By Andrew Gutmann and Paul Rossi | The Wall Street Journal
Last spring we exposed how two elite independent schools in New York had become
corrupted by a divisive obsession with race, helping start the national
movement against critical race theory. Schools apply this theory under the
guise of diversity, equity and inclusion programming. Until now, however,
neither of us fully grasped the dangers of this ideology or the true motives of
its practitioners. The goal of DEI isn’t only to teach students about slavery
or encourage courageous conversations about race, it is to transform schools
totally and reshape society radically.
Over the past month we have watched nearly 100 hours of
leaked videos from 108 workshops held virtually last year for the National
Association of Independent Schools’ People of Color Conference. The NAIS sets
standards for more than 1,600 independent schools in the U.S., driving their
missions and influencing many school policies. The conference is NAIS’s
flagship annual event for disseminating DEI practices, and more than 6,000 DEI
practitioners, educators and administrators attended this year. Intended as
professional development and not meant for the public, these workshops are
honest, transparent and unfiltered—very different from how private schools
typically communicate DEI initiatives. These leaked videos act as a Rosetta
Stone for deciphering the DEI playbook.
The path to remake schools begins with the word
“diversity,” which means much more than simply increasing the number of
students and faculty of color—referred to in these workshops as “Bipoc,” which
stands for “black, indigenous and people of color.” DEI experts urge schools to
classify people by identities such as race, convince them that they are being harmed
by their environment, and turn them into fervent advocates for institutional
change.
In workshops such as “Integrating Healing-Centered
Engagements Into a DEIA School Program” and “Racial Trauma and the Path Toward
Healing,” we learned how DEI practitioners use segregated affinity groups and
practices such as healing circles to inculcate feelings of trauma. Even
students without grievances are trained to see themselves as victims of the
their ancestors’ suffering through “intergenerational violence.”
The next step in a school’s transformation is
“inclusion.” Schools must integrate DEI work into every aspect of the school
and every facet of the curriculum must be evaluated through an antibias,
antiracist, or antioppressive lens. In “Let’s Talk About It! Anti-Oppressive
Unit and Lesson Plan Design,” we learned that the omission of this
lens—“failing to explore the intersection of STEM and social justice,” for
instance—constitutes an act of “curriculum violence.”
All school messaging must be scrubbed of noninclusive
language, all school policies of noninclusive practices, all libraries of
noninclusive books. Inclusion also requires that all non-Bipoc stakeholders
become allies in the fight against the systemic harm being perpetuated by the
institution. In “Small Activists, Big Impact—Cultivating Anti-Racists and
Activists in Kindergarten,” we were told that “kindergartners are natural
social-justice warriors.”
It isn’t enough for a school to be inclusive; it also
must foster “belonging.” Belonging means that a school must be a “safe
space”—code for prohibiting any speech or activity, regardless of intent, that
a Bipoc student or faculty member might perceive as harmful, as uncomfortable
or as questioning their “lived experience.” The primary tool for suppressing
speech is to create a fear of microaggressions.
In “Feeding Yourself When You Are Fed Up: Connecting
Resilience and DEI Work,” we learned techniques, such as “calling out,” that
faculty and students can use to shut down conversations immediately by interrupting
speakers and letting them know that their words and actions are unacceptable
and won’t be tolerated. Several workshops focused on the practice of
“restorative justice,” used to re-educate students who fall afoul of speech
codes. The final step to ensure belonging is to push out families or faculty
who question DEI work. “Sometimes you gotta say, maybe this is not the right
school for you. . . . I’ve said that a lot this year,” said Victor
Shin, an assistant head of school and co-chairman of the People of Color
Conference, in “From Pawns to Controlling the Board: Seeing BIPOC Students as
Power Players in Student Programming.”
With the implementation of diversity, inclusion and
belonging, schools can begin to address the primary objectives of DEI work:
equity and justice. NAIS obligates all member schools to commit to these aims
in their mission statements or defining documents. Equity requires dismantling
all systems that Bipoc members of the community believe to cause harm. Justice
is the final stage of social transformation to “collective liberation.” The
goal is to remake society into a collective, stripped of individualism and rife
with reparations.
In sessions such as “Traversing the Long and Thorny Road
Toward Equity in Our Schools,” “Moving the Needle Toward Meaningful
Institutional Change,” “Building an Equitable and Liberating Mindset” and
“Breaking the White Centered Cycle,” we learned that the only way to achieve
equity and justice is to eradicate all aspects of white-supremacy culture from “predominantly
white institutions,” or PWIs, as NAIS calls its member schools, irrespective of
the diversity of a school’s students. Perfectionism, punctuality, urgency,
niceness, worship of the written word, progress, objectivity, rigor,
individualism, capitalism and liberalism are some of the characteristics of
white-supremacy culture in need of elimination. In “Post-PoCC Return to PWI
Normal,” DEI practitioner Maria Graciela Alcid summarized: “Decolonizing
white-supremacy-culture thinking is the ongoing act of deconstructing,
dismantling, disrupting those colonial ideologies and the superiority of
Western thought.”
DEI was “another thing to put on the plate, and
absolutely now, it is the plate on which everything sits” said teacher Gina
Favre, describing her school’s transformation.
No longer are private schools focused primarily on
teaching critical thinking, fostering intellectual curiosity, and rewarding
independent thought. Their new mission is to train a vanguard of activists to
lead the charge in tearing down the foundations of society, reminiscent of
Maoist China’s Red Guards.
The danger, however, goes far beyond private schools. The
same framework called diversity, inclusion, belonging, equity and justice has
gained influence in public education, universities, corporate workplaces, the
federal government and the military. For the sake of our children and our
nation’s future, it must be dismantled.
________________
Mr. Gutmann is founder of Speak Up for Education and
a co-host of the podcast “Take
Back Our Schools.” Mr. Rossi is a contributor to Legal Insurrection and
co-host of Chalkboard Heresy, a channel for dissidents in education.
