The Political Hat

Meanwhile… in a Texas Elementary School.

     An elementary school decided that diving a class in two by hair color and then declaring one of the two to be less intelligent while giving them games with missing pieces that were unplayable and then forcing them to clean up after the other children. This didn’t happen in 1930s Germany, it happen here and now in Texas.

“Children at a local elementary school segregated by the color of their hair. The children in one group told they’re not as smart as the others. It was supposed to be a lesson on racism, but some parents are furious neither they, nor their kids, were told about it ahead of time.

“…

“Mike and Brandi Lininger say their ten-year-old daughter was confused and hurt by a classroom experiment in January at Leon Springs Elementary. Students were separated according to hair color, with one group receiving preferential treatment.

“’All of the dark-haired kids, the brown- and black-haired kids, were treated as the privileged ones and the blonde haired and the redhead kids were the ones treated not so nicely,’ said Brandi Lininger.

“The Lininger’s say teachers told students children in the fair-haired group were not as intelligent. That group was purposely given a game with pieces missing so they could not play. Later they were made to clean up after the other children.

“‘She was hurt, her friends, and she named to the principal and to district officials, names of her friends that were crying,’ Brandi Lininger said.”

     It turns out that this is the modern “equity” version of a lesson from 1968:

“The brown hair/blonde hair idea is a variation of a lesson first taught the day after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. That’s when a teacher named Jane Elliott decided to segregate her 3rd grade class based on eye color. On the first day, kids with blue eyes were told they were superior to kids with brown eyes and on the next day, the roles were reversed. The lesson was immediate a sensation.”

     Notice the difference between the two lessons. In the current Texas case, there was no indication that they were going to reverse it like it was done in 1968. The 1968 lesson was intended to show all kids that discrimination was bad by showing them how being discriminated against is truly horrible. In the modern example, there was no indication that they were going to do such a reversal with the kids with light colored hair being given preferential treatment and those with darker hair being treated like dirt, and there is little chance that a school in America today would dare try to pull something like that lest they be harassed and even threatened by the usual suspects; while the earlier lesson was about teaching the value of equality, this recent lesson was about equity and the need to treat the “privileged” less equally than others in order to achieve some ill-defined utopia of equity—this is the “praxis” of Critical Race Theory in action.

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