RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/the-assault-on-childrens-psyches

Patricia (a pseudonym) is the mother of a teenage girl who in recent years has come to identify as transgender. She lives in California, considers herself progressive, votes Democrat, and leads a group for parents of children with rapid onset gender dysphoria (ROGD)—that is, youth who suddenly experience distress with their bodies and believe that undergoing medical “transition” will make them whole again. When I spoke to her recently, she recounted how her daughter’s at-first-lesbian and then trans identity emerged in response to feelings of shame about being white.

I have since spoken to more than a dozen ROGD parents and parent-group leaders who tell a similar story. Their schools compulsively tell their children how awful it is to be white, how white people enjoy unearned “privilege,” how they benefit from “systems” put in place by and for white people for the sole purpose of oppressing “people of color.” Plagued by guilt, the children—almost all of them girls—rush to the sanctuary of “LGBTQ+” identity. Once there, they are catapulted into hero status. According to Patricia, some teachers at her daughter’s school are more forgiving toward “queer” and “trans” kids who hand in their homework late.

The students, especially the girls, absorb this messaging. They are acutely sensitive to how identity affects their social status and academic fortunes. They want the warmth that comes with queer/trans identity, but above all they don’t want to be thought of as vicious oppressors. Lacking maturity and self-confidence, they fail to put “anti-racist” indoctrination in its proper context. They do not appreciate its ahistorical, anti-intellectual, and anti-humanist foundations, nor are they aware of the incentives leading teachers and administrators to foist it on them. Being white is not something these teenagers can escape, but they can mitigate its social costs by declaring themselves part of an oppressed group.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/06/compelling-diversity-and-punishing-dissent-richard-l-cravatts/

As more evidence that universities continue to be obsessed with race and are in thrall with the pursuit of racial “justice” and “equity,” the Board of Directors of California Community Colleges has decided that the system will now grade its employees, including, of course, faculty, on the extent to which they promote “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility.” The guidelines of a March proposal “include DEIA competencies and criteria as a minimum standard for evaluating the performance of all employees,” and, in case a staff or faculty member was disinterested in this mandatory thinking about race, the rules firmly “provide employees an opportunity to demonstrate their understanding of DEIA and anti-racist principles.”

The California Community Colleges system is not the first to mandate DEIA “competence” and adherence as a component of hiring and tenure decisions. A recent report by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) found that “DEI criteria were found in tenure standards at 21.5 percent of institutions.” 

In April, as one recent example, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign announced that it will demand diversity-contribution statements in which faculty must profess their allegiance to goals of diversity and inclusion as part of the process of tenure and promotion.

Unsurprising, UC Berkeley instated a similar policy, portentously entitled “Guidelines for Assessing Faculty Candidate Contributions to Advancing Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging at Berkeley,” which has as its broad mission to advance “diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging are responsibilities of all Berkeley faculty through their research, teaching, and/or service.”

https://www.nas.org/blogs/statement/regime-change-repelling-the-dei-assault-on-higher-education?utm_

Criticism of American society for its inequitable treatment of blacks and other minority groups has become a focal point of American education at every level of instruction. Sometimes this criticism is historically well-grounded and tempered by recognition of social, political, and economic complexity. But more often this criticism veers into simplistic claims and fictions presented as fact. The latter sort of critique has become conspicuous in many of the nation’s public schools and has aroused opposition from esteemed historians and parents of all races and ethnicities who object to curricula and teaching practices that treat American society as fundamentally racist and therefore illegitimate. Similar complaints have been leveled at colleges and universities, including graduate schools of law, education, and medicine. But objections to the so-called “anti-racist” agenda in post-secondary education has not drawn nearly as much attention as it has in K-12 schools. In this essay I intend to address the critique of America on racial grounds mainly at the college and university level, but problems in the public schools will necessarily come into the picture.

Words Matter

America’s racial critics often disarm their opponents by using a vocabulary whose unassuming or technical demeanor hides radical meanings. Because many of these words and phrases are ambiguous, I will start by setting out these terms as I shall use them.

Anti-racism is a word contrived by Boston University professor Ibram X. Kendi. It looks as if it means ‘opposed to racism,’ but Kendi and his followers use it to mean racial favoritism towards blacks, deliberate discrimination against whites aimed at compensating for “systemic” racial injustice, and the suppression of all speech and action opposed to their preferred policies.

Systemic racism refers to the supposedly omnipresent racially disparate treatment built into institutions such as law, the real estate market, medical practice, and education. The proponents of the concept of systemic racism argue that it generally operates outside the awareness of white people or other beneficiaries of the privileges it confers on one group at the expense of another. Even individuals who decry racism and are free from any personal racial animus are thus part of systemically racist institutions.

Critical Race Theory (“CRT”) is a branch of neo-Marxist social analysis formulated by Harvard Law School professor Derrick Bell in the late 1970s and further developed by his colleague, Kimberlé Crenshaw. Bell and Crenshaw argued that the Civil Rights Movement had failed to reform American society in any fundamental way and that, rightly seen, all American institutions are systemically racist. CRT found a niche in academe among social theorists who hold that participants in a society seldom understand how the social order is actually structured and why it is that way. Most consequentially, CRT achieved substantial influence among scholars focusing on education, and in the curricula of education schools. Proponents of CRT see themselves as liberating people from their illusions by showing them that American institutions are built on and continue racial oppression. They also believe they have a duty to subordinate all activities of life, and especially education, to CRT’s dis-illusioning project.

Diversity was a doctrine first articulated by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell in a 1978 decision. Powell argued that colleges and universities might engage in some racial favoritism towards black students if the schools could show that this would advance the “intellectual diversity” of college classes and thus benefit all students regardless of race. Powell’s opinion was not supported by any other Justice at the time and thus lacked the force of law, but colleges and universities soon began to justify racial preferences in admissions by citing diversity. In time, the idea that racial “diversity” was a means to achieve “intellectual diversity” gave way to the widespread assumption that racial diversity is an end in itself. In 2003, the Supreme Court in a majority decision in the case of Grutter v. Bollinger agreed that “diversity” was an acceptable reason for racial preferences in college admissions, provided that the use of preferences was somewhat disguised.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (“DEI”) is the contemporary expansion of the diversity doctrine. “Equity” replaces the older idea of individual equality under the law with the idea that all social goods should be distributed in proportion to each ethnic group’s size relative to the total population. “Inclusion,” which violates the principles of freedom of association and individual merit, requires the extension of group-identity quotas to every part of society, public and private. This fixation on group-identity extends beyond race, as the proponents of DEI increasingly write “gender identity” into institutional policy. DEI ideologues share with their “anti-racist” peers the habit of suppressing their critics rather than answering their criticisms.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/06/conservative-professor-fights-uclas-bias-and-wins-mark-tapson/

It is a given today that our so-called institutions of higher learning are hostile to political conservatives, not only students but the minority of professors who openly lean Right. Even Progressive academics can find themselves targeted by Cancel Culture for minor or accidental transgressions against woke dogma. The punishment can range from “mere” ostracization, to a hopelessly smeared reputation, to the loss of one’s job – usually a combination thereof. It’s ugly and totalitarian, which is why any moral victory against the Left’s ideological intolerance is a blow for freedom of speech and political balance in the classroom.

Keith Fink – a successful attorney, legal commentator, academic, and author –was a Communications Studies lecturer at the University of California Los Angeles from 2008 until his forced departure in June 2017. His courses on “Race, Sex & Politics: Free Speech on Campus;” “Free Speech in the Workplace;” “Entertainment Law;” and “Arguing Contemporary Social Issues” were among the students’ most popular ones at UCLA. But Fink is politically conservative and an ardent, fair-minded advocate for truth, so a confrontation with the school’s Progressive administrators was inevitable.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/06/canceling-honors-classes-name-equity-jason-d-hill/

Like ineradicable fungi spreading across a diseased body devoid of inoculants to fight it off, there is a growing educational malfeasance taking root in many of our nation’s public schools that few seem to have the moral courage to speak out against. Honors Programs are being eliminated or are being considered for elimination on the premise that they discriminate against the non-gifted, most of whom fall into minority groups. The elimination of such programs is being defended in the name of equity and recognition.

The theory behind the “deleveling” of subjects such as English, social studies, biology, math and science, and history is to give all students the opportunity to engage in rigorous instruction. In the highest-performing school district in Rhode Island, Barrington High School has been in an uproar over the cancelation of such courses. Many of them have since been restored.

The school had been moving into a “one universal design for learning,” or one curriculum for students of varying abilities. The “universal design” is seen as a way to offer equal access to a rigorous curriculum to traditionally under-represented groups.

In San Diego at the Patrick Henry High School, more than 150 parents protested the school’s decision to eliminate eight advanced and honors courses from its offerings, including advanced English, History and Biology. The school’s principal, Michelle Henry, announced a more equitable program that will be part of a district pilot of “Honors for All.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-georgetown-law-purge-ilya-shapiro-resigns-tweet-william-treanor-11654552225?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Optimists have opined that America has reached “peak woke” as a backlash against it grows. Think again, as the experience of Ilya Shapiro demonstrates.

Nearby Mr. Shapiro describes his treatment at the hands of Georgetown University Law School, which had hired him to be the executive director of its Constitution Center. Mr. Shapiro is a libertarian-minded legal scholar who sometimes writes for these pages. Georgetown, like most law schools, is dominated by progressives, often of the intolerant and vindictive variety.

But Mr. Shapiro was encouraged by dean William Treanor and the school’s Speech and Expression Policy, which promises to defend dissenting voices on campus. His painful education has been discovering that some speech is more protected than others.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-i-quit-georgetown-11654479763?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

After a four-month investigation into a tweet, the Georgetown University Law Center reinstated me last Thursday. But after full consideration of the report I received later that afternoon from the Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity and Affirmative Action, or IDEAA, and on consultation with counsel and trusted advisers, I concluded that remaining in my job was untenable.

Dean William Treanor cleared me on the technicality that I wasn’t an employee when I tweeted, but the IDEAA implicitly repealed Georgetown’s Speech and Expression Policy and set me up for discipline the next time I transgress progressive orthodoxy. Instead of participating in that slow-motion firing, I’m resigning.

IDEAA speciously found that my tweet criticizing President Biden for limiting his Supreme Court pool by race and sex required “appropriate corrective measures” to address my “objectively offensive comments and to prevent the recurrence of offensive conduct based on race, gender, and sex.” Mr. Treanor reiterated these concerns in a June 2 statement, further noting the “harmful” nature of my tweets.

But IDEAA makes clear there is nothing objective about its standard: “The University’s anti-harassment policy does not require that a respondent intend to denigrate,” the report says. “Instead, the Policy requires consideration of the ‘purpose or effect’ of a respondent’s conduct.” That people were offended, or claim to have been, is enough for me to have broken the rules.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/06/the_left_despises_people_of_color.html

Under the guise of caring and concern, the Left continues its assault on Black people, aka People of Color.

First, it began with substandard education to Black children and the control of the school systems by the teachers’ unions, who shill for the Democrat party.

Not surprising, these very children could not compete academically because they were never given the basic tools to do so.  But the seed was planted fostering the implicit bias that Blacks were simply not capable of doing well.

So, the next step was to institute affirmative action.  After 60 years, it has been discovered, for example, that while these very students could have done well in second tier law schools, far too many could not compete in the elite schools and dropped out. 

The chaos that now describes American education has created ignorance of a magnitude that is terrifying.  Of course, it has affected the Caucasian students, but it has only worsened things for the Black students.

Obama speeded up the process of victimology when he decided that disparate discipline measures needed to be addressed.  Thus, if a child’s melanin level met the standards, that was all that mattered.  Behavioral problems, misdemeanors and felonies were simply glossed over as the misdeeds of these students were attributed to racism in America.

And now, the low expectations of soft bigotry rear their ugly head again as race-based grading systems will now be implemented in Illinois schools. Of course, it is a natural outgrowth of the Diversity, Inclusion and Equity programs that the Left has insinuated into school systems across the country. Achievement and merit have been eliminated but race rules the roost. 

https://news13now.com/2022/06/02/a-wake-up-call-for-public-education/

A recent national analysis contained a deeply disturbing finding that has generated little public discussion when it should be causing an outcry: Nearly 1.3 million students have left public schools since the pandemic began. Most states have seen enrollment declines for two straight years. In New York City, K-12 enrollment has dropped by an astounding 9%.

Given that state education funding formulas rely on student population numbers, a large reduction in students will lead to a corresponding reduction in school budgets. That’s the law of supply and demand. Otherwise, at this rate, the public will soon be paying teachers to lead half-empty classrooms.

The message to educators and elected officials could hardly be clearer: Too many public schools are failing, parents are voting with their feet, and urgent and bold action is needed. Until now, however, the only governmental response has been to spend more money — too much of which has gone to everyone but our children.

Since 2020, Congress has sent an additional $190 billion to schools, in part to help them reopen safely and stave off layoffs. But in many districts, union leaders resisted a return to in-classroom instruction long after it was clear that classrooms were safe. And by and large, remote instruction was a disaster. By one analysis, the first year of the pandemic left students an average of five months behind in math and four months behind in reading, with much larger gaps for low-income schools.