Another “quick takes” on items where there is too little to say to make a complete article, but is still important enough to comment on.
The focus this time: History is all about blaming the designated oppressor, dontchaknow.
First, a little mood music:
Carrying on…
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Remember, segregation is good when it involves re-educating icky White people.
“New York University hosted a whites-only ‘anti-racism’ workshop for public school parents in New York City, barring minorities from a five-months-long seminar that legal experts say was a brazen violation of civil rights law.
“The all-white seminar, ‘From Integration to Anti-Racism,’ cost $360 to attend and met six times between February and June, according to a description of the program that has since been scrubbed from the university’s website without explanation. Organized by NYU’s Steinhardt School of Education, the workshop was ‘designed specifically for white public school parents’ committed to ‘becoming anti-racist’ and building ‘multiracial parent communities.’
“But to promote solidarity with all races, participants were told, it was necessary that the seminar include only one.”
It couldn’t be incompetent woke teachers or woke pedagogy that’s to blame for underperforming minority students! It must be due to… Jim Crow!
“It’s unsurprising that Evanston is experiencing the same struggles with underperforming schoolchildren — primarily black and Latino children from low-income households — besetting most other public schools across the country. (The State of New York recently floated the shameful idea of making its Regents Exams, passage of which is mandatory for a high-school diploma, optional instead.) How to respond? Perhaps a rigorous reform is in order, not only of the curriculum but of the teachers tasked with delivering that curriculum to the kids. Maybe they could try bold solutions like banning all cellphones at school, as the Washington Post editorial board advocated Saturday in a rare fit of good sense. At the very least, perhaps inflicting more “Colorism Privilege Walks” on the white public-school students would lower the overall curve through demoralization, even if it doesn’t improve anyone’s scores.
“And of course, the Evanston School Board, having already once approved the last-named option, has decided instead to raise the stakes: According to the Wall Street Journal, the board members have thought it through carefully and — in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion — are going to give segregation a shot again. Don’t worry, though — this time it’ll be good. These are not your old, nasty, Fifties ‘Jim Crow’ segregated classes, mind you. No, these are refined, sensitively modern ‘Affinity Classes,’ an idea first tried in the San Francisco Bay Area’s public schools (the true hallmark of a quality educational idea). They are purely voluntary and ‘designed to address the achievement gap by making students feel more comfortable in class.’ As one administrator puts it, ‘A lot of times within our education system, black students are expected to conform to a white standard. . . . In our spaces, you don’t have to shed one ounce of yourself because everything about our space is rooted in blackness.’”
And what kids are being taught, especially the smarter ones, is distilled racialized social Marxism.
“After researching the intellectual affiliations of both the recommended authors and the pilot course’s designers, I argued in late 2022 that the perspective guiding the design of the pilot course was largely that of the historian Robin D. G. Kelley, a student and follower of Cedric Robinson, author of Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983).
“Robinson identified a black radical political tradition generally ignored or downplayed by conventional historians. He found in that tradition a model for the revolutionary transformation of American society, and the world. In particular, he spun out a theory of ‘racial capitalism,’ which brought race into the heart of Marx’s economic theory. Robinson’s contention was that the oppression of non-whites would never be lifted without the destruction of capitalism.
“Kelley, especially in his most influential book, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2002), picked up where Robinson had left off. That book traced the history of black radicals, Marxists, Maoists, and assorted communist splinter groups through much of the 20th century. In particular, Kelley challenged the traditional view that the Black Power movement of the late 1960s emerged out of frustration with the failures and limitations of Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent civil-rights movement.
“Kelley argued instead that a black tradition favoring violent revolution existed before and during the mainstream civil-rights movement of the 1950s and early 1960s. That radical stream, Kelley argued, could only be fully comprehended if attention was paid not simply to events in America but to the anti-colonial movements and communist revolutions of the Third World. Kelley’s perspective, I argue, continues to govern the revised APAAS curriculum.
“Although it’s supposed to be a course in African-American studies, the final unit of the pilot and the revised course begins not with the modern American civil-rights movement but with the international anti-colonial movement in its most radical form. In the pilot program, that meant reading selections from Frantz Fanon, who famously celebrated the healing power of anti-colonial violence and rejected the United States as ‘a monster, in which the taints, the sickness, and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions.’”
TTFN.
