Tag: critical race theory

Washington’s Olympia School District to ax music classes for pushing ‘white supremacy’

A Washington school district is planning to cut music classes it believes promote “white supremacy culture” and “significant institutional violence.”

The Olympia School District — which is facing a budget shortfall of $11.5 million — voted last week to eliminate band and strings for fourth-graders in an effort to both save money and fight racism.

School Board Director Scott Clifthorne admitted during the meeting that research proves music classes are “healthy for young minds,” but that they are disproportionately rolled out across the district’s 12 elementary schools.

Students at some campuses are required to miss “core instruction” in order to attend music classes, he said, while some campuses offer longer instrumental class time than others.

“We also know that there are other folks in the community that experience things like a tradition of excellence as exclusionary,” Clifthorne said.

“We’re a school district that lives in and is entrenched in and is surrounded by white supremacy culture. And that’s a real thing.”

The board director told concerned parents that there was nothing “intrinsically white supremacist” about string or instrumental music, but warned that there are ways in which it could contribute to the racist culture.

“The ways in which it is and the ways in which all of our institutions — not just schools, but local government, state government, our churches, our neighborhoods — inculcate and allow white supremacy culture to continue to be propagated and caused significant institutional violence are things that we have to think about carefully as a community,” he said.

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Anti-CRT Measures Adopted By 28 US States

More than half of U.S. states have passed measures against the teaching of critical race theory – for example in schools or government employee trainings. Another dozen have seen successful initiatives on a smaller scale, with single cities, counties or school districts (or both) establishing such laws and directives. This is according to a tracking project at the University of California Los Angeles law school.

Additionally, as Statista’s Katharina Buchholz reports, almost all states that haven’t yet passed any such measures have seen them proposed on the state level, the exceptions being California, Vermont and Delaware.

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Surprise: More Right-Wing ‘Conspiracies’ and ‘Misinformation’ Now Confirmed

Let’s begin with the important point that dangerous misinformation and conspiracy theories are, in fact, real problems that seem to be gaining momentum in American politics.  The Left flatters itself by pretending this phenomenon is, more or less, the sole or overwhelming province of the Right, all while indulging or embracing their own falsehoods.  But these things do exist, on both sides, and they really do threaten to warp our collective sense of reality by injecting poisonous forms of paranoia into our discourse and polity.  But here’s what also erodes trust in institutions, and degrades the importance of truth, within American society: Partisans and ideologues, posing as neutral arbiters, arrogantly declaring ideas or allegations with which they disagree to be “misinformation” and “conspiracy theories” — not just debatable or controversial, mind you, but factually wrong, and dangerously so.  This goes beyond dishonesty; it’s irresponsible.  

When the official Narrative shapers have aggressively attempted to disqualify something as crazy and beyond the pale, and then reality intervenes and disproves their spin, people are much less likely to believe them next time they fire up their warning sirens.  Some toxic claims truly need to be debunked and discarded, but when would-be gatekeepers’ credibility has sustained one self-inflicted blow after another, the ability for truth to win out over perilous and inaccurate nonsense is diminished.  Let’s walk through just a handful of examples that have come to light within the last few days.  First, one “conspiracy theory,” for which some on the Right were roundly denounced and ridiculed by the bien pensant ‘Consensus’ crowd, was the idea that COVID-19 escaped from a Chinese laboratory.  At some point, this possibility morphed from unspeakable, to potentially viable, to perhaps probable, including among some of the very people who’d lectured anyone who’d whispered about it even months earlier.  Over the weekend, we saw this report, as the reality trajectory continues to bend toward erstwhile right-wing “misinformation:”

The U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress. The shift by the Energy Department, which previously was undecided on how the virus emerged, is noted in an update to a 2021 document by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines’s office…The Energy Department now joins the Federal Bureau of Investigation in saying the virus likely spread via a mishap at a Chinese laboratory. Four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that it was likely the result of a natural transmission, and two are undecided. The Energy Department’s conclusion is the result of new intelligence and is significant because the agency has considerable scientific expertise and oversees a network of U.S. national laboratories, some of which conduct advanced biological research…The FBI previously came to the conclusion that the pandemic was likely the result of a lab leak in 2021 with “moderate confidence” and still holds to this view.

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Disney+ Cartoon Demands Reparations And More With ‘Slaves Built This Country’ Song

Disney has gone for woke yet again with a recent episode of the cartoon series “Proud Family” — which featured kids singing a song about reparations that America “owes” to black Americans and about how “slaves built this country.”

The recent episode that aired on Disney+, titled “Louder and Prouder,” reviews the history of Juneteenth when the kids discover their town’s founder was a slave-owner. The song opens with the line, “This country was built on slavery — which means slaves built this country” — and that line was repeated over and over throughout.

“We the descendants of slaves in America have earned reparations for their suffering,” the song continued. “And continue to earn reparations every moment we spend submerged in a systemic prejudice, racism and white supremacy that America was founded with and still has not atoned for.”

In the cartoon, that last line was punctuated by four black students glaring while the only white student on the stage with them held a sign that read “still has not atoned for.”

“Slaves built this country,” they shouted again, claiming, “We made your families rich,” as they listed plantation owners, northern bankers, New England ship-owners, the Founding Fathers, and current senators among those who had profited on the backs of slaves.

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Founder of LGBT Youth Support Group Discusses ‘White Terror,’ Says There is ‘No Such Thing’ as a ‘Good’ White Person

Marlene Pray, the founder of a Planned Parenthood-backed LGBT youth sex education group in Bucks County, PA, discussed “white terror” and stated that there is “no such thing” as a “good” white person during a Zoom meeting. Pray is the founder of the Rainbow Room, an “LGBTQIA youth program that provides a supportive and empowering environment for youth ages 14-21.”

During a zoom meeting on the topic of “systemic racism,” Pray, a white woman, was asked if she herself was a racist. “Yes, absolutely. I am a racist. I participate and function and benefit from a system of racism,” the Rainbow Room founder replied enthusiastically. “Whether we call it white supremacy, although we are in no way supreme, so white terrorism is sometimes a more appropriate term for this system that we live in.”

Pray went on to say that “white folks traded our humanity in order to gain white terror and supremacy and white superiority. That’s part of the history of the founding United States.”

“And I have inherited this white privilege that is totally unearned, that is… it’s also dehumanizing, that is the piece I was adding,” she continued. “But it’s, for me, it’s, as well as oppressive as well as oppressive, and damaging, and violent, and lethal to people of color,” Pray continued. “I can do what I can to minimize harm all the time. I am never free of harm as a white person, I am never a completely safe white person.”

The far-left activist went on to praise author Patrice Jackson, stating that there is “no such thing as a good person,” only that they can “minimize the harm” that they do.

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‘1619 Project’ author receives $29K in taxpayer funds from public library for 1-hour speaking event

The Fairfax County Public Library doled out $29,350 in taxpayer funds to “1619 Project” author Nikole Hannah-Jones for an upcoming one-hour speaking event, the New York Post reported.

Hannah-Jones authored the controversial New York Times Magazine series “The 1619 Project,” which aimed to reframe the United States as a system built on racism. Earlier this month, Hulu released a docuseries adaptation of Hannah-Jones’ project.

Northern Virginia residents were enraged that a local public library wrote a $33,350 check to Hannah-Jones, $29,350 of which was covered by taxpayers’ dollars. For the one-hour speaking engagement at McLean Community Center next month, Hannah-Jones will rake in approximately $589 per minute.

Fairfax County Times reported that Hannah-Jones’ contract with the Virginia library also included “non-stop, direct” first-class plane tickets, hotel accommodations, ground transportation, and “$350.00 to cover speaker’s out of pocket expenses.”

Last month, Virginia taxpayers were fuming when they discovered Fairfax County Public Library shelled out $22,500 to another divisive author, Ibram X. Kendi, for a one-hour virtual talk.

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Is White Paint Racist?

I’ve just spent a week in a very white place. The snow fell solidly for two days, and everything was white – the air, the ground, the trees, the streets. And to complete the picture, the houses, in the little seaside town south of Oslo, blended in perfectly, being painted pure, brilliant white. When I got back to a green(ish) Scotland, I didn’t sigh with relief, “Thank goodness, I’m finally out of that racist hellhole.” But perhaps I should have.

According to Norwegian academics, “whiteness” and “white supremacy” are terms to take literally, and the colour white, in particular the white paint that is so commonly used on Norwegian houses, equals racism. Had it been the first of April, I would have assumed this was a hoax, but alas this is serious, state-funded stuff.

From the research project ‘How Norway Made the World Whiter (NorWhite)’ co-authored by Ingrid Haland, an associate professor at the University of Bergen, we learn that:

Whiteness is one of today’s key societal and political concerns. Within and beyond academia worldwide, actions of revolt and regret seek to cope with our racial past. In the pivotal works in whiteness studies within art and architecture history, whiteness is understood as cultural and visual structures of privilege. The new research project ‘How Norway Made the World Whiter’ (NorWhite) funded by the Research Council of Norway (12 million NOK), addresses a distinctively different battleground for politics of whiteness in art and architecture. Two core premises underpin the project: Whiteness is not only a cultural and societal condition tied to skin colour, privileges, and systematic exclusion, but materialise everywhere around us. Second, one cannot understand this materialisation without understanding the societal, technological and aesthetic conditions of the colour itself.

Following this inane logic, I should be ashamed at owning a white house, but perhaps pleased that my parents’ cabin in the mountains is painted brown? Or is that cultural appropriation?

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Prince Harry and the snootiness of modern ‘anti-racism’

Since Prince Harry left the royal family he’s been casting about for a new role, a new calling, beyond talking mournfully about himself to the highest bidder. Going by his bombshell memoir, Spare, and the cascade of interviews surrounding it, an obvious vocation presents itself: diversity trainer.

It’s a lucrative industry, after all. And if Harry’s recent media blitz is anything to go by, he’s taken to all the woke mantras with the zeal of a convert. He’s suggested that the royals need to confront their ‘unconscious bias’ if the monarchy is to have any chance of surviving. Harry even told CBS that he himself was ‘probably bigoted’ before he met his mixed-race wife, Meghan Markle. By which he seems to mean he was blissfully unaware of the scale of racism in society.

In his book, Harry blames his own racial indiscretions as a young man – such as dressing up as a Nazi and referring to a fellow cadet at Sandhurst as a ‘Paki’ – on his ‘unconscious bias’ and the privilege he was raised in. So sheltered was this carrot-topped prince, Harry improbably claims, that aged 21 he genuinely thought ‘Paki’ was as inoffensive as ‘Yankee’.

Unconscious bias – also known as implicit bias – is a concept that has been curdling in academia for almost three decades, first developed by psychologists Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald in the mid-Nineties. They designed the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which has been used millions of times to measure the prejudices people allegedly hold without realising.

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Race to the Bottom: High School Withholds Academic Awards for the Sake of ‘Equity’

It’s almost funny how when it comes to the American education system, leftist indoctrination and pandering has paved the way for “equity” to be a good trait or quality.

We all know that simply isn’t the case…

The Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia, has come under intense scrutiny and fire after it was revealed that the school had intentionally delayed notifying students of national academic honors in the name of “equity.”

A Fairfax County parent, Asra Nomani, joined “Fox and Friends First” to lament the award delays and the philosophy backing up such decision-making.

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The DEI industrial complex

In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, chief diversity officer hires tripled among the largest publicly traded companies. American companies paid an estimated $3.4 billion to firms for diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, programs, according to Princeton professor Betsy Levy Paluck in an op-ed at the Washington Post.

And yet, moans Paluck, there is practically no research evaluating the results of these DEI initiatives.

DEI practitioner (and profiteer) Lily Zheng made a similar observation in a Harvard Business Review article earlier this month : “Despite the increase in organizations adopting DEI initiatives and the proliferation of DEI firms and practitioners, the big, poorly kept secret is that the majority of these initiatives are less effective than many make them out to be.” This, argues Zheng, is for two reasons. “On the one hand, there is a lack of standards, consistency, and accountability among DEI practitioners. And on the other, organizations keep asking for, and funding, interventions that don’t work.”

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