Anti-racist zoom seminars, asked to reflect whether they are a white supremacist and their children told white heads are dangerous places for black people: Parents' fury at lessons in wokeness
A woke offensive has taken the nation's schools by storm in the aftermath of the George Floyd fallout, but instead of the intended purpose of solving racial inequities it's irritated parents of all persuasions.
In interviews with DailyMail.com, parents say they've been overwhelmed by education reformers seeking to impose anti-racist agendas on America's schools. They describe the efforts as well-intentioned but often rushed, condescending, insulting and poorly timed, coming during a global pandemic when most families are just trying to get by.
'It's a whole cottage industry right now, a whole lot really fast that even a good-hearted liberal like me has trouble digesting,' said a Manhattan mother who was recently mandated to sign on to a 90-minute, anti-racist Zoom seminar for her pre-teen daughter's school.
'The stuff is intense,' she said in an interview with DailyMail.com. 'They actually told us, ''The most dangerous place for a black person to live is in a white person's imagination.' And they told us that as a truth. They're presupposing uniform white aggression.' My thought was — ''Please don't say that to my child.'' My daughter's imagination is not dangerous.'
Joe Borelli, a New York City councilman who serves on the education committee, said he's been flooded with complaints from constituents about the woke movement in schools and noted many parents are seeing it for the first time because their children are taking classes from home.
'When parents are listening to the background noise of their son or daughter's education, they hear first hand what's happening in the classroom,' he told DailyMail.com. 'The public would be shocked at how little focus City Hall has on making schools better rather than making schools part of some woke utopia.'
Their mission is to right wrongs of an education system they decry as institutionally racist, a goal most parents support. More than 80 percent of Americans — including 59 percent of conservatives — agree education should teach children about the history of racism, according to a recent poll commissioned by The 74, an education news website.
How schools bring about those reforms topped the agenda last week when administrators across the country came together virtually for the School Superintendents Association's annual conference.
'How do you go about doing this (reform) so you don't do it in an antagonistic way where you're in essence making the situation worse because people get riled up?' Daniel Domenech, executive director of School Superintendents Association, asked DailyMail.com. 'It has to be done carefully.'
He conceded that hasn't always been the case. 'There's a tremendous backlash,' he said. 'It's a battle that is going to be fought district by district, school by school. There are unfortunately people who don't want to accept or see the reality and will fight everything.'
A Portland principal was branded a 'BLM Marxist' by angry parents after she claimed the education system is built on a 'system of oppression and white supremacy.'
In New York City, a high school principal sent parents a survey asking them to reflect where they land on an eight-point scale of 'whiteness' from 'white supremacists' to 'white abolitionist.'
The exclusive Dalton School in Manhattan is mired in controversy after an eight-page memo of staff's anti-racist 'demands' was leaked, proposing sweeping changes to staff training and the curriculum.
In San Francisco the school board voted to strike the names of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln and dozens of other historical figures from the district's institutions deemed to have ties to racism or have 'dishonorable legacies.'
'This whole woke movement is horrible for society,' argued public school parent Carrie Letke of Ann Arbor, Michigan, where a high school English department chair recently challenged the 'whiteness' of Shakespeare and supported efforts to replace him.
'Why are we constantly focused on race, race, race, color, color, color,' she said. 'Everyone's open to be receptive of things, but they're jamming it down our throats in the worst way.'
Letke was home last week when her son, a senior at Ann Arbor's Community High School, started complaining when his teacher turned a literature class into a lecture on social justice, racism and gender neutral bathrooms.
'My office is below his bedroom, and he was on this Zoom session on racism and inclusivity,' Letke told DailyMail.com. 'He didn't agree with some of the teacher's comments, but was like, ''If I were to raise my voice, it would change the way they treat me.''
This whole woke movement is horrible for society. Why are we constantly focused on race, race, race, color, color, color.
The woke movement in education has ignited passion on all sides, with some on the right denouncing diversity plans as Marxist and leftist indoctrination.
Last summer, a district in Southlake, Texas introduced a plan to require diversity and inclusion training after a video went viral showing some of its students laughing as they shouted the N-word, according to local press reports. Parents packed school board meetings to oppose the plan, arguing it would create diversity police and discriminate against white children. Some even pulled their kids out of the district, and one mother sued, halting the plan's implementation.
In San Antonio, one parent said her 15-year-old daughter's school, which is almost entirely white, doesn't even attempt reform because of the anticipated backlash.
'Black History Month is in February, but it hasn't even been brought up at any of our schools,' the mom told DailyMail.com. 'People wouldn't know it's Black History Month unless it popped up on their phone. Everything's just swept under the rug.'
In Pennsylvania, Elena Fishbein states that she pulled her children from a local public school after a 'Cultural Proficiency Committee' drew up a plan 'to offer explicit lessons on equity and race for our students.' She launched the grassroots group 'No Left Turn in Education' to fight 'indoctrination.'
'The fight for America begins in the classroom,' she says in a video on Facebook. 'It is D-day. Wake up right now!'
'They're telling your kids they are privileged and guilty if the color of their skin is white.'
Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a father-of-three from Bethesda, Maryland, said he's concerned about students being force-fed 'Critical Race Theory' programs that teach the effects of systemic racism on American life.
'Parents are afraid to speak out,' he told DailyMail.com. 'They don't feel like they can fight this. They're afraid of being canceled, being called a racist, of their children not being allowed to go to school. And this is happening in the land of the free.'
A student at Princeton University, where the school president declared that racism 'remains embedded in the structures of the university itself,' told DailyMail.com he's bothered by the rhetoric of conservatives who deny a need for reforms.
'They don't say they're against equality,' he said. 'They say they want to move preemptively into a post-racial society. But it takes work. We first have to acknowledge, deal and repair the historical damage before we move into a world without racism.'
'When I ask my daughter what she's studying in history or reading in English, it appears to be a very new and, I would say, slavery-specific theme. Everything seems to hover around this one topic of race.
Roberto German, who with his wife Lorena co-founded Multicultural Classroom, which works with schools to promote anti-racism efforts, said he and his wife have been threatened for their efforts and outspokenness.
During the height of the George Floyd protests in May, his wife tweeted: 'Educators: what are you burning? Your White-centered curriculum? The Amy Cooper next door? Your anti-Black behavior policies? The school's racist policies? Your racist ass principal….'
'We've received threats and been bombarded by hate mail, people calling us 'coons' and saying, 'Die n*****,' Roberto German told DailyMail.com. 'We're not in this to spread hate and we don't want to receive it.'
Alicia Williams, who founded Teach Woke, an organization that provides race and equity workshops for schools nationwide, told DailyMail.com that she's not surprised by all the hostility.
'There's always resistance when there's change, when black and brown people want equality, when white folks want to hold onto their power and their privilege.'
In Oregon, Sheila Warren, the black president of the Portland Parent Union, said she's been fighting with public school officials for years to make changes that could help fellow minorities, but said the district rarely consults with the black community.
'We're up against institutional racism, liberal, white astute parents who want things their way,' she told DailyMail.com. 'These liberals are worse than people who are racist up front.
'Their whole ''woke'' thing is offensive to us,' she added. 'That word came from our community. People are appropriating it now, the white folks. They talk about equity and anti-racism, without consulting the people who are most impacted, which in our case is the people of color.'
In Manhattan, the mother who was forced onto the Zoom session for her daughter's class said she wishes the school would consult parents before reworking the curriculum.
'When I ask my daughter what she's studying in history or reading in English, it appears to be a very new and, I would say, slavery-specific theme,' she said. 'Everything seems to hover around this one topic of race.'
'These schools, their hearts are in the right place, and we all hate racism,' she continued. 'But I'm not sure the school cares about how I feel or my kids feel about what they're doing.'
'And honestly, it's a crap year to focus on this given the pandemic sh*t-show of schools,' she said. 'It's hard for parents to have the necessary conversation when we're struggling to find work. What's happening here is a bunch of white, liberal progressive parents, in a pandemic, trying to grapple with very important action from schools that takes a lot of bandwidth that parents don't actually have this year.'
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There’s no evidence of ‘white privilege’
The concept of ‘white privilege’ has become ubiquitous in certain circles. This deeply flawed idea is presented by politicians, academics and social commentators as an incontestable fact.
Though much of our progressive commentariat obsesses about racial equality, one of the most striking facts about modern-day Britain is that poor white teenagers in England’s former industrial and coastal towns are among the least likely to go to university. Chris Millward, director of fair access at the Office for Students, recently described how white working-class communities have missed out: ‘The expansion of educational opportunities, and the belief that equality of opportunity would flow from this, have not delivered for them… so, they are less likely to see education as the way to improve their lives.’
‘White privilege’ doesn’t amount to much when we consider figures for educational performance. For a range of outcomes, white working-class children trail behind their peers in a number of ethnic-minority groups: including those of Indian, Chinese, Bangladeshi and Black African origin. For 2018-2019, the average ‘Attainment 8’ score for Indian and Bangladeshi-origin pupils on free school meals (FSMs) in England was 48.2 and 46.4 respectively. The corresponding figure for white British pupils on FSMs was only 31.8.
The unfortunate reality is that many coastal and former industrial towns have had to deal not only with the decline of their local economies, but also with the collapse of the family unit and the atomisation of their communities. Research from the Centre for Social Justice found that children who experienced family breakdown were twice as likely to fail at school. Against a backdrop of substance misuse and alcohol dependency, responsible and inspiring adult role models are a relatively scarce commodity. And, starved of meaningful public investment for decades, chronically under-resourced schools are bursting at the seams.
This is the story of predominantly white working-class ‘left behind’ coastal towns across Britain – whether it is Blackpool in Lancashire or Great Yarmouth in Norfolk. Coastal areas like Thanet have also been identified as ‘divorce hotspots’, with material deprivation and economic decline cited as major factors.
But the same goes for white working-class neighbourhoods in Nottingham, Sheffield, Stoke-on-Trent and Hull. These parts of the country are not only materially deprived, but also socially disconnected and spiritually damaged. By falling down the rabbit hole of ‘white privilege’, we run the risk of trivialising the feelings of helplessness and abandonment in such communities.
The concept of ‘white privilege’ is an instrument predominantly used by white middle-class liberals to appear virtuous, while deflecting attention away from their own comfortable position of affluence. It also unhelpfully takes society’s attention away from meaningful sources of advantage, such as belonging to a stable family unit, aspirational parental attitudes or being part of a supportive local community. These have all been eroded in the white British mainstream but are firmly embedded in successful non-white groups, such as British people of Indian and Nigerian origin.
And for all the talk of ‘white privilege’, my new report for the Henry Jackson Society found that when controlling for a range of factors, non-white people were more likely to be satisfied with their life in the UK than white Brits.
The myth of white privilege puts race at the forefront of discussions about disadvantage when there are a range of other social factors – including family structure, community support and cultural attitudes towards education – which have a critical impact on one’s life chances. This flawed concept has no place in the setting of social policy in the UK. Its divisive implications are unhelpful for building community cohesion in our multi-racial democracy.
White privilege may be treated as a fact among a smallish but influential subset of culturally liberal ‘progressive’ activists, but the rest of us should repudiate it with vigour.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/02/26/theres-no-evidence-of-white-privilege
*****************************************Margaret Thatcher is removed from a list of inspirational women by woke students at Durham University
Students at one of the country’s most prestigious universities have removed Margaret Thatcher from a list of inspirational women and apologised for including her.
Members of the Durham University Art Society had been invited to take part in a portrait competition to mark International Women’s Day.
Among the suggested subjects were Florence Nightingale, Cleopatra, Marie Curie and Britain’s first female Prime Minister.
But Baroness Thatcher was removed from the list – along with French designer Coco Chanel – after complaints. Organisers issued an apology, saying: ‘Considering Durham’s history as a former mining town, the impact of Thatcher’s policies, as well as her homophobia, her inclusion was an error.
‘Coco Chanel also had links to Nazis... so her inclusion was also extremely erroneous. We can only apologise for any offence or insult to anyone in our community that this may have caused.’
Toby Young, general secretary of the Free Speech Union, accused the Art Society and their joint organisers, the History in Politics Society, of capitulating to ‘woke bullies’.
He added: ‘They’ve allowed themselves to be bullied by a small minority of political activists.
'Far from being sensitive to the feelings of the local community in Durham, these student societies have thumbed their noses at all those local people who voted Conservative at the last Election.’
A spokesman for the Art and History in Politics societies said: ‘After some of the history of certain names on the list was drawn to our attention, we decided amongst ourselves to remove them.’
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Asian American Group Eviscerates Critical Race Theory: 'A Hateful, Divisive, Manipulative Fraud'
Backlash is rising against the Marxist critical race theory (CRT) behind The New York Times‘ “1619 Project” and other efforts to indoctrinate Americans with the idea that American society is fundamentally or “structurally” racist. This week, the Chinese American Citizens Alliance of Greater New York (CACAGNY) issued a powerful statement condemning critical race theory and urging Chinese Americans to oppose it.
“Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a hateful, divisive, manipulative fraud,” CACAGNY declared. “One way or another, CRT wants to get rid of too many Asians in good schools. Asians are over-represented. CRT is today’s Chinese Exclusion Act. CRT is the real hate crime against Asians” (emphasis original).
Critical race theory teaches that any racial disparities must ipso facto be proof of some hidden racial bias or discrimination, regardless of civil rights laws explicitly forbidding such discrimination. Since Americans of Asian ancestry are overrepresented in colleges, universities, and certain high-income professions, CRT effectively teaches that American society is structurally biased in favor of Asians.
“CRT appears in our workplaces under the cover of implicit bias/sensitivity training. It infiltrates our schools pretending to be culturally/ethnically responsive pedagogy, with curricula such as the New York Times’ 1619 Project and Seattle’s ethnomathematics,” CACAGNY argued. “From its very roots, CRT is racist, repressive, discriminatory, and divisive.”
The Chinese American group laid out the main “dogmas” of critical race theory, including (emphasis original):
You are not a person. You are only your race, and by your race alone you will be judged.
Justice is about equal rights, but Social Justice, or equity, is about equal outcomes. Only Social Justice matters; Justice does not. To achieve equal outcomes, forget equal rights.
All unequal outcomes by race — inequity for short — are the result of racial oppression.
All Blacks are oppressed and all Whites are oppressors. This is systemic: never ask whether oppression occurred, only how it occurred. Everyone and everything White is complicit.
If you are White and won’t admit you are racist, you are racist by implicit bias. To reduce implicit bias, you must self-criticize, confess to privilege, apologize to the oppressed race.
Whiteness is belief in, among others: achievement, delayed gratification, progress, schedules and deadlines, meritocracy, race-blindness, the written word, facts and objectivity (they deny lived experience) , logic and reason (they deny empathy), mathematics and science (until they are de-colonized and humanized).
CRT suppresses dissent with cancel culture: publications withdrawn, college admissions rescinded, online presence wiped out, business relationships ended, jobs terminated.
The Chinese American group presented three instances of CRT at work. In June 2020, Seattle ran an “anti-racism” training that began with the claim that all White people have a natural sense of racial superiority. The session required participants to confess their complicity in “white supremacy” become “less white,” and become accountable to black people in their every thought.
In August 2017, Nevada high school senior William Clark took a mandatory class in which the curriculum told students that white people are racists who enjoy the privileges of oppression. Classmates, teachers, and administrators allegedly began harassing Clark merely because he was identified as white.
In January 2021, a teacher in Cupertino, Calif., told an elementary school math class that students lived in a dominant culture of white, cisgender, educated Christians, and that the culture was created to hoard power. As CACAGNY explained, “a Chinese parent found out about this and organized parents to stop it. It reminded them of Mao’s bloody Cultural Revolution.”
Although Chinese Americans “are people of color and therefore start from the oppressed side of CRT’s binary,” CACAGNY explained that “as we overcome discrimination and achieve upward mobility, we are now White by adjacency” (emphasis original). The Chinese American group claimed that Black Lives Matter rioters with CRT signs assaulted a CACAGNY rally supporting merit-based education.
CACAGNY condemned various forms of sleight-of-hand that allow universities like Harvard and top high schools to select “lower-qualified Blacks” over “better-qualified Asians.”
CACAGNY called on Asian Americans to loudly denounce critical race theory and to fight back.
“We need to recognize CRT through its fraudulent packaging, call it out, resist. Parents need to watch for CRT in schools, talk to each other, and organize, like the Cupertino Chinese parents,” the group argued. “Regardless, parents need to speak with their kids to anti-indoctrinate (or un-doctrinate) them at home. This needs to start early, because CRT indoctrination also starts early. Don’t trust schools and teachers blindly.”
CACAGNY acknowledged former President Donald Trump’s executive order to ban CRT on the federal level, but noted that President Joe Biden rescinded that order upon taking office. That means state and local efforts provide the most promise.
Republicans in various states have filed legislation to ensure that schools do not indoctrinate kids with the 1619 Project. These efforts are likely to grow.
CACAGNY made powerful arguments against Marxist critical race theory without mentioning that this ideology inspired much of the destruction of the Black Lives Matter and antifa riots over the summer. While protesters rightly expressed outrage at the treatment of George Floyd, many of the protests devolved into looting, vandalism, and arson in which lawless thugs — acting in the name of fighting racism — destroyed black lives, black livelihoods, and black monuments.
When vandals toppled a statue of George Washington in Portland, they spray-painted “1619” on the statue. When Claremont’s Charles Kesler wrote in The New York Post, “Call them the 1619 riots,” Hannah-Jones responded (in a since-deleted tweet) that “it would be an honor” to claim responsibility for the destructive riots.
Parents of all races should oppose this dangerous and divisive ideology. Critical race theory pits Americans against one another on the basis of skin color, teaches children a basic distrust of the social elements that make America great, and inspired violent and deadly riots.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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