedly benign nature. A Pope Francis quotation asserted “it’s not fair to identify Islam with violence” and hackneyed apologetics for Islamic law stated that sharia, rather than uniformly endangering human rights, “has been interpreted in diverse ways.” By contrast, “[t]hose surveyed who consume content from Catholic media outlets have more unfavorable views of Muslims than those who don’t.”

Surveyed Catholic views on Islam in Danger & Dialogue were correspondingly negative. In all, “[n]early half of Catholics (45%) believe Islam ‘encourages violence more than other religions around the world.'” “Catholics more often identified Muslims’ potential shortcomings or faults as major obstacles to good relations, than they mentioned Catholics’ faults,” the report stated in an accusatory tone without specifying such Catholic faults. Yet brutal realism justified that “[t]hree-quarters (75%) of Catholics felt that violence and terrorism committed by Muslims was ‘very much’ or ‘somewhat’ of an obstacle to better relations.”

As a contributing cause to these findings, Danger & Dialogue focused on how the “Islamophobia industry sometimes influences the production of Catholic content on Islam.” The report reiterated well-worn accusations from leftwing, George Soros-funded organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the Center for American Progress (CAP) concerning “Islamophobes” in Catholic media. Muslim reformer Zuhdi Jasser, Donald Trump’s Catholic presidential campaign adviser Walid Phares, and Catholic academic William Kilpatrick all received critical citations. The report noted that books by the best-selling Catholic writer on Islam, Robert Spencer, a supposed “anti-Muslim hate group” leader and “misinformation expert,” are available in Washington, DC, area Catholic bookstores.

Such individuals were anathema to the panelists who presented Danger & Dialogue in Georgetown’s Riggs Library. The university’s well-known Islam apologist, Professor John Esposito, echoed the report by stating that “Islamophobia is growing exponentially in the US and Europe….Many would say it is at an all-time high.” ACMCU board member and Catholic Theological Union professor Scott Alexander in turn contrasted that Esposito, “one of my most faithful and treasured mentors,” belongs among Islam scholars to the “Islamophilic category, a category to which I unapologetically place myself.”

One hundred years ago, on October 2, 1916, a new public high school building for black youngsters was opened in Washington, D.C. and named for black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. Its history is a story inspiring in many ways and appalling in many other ways.

Prior to 1916, the same high school had existed under other names, housed in other buildings — and with a remarkable academic record.

In 1899, when it was called “the M Street School,” a test was given in Washington’s four academic public high schools, three white and one black. The black high school scored higher than two of the three white high schools. Today, it would be considered Utopian even to set that as a goal, much less expect to see it happen.

The M Street School had neither of two so-called “prerequisites” for quality education. There was no “diversity.” It was an all-black school from its beginning, and on through its life as a high quality institution under the name Dunbar High School.

But its days as a high quality institution ended abruptly in the middle of the 1950s. After that, it became just another failing ghetto school.

The other so-called “prerequisite” that the M Street School lacked was an adequate building. Its student body was 50 percent larger than the building’s capacity, a fact that led eventually to the new Dunbar High School building. But its students excelled even in their overcrowded building.

Some students at the M Street School began going to some of the leading colleges in the country in the late 19th century. The first of its graduates to go to Harvard did so in 1903. Over the years from 1892 to 1954, thirty-four of the graduates from the M Street School and Dunbar went on to Amherst.

Of these, 74 percent graduated from Amherst and 28 percent of these graduates were Phi Beta Kappas. Other graduates from M Street High School and Dunbar became Phi Beta Kappas at Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth and other elite institutions.

Graduates of this same high school pioneered as the first black in many places. These included the first black man to graduate from Annapolis, the first black woman to receive a Ph.D. from an American institution, the first black federal judge, the first black general, the first black Cabinet member and, among other notables, a doctor who became internationally renowned for his pioneering work in developing the use of blood plasma.