By Katie Pavlich | Townhall.Com
Source: (AP Photo/John Raoux)
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is ridding Florida public
schools of Critical Race Theory.
During an official education announcement this week from
Naples, DeSantis blasted the indoctrination curriculum as hateful and
anti-American.
"Let me be clear, there is no room in our classrooms
for things like Critical Race Theory. Teaching kids to hate their country &
to hate each other is not worth one red cent of taxpayer money," DeSantis
said. "We will invest in actual, solid, true curriculum and we will be a
leader in the development and implementation of a world class civics education."
Even better, DeSantis plans to reward schools for
teaching accurate civics.
"Under the governor’s proposal, teachers who get
credentialed in teaching civics would get a $3,000 bonus. Some $16.5 million
would be devoted to training teachers and principals in civics education. That
training would come from civics “coaches,” in-person seminars and virtual
learning," the Associated Press reports.
Meanwhile, proponents of CRT have been infiltrating
school districts around the country. In Virginia, parents opposed to it are
being put on lists for doxxing, hacking and public
shaming.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2021/03/18/desantis-blasts-critical-race-theory-n2586435
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Biden’s would-be education secretary pioneered classroom race theory
By Max Eden | NY Post
Miguel Cardona was recently confirmed by the Senate
to be President Joe Biden's education secretary.POOL/AFP via Getty Images
President Biden’s choice
to lead the federal Department of Education, Miguel Cardona, is neither a tenured
radical nor a vocal charter-school opponent. But during his tenure as
Connecticut education commissioner, Cardona was a trailblazer in one respect
that merits strict scrutiny: He oversaw the creation of America’s first state-mandated ethnic-studies course.
The Connecticut legislature
determined that all high schools must offer — though students needn’t
necessarily take — a year-long “African-American, Black, Latino and Puerto
Rican course of studies.” Proponents claim, reasonably enough, that it is
beneficial for minority students to see people of their ethnic background
represented in the curriculum.
But these programs can also
indoctrinate children into the political dogma of critical race theory, which
holds that all whites are oppressors, that America is an inherently racist
country and that for nonwhite people to be “liberated” or for white people to
be “anti-racist,” we must interpret human affairs through the lens of identity
politics and pursue left-wing causes.
In California, Gov. Gavin
Newsom vetoed a proposed ethnic-studies graduation requirement on the grounds
that the curriculum was unmistakably anti-Semitic, which is all too common in
political projects that involve racial stereotyping and scapegoating.
Connecticut’s draft curriculum doesn’t suffer from this problem, but it does
read as a sloppy exercise in ideological indoctrination.
Only a handful of the proposed
history lessons have been fleshed out to date, but the third unit from the
first semester, on the Moors, an Islamic people who invaded and occupied Spain
from 711 to 1492, is confused. The unit begins by providing the following “historical
context for teachers”: “The Moors are an excellent refutation of the false
narrative of African racial inferiority. These adherents of al-Islam were the
battering-ramp [sic] that conquered Spain, Southern Europe and parts of
France.”
It goes on: “Like so much of
Africans’ contributions to world civilization, the Moorish gifts and
enrichments have not been generally recognized. . . . [T]he most stupendous
aide [sic] and/or help was the introduction of algebra and the Hindi
numeral system at time [sic] when Europe used the Roman numeral system.
. . . The Moorish presence in Europe, especially Spain and Portugal, given
their long tenure in these nations, their strident advocacy of Africans being
sub-humans, during the Transatlantic slave trade must be viewed in stark
economic terms.”
Setting aside factual accuracy
— the Moorish invaders didn’t introduce the Hindu-Arabic numeral system to
Europe, for starters — this is barely readable.
The course’s objectives direct
students to “analyze how race, power and privilege influence group access to
citizenship, civil rights and economic power.” This language of “power” and
“privilege,” as well as a later call for “radical [political] imaginations” to
be derived from ethnicity, are pure identity politics — and as such,
incompatible with a politically neutral interpretation.
But after hosting a listening
session with the Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning Collective, representatives
of the Connecticut state Department of Education agreed that it was critical
that the state “support teachers in their role as anti-racist leaders.”
“Anti-racist,” according to
best-selling writer Ibram X. Kendi doesn’t mean “not racist.” According to
Kendi, there is no such thing as “not racist,” only “racist” and “anti-racist”
— moral states predicated on political convictions and activism. In order to be
an “anti-racist leader,” one must possess “critical consciousness” and advocate
for left-wing political causes.
While Cardona couldn’t impose
ethnic-studies curricula on a national level, he could advocate for it from the
bully pulpit of his Cabinet-level position and use other levers at his
disposal, most notably the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, to
advance critical race ideology in K-12 schools.
Former President Barack Obama’s
Department of Education leveraged civil rights investigations and “Dear
Colleague” letters to force school districts to adopt allegedly anti-racist
discipline policies and to hire consultants to that end. The Biden Department
of Education could coerce school districts to hire consultants or full-time
staff dedicated to permeating the administrative culture and school curriculum
with critical race ideology.
Sadly, lawmakers missed an
opportunity at Wednesday’s confirmation hearing for Cardona to press him on any
of this.
Max Eden is a
senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Adapted from City
Journal.
https://nypost.com/2021/02/03/bidens-would-be-education-secretary-pioneered-classroom-race-theory/
__________________
'Critical Race Theory' Costs a Brave Smith
College Whistleblower Her Job
BY RICK MORAN | PJ Media
(YouTube screenshot)
A staff member at Smith College, Jody Shaw, resigned her
position as a student support coordinator because of the “hostile atmosphere”
at the college. It appears that Ms. Shaw ran afoul of critical race theory
fanatics who forced her to “participate in racially prejudicial behavior as a
condition” of her employment.
Shaw, being a normal, intelligent, woman rebelled. She
blew the whistle on the racialists at Smith College in a scathing video she
posted to YouTube.
Bari Weiss is also covering this disturbing story.
“I ask that Smith College stop reducing my personhood to
a racial category. Stop telling me what I must think and feel about myself,”
she said. “Stop presuming to know who I am or what my culture is based upon my
skin color. Stop asking me to project stereotypes and assumptions onto others
based on their skin color.”
This is the essence of critical race theory. In order to
make “progress” in “combatting racism,” everyone is reduced to a stick figure.
It’s so much easier to define individuals when you identify them as members of
a specific group, with specific beliefs, biases, prejudices,
In her resignation letter to the university president,
she didn’t pull any punches.
Every day, I watch my colleagues manage student conflict
through the lens of race, projecting rigid assumptions and stereotypes on
students, thereby reducing them to the color of their skin. I am asked to do
the same, as well as to support a curriculum for students that teaches them to
project those same stereotypes and assumptions onto themselves and others. I
believe such a curriculum is dehumanizing, prevents authentic connection, and undermines
the moral agency of young people who are just beginning to find their way in
the world.
Ms. Weiss catalogs the damage this ideology/theology is
doing to people in all walks of life, of all colors.
We all know that something morally grotesque is swallowing
liberal America. Almost no one wants to risk talking about it out loud.
Every day I get phone calls from anxious Americans
complaining about an ideology that wants to pull all of us into the past.
I get calls from parents telling me about the damaging
things being taught in schools: so-called antiracist programs that urge
children to obsess on the color of their skin.
I get calls from people working in corporate America
forced to go to trainings in which they learn that they carry collective, race-based
guilt — or benefit from collective, race-based virtue.
I get calls from young people just launching their
careers telling me that they feel they have no choice but to profess fealty to
this ideology in order to keep their jobs.
Almost no one who calls me is willing to go public. And I
understand why. To go public with what’s happening is to risk their jobs and
their reputations.
We need more Jodi Shaws in the world. The problem is that
it takes otherworldly courage to speak out, to demand change. I daresay Ms.
Shaw’s life will never be the same. And given her stand was made on a college
campus, any career she was hoping for in higher education is probably ruined.
She’s probably lost some friends over her stand. Her life has been changed
forever.
It’s important that we realize that this didn’t
have to happen. Small-minded, even ignorant people see salvation in
controlling the minds and lives of others. Is it a mass delusion that they
believe they are actually “fighting racism,” that they’re doing this for white
people’s own good? Or are these the same efforts at control that have been
around since humans created civilizations?
It’s a contagion that no one seems capable of stopping.
Perhaps it’s good enough now that enough of us speak out and fight for what we
know in our bones is right.
________________
Whistleblower at Smith College Resigns Over
Racism
By Bari Weiss
We
all know that something morally grotesque is swallowing liberal America. Almost
no one wants to risk talking about it out loud.
Jodi Shaw made less in a year
than the cost of tuition. She was offered a settlement, but turned it down.
Here's why.
Every day I get phone calls
from anxious Americans complaining about an ideology that wants to pull all of
us into the past.
I get calls from parents
telling me about the damaging things being taught in schools: so-called
antiracist programs that urge children to obsess on the color of their skin.
I get calls from people working
in corporate America forced to go to trainings in which they learn that
they carry collective, race-based guilt — or benefit from collective,
race-based virtue.
I get calls from young people
just launching their careers telling me that they feel they have no choice but
to profess fealty to this ideology in order to keep their jobs.
Almost no one who calls me is
willing to go public. And I understand why. To go public with what’s happening
is to risk their jobs and their reputations.
But the hour is very late. It calls for
courage. And courage has come in the form of a woman named Jodi Shaw.
Jodi Shaw was, until this
afternoon, a staffer at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. She made
$45,000 a year — less than the yearly tuition at the school.
She is a divorced mother of two
children. She is a lifelong liberal and an alumna of the college. And she has
had a front-row seat to the illiberal, neo-racist ideology masquerading as
progress.
In October 2020, after Shaw
felt that she had exhausted all her internal options, she posted a video on
YouTube, blowing the whistle on, what she says, is an atmosphere of racial
discrimination at the school.
“I ask that Smith College stop
reducing my personhood to a racial category. Stop telling me what I must think
and feel about myself,” she said. “Stop presuming to know who I am or what my
culture is based upon my skin color. Stop asking me to project stereotypes and
assumptions onto others based on their skin color.”
Now today, she is resigning from the college.
In doing that — and in speaking
out — she is turning down a settlement that would have given her a much easier
way out. We need more people like her.
Here’s how Shaw put it in her resignation
letter to Smith College President Kathleen McCartney, which she sent to me to
publish in full:
Dear President McCartney:
I am writing to notify you that effective today, I
am resigning from my position as Student Support Coordinator in the Department
of Residence Life at Smith College. This has not been an easy decision, as I
now face a deeply uncertain future. As a divorced mother of two, the economic
uncertainty brought about by this resignation will impact my children as well.
But I have no choice. The racially hostile environment that the college has
subjected me to for the past two and a half years has left me physically and
mentally debilitated. I can no longer work in this environment, nor can I
remain silent about a matter so central to basic human dignity and freedom.
I graduated from Smith College in 1993. Those four
years were among the best in my life. Naturally, I was over the moon when,
years later, I had the opportunity to join Smith as a staff member. I loved my
job and I loved being back at Smith.
But the climate — and my place at the college —
changed dramatically when, in July 2018, the culture war arrived at our campus
when a student accused a white staff member of calling campus security on her
because of racial bias. The student, who is black, shared her account of this
incident widely on social media, drawing a lot of attention to the college.
Before even investigating the facts of the incident,
the college immediately issued a public apology to the student, placed the
employee on leave, and announced its intention to create new initiatives,
committees, workshops, trainings, and policies aimed at combating “systemic
racism” on campus.
In spite of an independent investigation into the
incident that found no evidence of racial bias, the college ramped up its
initiatives aimed at dismantling the supposed racism that pervades the campus.
This only served to support the now prevailing narrative that the incident had
been racially motivated and that Smith staff are racist.
Allowing this narrative to dominate has had a
profound impact on the Smith community and on me personally. For example, in
August 2018, just days before I was to present a library orientation program
into which I had poured a tremendous amount of time and effort, and which had
previously been approved by my supervisors, I was told that I could not proceed
with the planned program. Because it was going to be done in rap form and
“because you are white,” as my supervisor told me, that could be viewed as
“cultural appropriation.” My supervisor made clear he did not object to a rap in
general, nor to the idea of using music to convey orientation information to
students. The problem was my skin color.
I was up for a full-time position in the library at
that time, and I was essentially informed that my candidacy for that position
was dependent upon my ability, in a matter of days, to reinvent a program to
which I had devoted months of time.
Humiliated, and knowing my candidacy for the
full-time position was now dead in the water, I moved into my current,
lower-paying position as Student Support Coordinator in the Department of
Residence Life.
As it turned out, my experience in the library was
just the beginning. In my new position, I was told on multiple occasions that
discussing my personal thoughts and feelings about my skin color is a
requirement of my job. I endured racially hostile comments, and was expected to
participate in racially prejudicial behavior as a continued condition of my
employment. I endured meetings in which another staff member violently banged
his fist on the table, chanting “Rich, white women! Rich, white women!” in
reference to Smith alumnae. I listened to my supervisor openly name preferred
racial quotas for job openings in our department. I was given supplemental
literature in which the world’s population was reduced to two categories —
“dominant group members” and “subordinated group members” — based solely on
characteristics like race.
Every day, I watch my colleagues manage student
conflict through the lens of race, projecting rigid assumptions and stereotypes
on students, thereby reducing them to the color of their skin. I am asked to do
the same, as well as to support a curriculum for students that teaches them to
project those same stereotypes and assumptions onto themselves and others. I
believe such a curriculum is dehumanizing, prevents authentic connection, and
undermines the moral agency of young people who are just beginning to find
their way in the world.
Although I have spoken to many staff and faculty at
the college who are deeply troubled by all of this, they are too terrified to
speak out about it. This illustrates the deeply hostile and fearful culture
that pervades Smith College.
The last straw came in January 2020, when I attended
a mandatory Residence Life staff retreat focused on racial issues. The hired
facilitators asked each member of the department to respond to various personal
questions about race and racial identity. When it was my turn to respond, I
said “I don’t feel comfortable talking about that.” I was the only person in
the room to abstain.
Later, the facilitators told everyone present that a
white person’s discomfort at discussing their race is a symptom of “white
fragility.” They said that the white person may seem like they are in distress,
but that it is actually a “power play.” In other words, because I am white, my
genuine discomfort was framed as an act of aggression. I was shamed and
humiliated in front of all of my colleagues.
I filed an internal complaint about the hostile
environment, but throughout that process, over the course of almost six months,
I felt like my complaint was taken less seriously because of my race. I was
told that the civil rights law protections were not created to help people like
me. And after I filed my complaint, I started to experience retaliatory
behavior, like having important aspects of my job taken away without
explanation.
Under the guise of racial progress, Smith College
has created a racially hostile environment in which individual acts of
discrimination and hostility flourish. In this environment, people’s worth as
human beings, and the degree to which they deserve to be treated with dignity
and respect, is determined by the color of their skin. It is an environment in
which dissenting from the new critical race orthodoxy — or even failing to
swear fealty to it like some kind of McCarthy-era loyalty oath — is grounds for
public humiliation and professional retaliation.
I can no longer continue to work in an environment
where I am constantly subjected to additional scrutiny because of my skin
color. I can no longer work in an environment where I am told, publicly, that
my personal feelings of discomfort under such scrutiny are not legitimate but
instead are a manifestation of white supremacy. Perhaps most importantly, I can
no longer work in an environment where I am expected to apply similar
race-based stereotypes and assumptions to others, and where I am told — when I
complain about having to engage in what I believe to be discriminatory
practices — that there are “legitimate reasons for asking employees to consider
race” in order to achieve the college’s “social justice objectives.”
What passes for “progressive” today at Smith and at
so many other institutions is regressive. It taps into humanity’s worst
instincts to break down into warring factions, and I fear this is rapidly
leading us to a very twisted place. It terrifies me that others don’t seem to
see that racial segregation and demonization are wrong and dangerous no matter
what its victims look like. Being told that any disagreement or feelings of
discomfort somehow upholds “white supremacy” is not just morally wrong. It is
psychologically abusive.
Equally troubling are the many others who understand
and know full well how damaging this is, but do not speak out due to fear of
professional retaliation, social censure, and loss of their livelihood and
reputation. I fear that by the time people see it, or those who see it manage
to screw up the moral courage to speak out, it will be too late.
I wanted to change things at Smith. I hoped that by
bringing an internal complaint, I could somehow get the administration to see
that their capitulation to critical race orthodoxy was causing real, measurable
harm. When that failed, I hoped that drawing public attention to these problems
at Smith would finally awaken the administration to this reality. I have come
to conclude, however, that the college is so deeply committed to this toxic
ideology that the only way for me to escape the racially hostile climate is to
resign. It is completely unacceptable that we are now living in a culture in
which one must choose between remaining in a racially hostile, psychologically
abusive environment or giving up their income.
As a proud Smith alum, I know what a critical role
this institution has played in shaping my life and the lives of so many women
for one hundred and fifty years. I want to see this institution be the force
for good I know it can be. I will not give up fighting against the dangerous
pall of orthodoxy that has descended over Smith and so many of our educational
institutions.
This was an extremely difficult decision for me and
comes at a deep personal cost. I make $45,000 a year; less than a year’s
tuition for a Smith student. I was offered a settlement in exchange for my
silence, but I turned it down. My need to tell the truth — and to be the kind
of woman Smith taught me to be — makes it impossible for me to accept financial
security at the expense of remaining silent about something I know is wrong. My
children’s future, and indeed, our collective future as a free nation, depends
on people having the courage to stand up to this dangerous and divisive
ideology, no matter the cost.
Sincerely,
Jodi Shaw
_______________
