“Ways of knowing”: New Zealand pushes to have “indigenous knowledge” (mythology) taught on parity with modern science in science class - ""This perpetuates disturbing misunderstandings of science emerging at all levels of education and in science funding. These encourage mistrust of science. Science is universal, not especially Western European... Science itself does not colonise. It has been used to aid colonisation, as have literature and art. However, science also provides immense good, as well as greatly enhanced understanding of the world. Science is helping us battle worldwide crises such as Covid, global warming, carbon pollution, biodiversity loss and environmental degradation. Such science is informed by the united efforts of many nations and cultures. We increasingly depend on science, perhaps for our very survival. The future of our world, and our species, cannot affort mistrust in science. Indigenous knowledge is critical for the preservation and perpetuation of culture and local practices, and plays key roles in management and policy. However, in the discovery of empirical, universal truths, it falls far short of what we can define as science itself."...
This is a sensible letter which is not inflammatory—except to those postmodernists and Wokeists who see “other ways of knowing” just as valid as modern science. They are wrong. But in response, 2,000 academics and public figures signed a heated objection... Those who signed the letter are either completely ignorant of science (which I don’t believe), or are flaunting their virtue. It’s true that Maori have often been mistreated by colonials, and NZ has tried to rectify this inequality over the years, as it should. But one way not to rectify it is to pretend that Maori “knowledge” is really “true” in the scientific sense. To teach that in the schools, as is being proposed, is a recipe for continuing scientific ignorance. It is the same as a letter saying that fundamentalists Christian “ways of knowing”, like creationism, should be taught alongside evolutionary biology in science class. (Such “parity” is not upheld by freedom of speech, for American courts, at least, have long declared that teachers do not have license to teach anything they want in a class—particularly religion.) Indeed, as we see above, Maori “science” is explicitly creationist!"...
Two of Professor Cooper’s academic colleagues, Dr Siouxsie Wiles and Dr Shaun Hendy, issued an ‘open letter’ condemning the heretics for causing ‘untold harm and hurt’. They invited anyone who agreed with them to add their names to the ‘open letter’, and more than 2,000 academics duly obliged. Before long, five members of the Royal Society had complained and a panel was set up to investigate. The witch-finders disregarded several principles of natural justice in their prosecutorial zeal. For instance, two members of the three-person panel turned out to be signatories of the ‘open letter’ denouncing Professor Cooper so had to be replaced. In addition, all five complainants were anonymous and when the Society asked them to identify themselves, three fell by the wayside. But two remain and the investigation is proceeding apace, with a newly constituted panel."
Ironically many of the people pushing for indigenous mumbo jumbo in science class are against Creationism being taught there. That's what happens when you really just hate white people
This is a good rebuttal to those who claim that educational standards banning CRT is a violation of freedom of speech - they usually fudge when I point out that Creationism isn't allowed to be taught in science class either
University academics' claim mātauranga Māori 'not science' sparks controversy - "Many Māori are also outlining that non-Māori academics should not determine how or what mātauranga Māori is and that positionality is crucial when it comes to the discussions around the Māori school curriculum... "This is a very old argument actually that is coming from scientists who are very deeply steeped in a particular set of scientific norms that go back a long way and they have their roots in colonialism," she said. "If there's any mistrust in science, it comes from those historical legacies of research that has been harmful to indigenous peoples, to Māori, to minorities, to women." She said New Zealand's inherited curriculum enhanced a dominant view of science from a particular tradition, which left little room for questioning science and its claims of being universal. "I think if there is one thing this particular incident reminds us off is that there is need to decolonise first, to decolonise the science systems before we can create a safe space for mātauranga and indigenous knowledge, this is a reminder that this space is not completely safe." In an email sent to staff yesterday, University of Auckland Vice Chancellor Dawn Freshwater said the letter "has caused considerable hurt and dismay among our staff, students and alumni." "While the academics are free to express their views, I want to make it clear that they do not represent the views of the University of Auckland." Prof Freshwater said the institution had respect for mātauranga Māori as a valuable knowledge system, and that it was not at odds with Western empirical science and did not need to compete... Māori academics online have been encouraging people who do not agree with the letter to lodge a complaint to the Royal Society. The scientific academy said it had received numerous emails about the letter. In a joint statement, president Brent Clothier and academy executive committee chair Charlotte MacDonald said they deeply regret the harm such a "misguided view" could cause. "The recent suggestion by a group of University of Auckland academics that mātauranga Māori is not a valid form of knowledge is utterly rejected by Royal Society - Te Apārangi. "The Society strongly upholds the value of mātauranga Māori and rejects the narrow and outmoded definition of science outlined in The Listener - letter to the editor." The Tertiary Education Union (TEU) penned a letter to the academics, telling them their letter to the editor was damaging and ill-advised. TEU said to some members it seemed designed to attack and offend, rather than present a reasoned academic argument. It said members found the letter offensive, racist, reflective of patronising, and of neo-colonial mindset."
Royal Society Investigation Into Mātauranga Māori Letter Sparks Academic Debate - "Two authors of a controversial letter on the scientific status of Māori knowledge may be expelled from a prestigious academic society, following several complaints. News of the disciplinary process within Royal Society Te Apārangi has led some of the winners of its most significant award to threaten their own resignations over what they see as an impingement on academic freedoms. A July letter in The Listener, signed by seven professors from the University of Auckland, raised concerns about an NCEA working group’s proposal to give mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) parity with other forms of Western knowledge... Cooper, who is of Ngāti Māhanga descent, told Newsroom one of his concerns was that the proposed NCEA changes would “disenfranchise” young Māori from pursuing STEM subjects. “By telling them that science is a colonising force, basically they’re going to take away from that a) it’s evil and b) they’re not going to be interested in it.” Cooper said he had spent more than 30 years working in kaupapa Māori research, had helped develop the Health Research Council’s guidelines on research involving Māori, and believed the letters’ critics had “deliberately twisted what we said”. “If the society doesn't mend its ways, then I'm sure that I would not wish to remain a fellow because it is no longer behaving in a way that an organisation such as the Royal Society of New Zealand, as it was when I joined it, basically used to behave,” he said. While a large number of academics have been critical of the Listener letter, several Royal Society fellows have expressed their support for the co-authors and threatened to resign if they are disciplined. University of Auckland literature professor Brian Boyd, who received the society’s Rutherford Medal in 2020 for his “exceptional contributions to literary studies”, told Newsroom he was concerned with the “knee jerk reaction” of the society and others in initially condemning the letter’s authors and accusing them of racism."
Promoting Science is Racist
Weird how they value indigenous ways of knowing, but want to fire a Maori academic who supports Science
More indigenous anger from New Zealand about real science - " The paper below was published in Nature last month, and suggests an explanation for high rates of carbon deposition found in Antarctic ice cores starting about 700 years ago: levels three times higher than in previous centuries. As the abstract below shows, the most likely explanation was soot being blown towards Antarctica from either Tasmania, New Zealand, or Patagonia. But the record of fire use (“paleofire” studies), the directionality of carbon distribution, plus the timing (Maori settled New Zealand around 1300), suggests suggests that New Zealand was the source, probably from Maori burning of forests or fields that caused ancillary wildfires... For several reasons, this paper angered those who accept Maori “other ways of knowing”, both for its assumed conclusions (“Maori caused pollution”) but also because no Maori were involved in the investigation; the implication being that their different points of view might have changed the paper’s conclusions... My correspondent, who wishes to remain anonymous for obvious reasons (several signers of “The Listener” letter have been threatened), notes that there’s a very real possibility that Mātauranga Māori will at least nudge “real” science aside, and thus impede the growth of knowledge."
Why punish a scientist for defending science? | The Spectator - "The authors of the letter, ‘In Defence of Science’, were careful to say that indigenous knowledge was ‘critical for the preservation and perpetuation of culture and local practices, and plays key roles in management and policy’ and should be taught in New Zealand’s schools. But they drew the line at treating it as on a par with physics, chemistry and biology: ‘In the discovery of empirical, universal truths, it falls far short of what we can define as science itself.’ In a rational world, this letter would have been regarded as uncontroversial. Surely the argument about whether to teach schoolchildren scientific or religious explanations for the origins of the universe and the ascent of man was settled by the Scopes trial in 1925? Apart from the obvious difficulty of prioritising one religious viewpoint in an ethnically diverse society like New Zealand (what about Christianity, Islam and Hinduism?), there is the problem that Maori schoolchildren, already among the least privileged in the country, will be at an even greater disadvantage if their teachers patronise them by saying there’s no need to learn the rudiments of scientific knowledge. Knowing about Rangi and Papa won’t get you into medical school."
The solution is to require knowledge about Rangi and Papa to get into medical school, then blame "racism" for poorer Maori health outcomes
On knowledge and racism: How do we know what we know? - "Applying [CRT] to public health, they propose a public health critical race praxis that blends “theory, experiential knowledge, science and action.” A critical race praxis in public health guides health equity researchers and practitioners in four areas of focus...Challenging knowledge production by considering how knowledge is socially constructed, using critical approaches and centring the voices of marginalized peoples"
Some people claim indigenous mumbo jumbo in science class isn't CRT. But Maori mythology is basically another "way of knowing"
Critical Race Theory, Racial Microaggressions, and Campus Racial Climate: The Experiences of African American College Students - "Microaggressions are subtle insults (verbal, nonverbal, and/or visual) directed toward people of color, often automatically or unconsciously. Using critical race theory as a framework, the study described in this article provides an examination of racial microaggressions and how they influence the collegiate racial climate. Using focus group interview data from African American students at three universities, it reveals that racial microaggressions exist in both academic and social spaces in the collegiate environment. The study shows how African American students experience and respond to racial microaggressions. It also demonstrates how racial microaggressions have a negative impact on the campus racial climate... Our study thus explored the linkages between racial stereotypes, cumulative racial microaggressions, campus racial climate, and academic performance... To address racial microaggressions and campus racial climate, we utilized critical race theory (CRT), which draws from and extends a broad literature base in law, sociology, history, ethnic studies, and women’s studies. Though initially utilized in legal studies, CRT has been extended to areas such as education (Ladson—Billings 8: Tate, 1995; Solérzano, 1997, 1998; Tate, 1997), women’s studies (Wing, 1996), and sociology (Aguirre, 2000). For our purposes, we introduce some of the tenets of CRT to our discussion of campus racial climate, as it represents a paradigm shift in the extant discourse about race and racism in education. CRT offers insights, perspectives, methods, and pedagogies that guide our efforts to identify, analyze, and transform the structural and cultural aspects of education that maintain subordinate and dominant racial positions in and out of the classroom (see Matsuda, Lawrence, Delgado, 8: Crenshaw, 1993; Tierney, 1993). The basic CRT model consists of five elements focusing on: (a) the centrality of race and racism and their intersectionality with other forms of subordination, (b) the challenge to dominant ideology, (c) the commitment to social justice, (d) the centrality of experiential knowledge, and (e) the transdisciplinary perspective"
Defenders of CRT claim that it is only about law, but clearly even if it originated that way CRT has metastasised to infect many other fields as well - which have nothing to do with law at all. The basic framework of CRT as outlined by Solorzano et al. above is at the heart of racial grievance mongering
The CRT article above says nothing at all about the law - or even educational or on-campus policy. So clearly even in academia this straw man idea that CRT is only about the law does not hold
Mr President, I have a Mr Johnson on the line... will you accept the call? | News | The Sunday Times - "people around Biden, including Ben Rhodes, an Obama adviser now expected to take a national security role, have argued for Johnson to receive the cold shoulder. In a TV address on Friday, Biden stressed tackling “systematic racism” as a priority. “Leaders who are not seen as allies on race, there will be big problems for those leaders,” the campaign insider said. “He doesn’t want to work with people who project those views,” the aide said, and he was “shocked at the dismissiveness of black rights” after Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, called Black Lives Matter protestors taking the knee, “a symbol of subjugation and subordination” and said that he would kneel only before the Queen or when proposing to his wife."
When CRT infects foreign policy
The Meme Policeman - Posts | Facebook - "Occupy Democrats is doing fact checks now! Or, rather their Super PAC is distributing misleading election propaganda on FB. The claim that Virginia schools have never taught CRT is a good example of something being technically true, but woefully misleading. ▪️When advocates say CRT isn’t being taught in public schools, it’s true that there’s not an explicit course on CRT, a “CRT 101” that methodically walks through all of its aspects, its intellectual history, critiques, etc. Although that would actually be much preferred, then students could learn it in context. ▪️Instead, aspects of CRT ideology are taught, and it greatly influences how educators approach various subjects and what’s included in the curriculum. Christopher Rufo recently provided several examples of Virginia explicitly endorsing CRT...
In 2015, then-Governor McAuliffe's Department of Education instructed VA public schools to "embrace critical race theory" in order to "re-engineer attitudes and belief systems." They explicitly endorsed CRT by name.
Under Governor Northam, the Superintendent of Public Instruction sent a memo to Virginia public schools endorsing "Foundations of Critical Race Theory in Education," calling it an "important analytic tool" that can "further spur developments in education."
Currently on its website, the Virginia Department of Education recommends "Critical Race Theory in Education" as a "best practice" and derives its definitions of racism, white supremacy, and education equity explicitly from "critical race theory."
As an aside, OD’s Super PAC, which produced this meme, has some interesting donors. A surprising amount of universities donated money to them in the 2020 cycle, including:
University of California
Stanford
University of Arizona
Eastern Kentucky University
University of Wisconsin
Cornell"
To think that these are the same people who keep going on about gaslighting
Mom says white daughter asked if she was evil after history class - "A Virginia mother yanked her children out of public school after her 6-year-old asked if she was “born evil” for being white — something the young girl purportedly picked up in her history class. The Loudoun County woman, whose identity wasn’t immediately clear, detailed her concerns against critical race theory during an impassioned plea at a Loudon County Public Schools board meeting... “Then you kept the schools closed for a year and a half, despite the science indicating it was safe for kids to return,” she continued. “Now you’ve covered up a rape and arrested, humiliated and falsely accused parents of being domestic terrorists.” Some parents in the district have been calling for the resignations of Superintendent Scott Ziegler and the board for allegedly covering up a sexual assault report and ongoing issues with critical race theory in classes... McAuliffe, meanwhile, has dismissed concerns about critical race theory by saying it wasn’t taught in the state, but a presentation on the Virginia Department of Education website urges teachers to embrace the concept."
So this is what 'teaching accurate history' is code for
Facebook - "World Values Survey asks if they are against living next door to people of another race. Strangely, it’s the countries that Critical Race Theorists and other race hustlers say are the *most* racist, which are instead the *most* tolerant and xenophillic. Awkward truths to swallow."
They get around that by claiming white people are lying
Whistleblower: Amazon Regularly Forces Employees To Confess Unconscious Racial Bias - "Amazon forces its executives to acknowledge their white privilege and confess their “unconscious racial bias” during regular meetings with other employees, according to a whistleblower at the company, a revelation that comes just a week after the e-commerce giant announced this year’s “equity” goals... The town halls include live Q&A sessions during which employees have asked the senior executives to describe specific instances in which they experienced their own white privilege and say what they wish they could change about their actions in those moments. “The stories that they come back with are so obviously just false and fake, but it’s just stuff that they have to say during these meetings”... Amazon’s push for “equity” directly impacts hiring decisions."
Ibram X. Kendi accidentally undermines his views on white privilege and systemic racism in now-deleted tweet | The Post Millennial - "Author and activist Ibram X. Kendi, who upholds the ideas that white privilege is rampant in American culture and systemic racism keeps minorities in states of oppression, shared an article on Twitter that revealed that "more than a third of white students lie about their race on college applications"... Kendi has said that America is a "slaveholders" republic. And wrote a children's book about how to teach babies to be "anti-racist." Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey gave $10 million to Boston University to create the Center for Antiracist Research under Kendi's direction. The article from The Hill found that "81 percent of students who faked minority status did so to improve their chances of getting accepted. Fifty percent of students who lied said they did it to get minority-focused financial aid." But if white privilege is so prevalent and persuasive, why would white kids feel the need to disguise their whiteness in order to gain admittance to college and aid to help them attend? Could it be that these white students felt that as opposed to giving them an edge, their whiteness was a hindrance to admittance?... 48 percent of those lying about their race were white male students, compared to only 16 percent of white female students. Kendi presumably shared the story before he realized that instead of holding up his ideas about race and society in the US, it could be evidence of exactly the opposite of his views, which would be likely why he deleted it... The fact that Kendi posted then deleted the tweet raised red flags about his ideology. Political writer Chad Felix Greene said that Kendi's comment was "collapsing your entire worldview into a giant sinkhole." Kendi then blocked him"
CNN's Sellers: CRT -- Which I've Said 'We Need to Teach' and Is 'America's History' -- Isn't Taught in K-12 and Bans Are Playing 'Race Card' - "CNN Political Commentator Bakari Sellers said that Critical Race Theory — which he has previously said “can go by another name: America’s history” and is something that “we need to teach” — is not taught in K-12 schools and that pushing to ban CRT is playing the race card."
Schrodinger's CRT - CRT is not taught in schools and fears that it is or will be are unjustified but it must be taught in schools and cannot be banned
Boy Scouts of America Embraces Critical Race Theory - "the national organization announced a new merit badge called “Citizenship in Society.” What does this new merit badge mean? “The new merit badge encourages Scouts to explore important topics around diversity, equity, inclusion and ethical leadership and learn why these qualities are important in society and in Scouting,” The badge will be required for any scout who seeks the prestigious rank of Eagle Scout... “On top of this, this merit badge is unique in that it doesn’t actually have a merit badge booklet but is just guided by the counselor. Now Scouts will be at the mercy of their individual counselor, a prospect that could either be a saving grace or doom children to nauseating lectures on intersectionality and privilege.”"
Facebook - "Critical Race Theory is the biggest threat to Jews in the world today."
Meme - @thespinsterymc Mike Nichols' Lace Front: "I'm done explaining myself to antiblack, misogynoirist people. I know who I am. Everyone understands how deeply white supremacist American Jewish community is. It's not a secret nor a mystery. Whiteness is the center of American Jewish life. It impacts every move we make."
Florida bill to shield people from feeling 'discomfort' over historic actions by their race, nationality or gender approved by Senate committee - "A bill backed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis that would prohibit Florida's public schools and private businesses from making people feel "discomfort" or "guilt" based on their race, sex or national origin received first approval"
Florida bill would shield whites from 'discomfort' at school or job training - "A bill pushed by Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis that would prohibit public schools and private businesses from making white people feel “discomfort” when they teach students or train employees about discrimination in the nation’s past received its first approval"
I never thought I'd see the day when the CNN headline and article is fair and the AP one is biased
Patrick Luciani: Push back on the new theories breaching high school history classes - The Hub - "Now comes a new idea that says our teaching of history “has been notorious for promoting a one-dimensional understanding of national belonging far from the realities and stories of most young people today.” This old version of Canada, by which we mean Anglo and French history, “leaves out the violent history of colonialism, the state’s perpetration of continuous racial injustice, and the desire to make, and keep, Canada white.” Now that’s a theme that should wake up the kid at the back of the class. This last point is rather odd given that Canada is accepting millions of visible minorities from around the world. But let’s not get distracted. The book’s author wants to find a new “we” in Canada “to deconstruct the stories we have been told and to find new ways to put them back together again.” Here she suggests “meaningful learning”, which I take to mean that students are the subject in the classroom and teachers the objects. She wants to teach kids about a Canada that reflects their lived experience. My only interest in high school history was doing as little studying as possible. The idea that I wanted history, or any subject, to reflect my ethnicity as a minority would have been absurd. I doubt that’s changed for most students regardless of their ethnicity or background. Let’s continue. Rather than students learning from teachers, teachers learn from students, where students from various backgrounds can bring to the classroom their view of the world from their cultural experiences. The word “contextualized” is used liberally to the make the point. This will somehow make classrooms more relevant so all voices are heard. This can best be done by introducing a good dose of Critical Race Theory"
The Gathering Parent Horror at Public School - "This fall, I had the disturbing experience of sitting in on my daughter's second-grade Zoom class. A full-time school psychologist kicked off her weekly session of "Social Emotional Learning" by prompting the seven-year-olds to admit that COVID-19 is scary. Do you have anything at home that makes you feel better when you're frightened? She instructed the kids to leave their computers and return with an object that they might cuddle for the remainder of class. The remarkable thing about this scheduled lesson was that it was not prompted by any indication that the students were afraid of COVID. The lesson itself seemed as likely to induce anxiety in those who were not anxious as it might be to soothe it in those who were. A class begun with girls sitting like scholars ended with them slouching like Linus, clutching a blankie. Since the advent of lockdowns, parents have been catching glimpses of what's actually being taught in school. Because I send my daughter to a religious school that shares our values, I've gotten off easy. Many parents are discovering content—much of it lectures and online material that appear in no textbook—stunningly radical, devoid of rigor and apparently calculated to alarm. "The only way to characterize the messages being pushed are the words 'negative,' 'nihilistic' and 'anxiety-inducing,'" said Luke Rosiak, an investigative journalist who's been following what's being taught in secondary schools for over a year. "The prospect that adults are inducing depression and hopelessness in children to further political aims is something that I think should disturb anyone."... Rosiak created a website—whataretheylearning.com—to aggregate the materials sent to him by parents across the country. The trove is astonishing. In Virginia, an elementary school teacher used a slide to teach her students that "objectivity" and "individualism" are part of a "white supremacy culture." In New York, a third-grade teacher directed children to count the races represented in the characters in their books in lieu of a math lesson. In Washington state, a high school used Ibram X. Kendi's How to Be an Antiracist as the basis for a 40-slide indictment of America as a nation overwhelmed by systemic racism and informed its students that they, too, are racist. Any doubt of their own racism, students were assured, merely reflected their inability to apprehend their own implicit biases... My own investigation into the California public school system last year unearthed a radical gender ideology pushed on children as young as five that was deliberately concealed from parents. Some of the most explicit materials were viewed in class, not to be taken home where parents might see it—material that, before quarantine, was not easily monitored... In California and elsewhere, public schools routinely teach that gender is mindlessly presumed at birth by a doctor, but ultimately known only to them, the students. Any adult who tries to promote "rigid gender roles" (for instance, by encouraging kids to accept their biological sex) may be committing "spiritual abuse." Anticipating parent objections to classroom lessons, Philadelphia public high school teacher Michael Kay tweeted a warning to his fellow educators in August that upcoming Zoom classes would have "potential spectators—parents, siblings, etc.—in the same room. We'll never be sure who is overhearing the discourse." These interlopers, he wrote, might threaten "equity/inclusion work" in the classroom. "And while 'conservative' parents are my chief concern—I know that the damage can come from the left too. If we are engaged in the messy work of destabilizing a kids [sic] racism or homophobia or transphobia—how much do we want their classmates' parents piling on?" There was a time when a teacher might have considered the "messy work of destabilizing" a child the unfortunate influence of her worst peers—not the express goal of the adult running the class. The Rutherford County School system in Tennessee seems to have been thinking along the same lines. This fall, it asked parents to sign an agreement pledging that they would not observe their children's online classes. "Violation of this agreement may result in RCS removing my child from the virtual meeting"... Unlike radical professors who only reach kids at 18, these educators are catching kids at vulnerable times—in elementary school, when they're still cowed by authority, and in middle school and high school, when they're awkward and angry and looking for any excuse to stick it to mom. Teachers should be preparing future leaders for civic engagement. Instead, they seem to be raising an anguished army."
No wonder teachers are terrified at parents knowing what they teach
500 School Districts Publicly Declare Only Woke Teachers Need Apply - "Not all teachers buy into the leftist narrative of race-obsessed anti-Americanism. But leftist K-12 administrators want to ensure that, eventually, all teachers will present only approved ideas and counter any wrongthink children are taught at home. Many of these educrats are now embracing a technological fix. Trade publication Education Week recently reported that about 500 school districts around the country are rating teacher applicants according to their “cultural competency,” another code for “wokeness.” Many of these districts are contracting with a teacher-hiring company called Nimble, which uses artificial intelligence to examine applications and interview answers to determine which candidates harbor the correct political and cultural attitudes. A central concern of Nimble and its leftist clients is mindsets about race. The goal is to hire only teachers who are “anti-racist” activists, who will reject equal treatment of all students in favor of discrimination against some (whites) for the supposed benefit of others (racial minorities). Note that under this rubric, Asian students, who as a group work hard and consequently excel, don’t qualify as an oppressed racial minority... EdWeek identified a Boston elementary school principal who “will tell candidates the school’s priorities around anti-racism and ask them to respond.” To make crystal clear the political attitudes expected from successful candidates, “she will ask them what they’ve done personally or professionally to be more anti-racist.” Presumably, getting arrested at a Black Lives Matter riot would be, as Rush Limbaugh used to say, a resume enhancement. Applicants in Indianapolis may be asked “how [they would] ensure that student outcomes are not predictable by race, ethnicity, culture, gender, or sexual orientation.” Of course, there’s only one way to ensure such an outcome: manipulate it to guarantee that all students end up at the same low level. Any students who threaten the leveling by working too hard or achieving too much will have to be brought to heel—at least, if they’re the “wrong” race. Indianapolis teaching applicants may also be asked, “Why do you think that low-income students predictably perform lower on standardized tests than their more-affluent peers?” One would be pretty safe to assume a preferred answer would be “because of systemic racism,” not “because those students, largely due to decades of misguided government policies, are more likely to come from fatherless families and grow up in a dysfunctional environment.” Throughout the article, district officials emphasize the importance of hiring teachers who are amenable to the schools’ “priorities” and “values.” But how is it appropriate for a public institution, funded by taxpayers who hold a wide range of political opinions, to institutionalize one set of those opinions? Even worse, how is it appropriate for the institution to guarantee the propagation of those opinions by limiting hires to candidates who agree with them? These questions illustrate the bubble mentality of the left. Leftists are so certain of the objective correctness of all their views that they cannot conceive of any person of goodwill taking a different position. In the leftist mind, anyone not willing to engage in discrimination against whites or Asians in the name of “equity” is the moral equivalent of a Klansman. And who would object to screening out Klansmen from the teacher corps? Parents who hope the public schools are still salvageable might want to reconsider. The skyrocketing wokeness of administrators who control teacher hiring will ensure that all classrooms are increasingly devoted to indoctrination rather than education."
The Civil Rights Legend Who Opposed Critical Race Theory - "many people still may not know what it really means. They think CRT is part of the Rev. Martin Luther King's civil rights efforts. In truth, it is directly opposed to the central concept and vision he most stood for. One of the last and greatest civil rights leaders of our time -- and one of King's closest friends and advisers -- did understand CRT, and explicitly rejected it... In 2015, Dr. Walker and I co-authored an essay about education reform and race relations, where we wrote: "Today, too many ‘remedies’ -- such as Critical Race Theory, the increasingly fashionable post-Marxist/postmodernist approach that analyzes society as institutional group power structures rather than on a spiritual or one-to-one human level -- are taking us in the wrong direction: separating even elementary school children into explicit racial groups, and emphasizing differences instead of similarities. “The answer is to go deeper than race, deeper than wealth, deeper than ethnic identity, deeper than gender. To teach ourselves to comprehend each person, not as a symbol of a group, but as a unique and special individual within a common context of shared humanity. To go to that fundamental place where we are all simply mortal creatures, seeking to create order, beauty, family, and connection to the world that -- on its own -- seems to bend too often towards randomness and entropy." Before publishing this essay, I questioned Dr. Walker to make sure he really wanted to be on record with this opposition to CRT. I was worried this might put him in a bad way with other civil rights leaders. But he had never backed down in his life, and he reiterated that this was his position... As Dr. Walker tried to make clear, thinking in terms of blocs of people, rather than of people as individuals, leads to a whole set of insidious results. How can two people bind together in friendship if they are members of power blocs that are presumed to be inherently opposed? How can a person prove his innocence if he is branded as inevitably a part of a guilty group? Why should an individual strive to succeed by individual merit if group dynamics are presumed to be overwhelming and inescapable? How can we ever find peace among the races and religions if we won't look to each other, person by person, based on actual facts and actual intentions? The saddest thing is to see well-intentioned people, trying to achieve Martin Luther King's dream by employing CRT methods that are the opposite of King's dream. King asked for everyone to be judged by the content of their own individual character, not by their inescapable genetic links to post-Marxist style analytical power groups. Supporters of civil rights should follow the example of Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker, and not allow the two incompatible definitions of civil rights -- King's and CRT's -- to be confused with one another."
