Tag: critical race theory

Minnesota fourth-graders are told not to tell their parents about ‘equity survey’ on race and gender OR skip questions (even if they don’t understand them)

A class of fourth graders in Minnesota were given an equity survey about race and gender, but were allegedly told by a teacher not to tell their parents about the questions that they were asked even if they didn’t understand them. 

The survey was conducted at Riverview intermediate school in the Sartell-St. Stephen School District in Minnesota by the Equity Alliance of Minnesota, and comes amid a national debate on how to teach history and current events specifically focusing on matters of race. 

Student Hayley Yasgar addressed a school board on July 19 and told them she felt ‘very nervous and uncomfortable’ when her teacher instructed her not to talk to her mother about the survey. 

She also says she was not permitted to skip any questions even if she didn’t understand them, in a video of the meeting posted by Alpha News.

One question said: ‘Do you currently identify yourself as female, male, transgender (transgender people have a gender identity or gender expression that differs from their assigned sex. For example, they were born male but now identify as female), or something else?’ 

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You’ve Been Warned: Western Table Manners Are Now Racist

Heads up, everyone! There are new rules again, so I want everyone paying attention. Eating your food the way you’ve been taught to with forks and knives (because this is the West and it’s what we do) is racist and it hurts people who are still upset about colonization from hundreds of years ago. Writing in “Today’s Parent,” Joshana Maharaj is outraged, I tell you, just outraged that some teacher somewhere in Canada told a little girl not to eat rice with her hands.

This prompted her to write about learning how to eat around the world, where using hands is acceptable and how the West is just racist by using utensils, or something.

Recently, I chatted with someone who told me a story about her young niece, who goes to a prestigious preschool and was eating rice with her hands at lunchtime. The feedback her parents received was that this child needed to work on her table manners and use proper cutlery to eat. I immediately felt a rush of anger bubble up inside me when I heard this. The message that eating food with your hands is an unmannered way to eat is a real problem for me because it is dripping with the control and shame of colonization, which is particularly dangerous in an educational context. Suggesting that a child who eats with her hands has no manners is an echo of European colonial powers looking to tame the wildness out of the people they controlled. These European table manners were imposed on conquered people in an attempt to “civilize” them. It’s a damaging message about right and wrong ways to do things. It positions the technique as superior and the people who practise it as setters of the standard, leaving those with a different approach to eating with a status of inferiority. The idea of a single standard of acceptable table manners is just one of a host of strategies used to grow and promote racism. It’s a subtle message but one that is reinforced three times a day, every day, which makes it quite powerful.

Oh for crying out loud! For the most part in her essay, she explains that certain manners are for certain foods: chopsticks for sushi, and hands for naan, which makes sense and we do that in my house. But if you’re in a Western prep school, you need to use the table manners of the West. It’s not racist. It’s giving respect to the culture you’re in. You’re not in China. We eat rice with forks here in the West. If you are in China, then you probably want to put the fork down. I don’t think this has anything to do with colonialism, but with respecting the culture you’re in. “Recognizing diversity in cultural backgrounds and food traditions is essential, especially in a country as multicultural as Canada,” wrote Maharaj, totally unironically.

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Penn State Professor Tells White Student ‘You’re Breathing … So You May Have Oppressed Somebody Today’

Pennsylvania State University is defending a professor who pulled a white student in front of his class and told him that he’s breathing, so he may have oppressed someone today.

Professor Sam Richards, who teaches the 700-student “SOC119: Race and Ethnic Relations” course, pulled students up before the class on June 30 to discuss white privilege.

“I just take the average white guy in class, whoever it is, it doesn’t really matter,” Richards said. “Dude, this guy here. Stand up, bro. What’s your name, bro?”

The student, Russell, stood up to face the class.

“Look at Russell, right here, it doesn’t matter what he does,” the professor continued, according to a report from Campus Reform. “If I match him up with a black guy in class, or a brown guy… who’s just like him, has the same GPA, looks like him, walks like him, talks like him, acts in a similar way…and we send them into the same jobs…Russell has a benefit of having white skin.”

In another class on March 4, Richards attacked two white students as “oppressors” while discussing the Critical Race Theory training taking place at Coca-Cola. The company made headlines after it was revealed that they had instructed their employees to “be less white.”

Richards, according to Campus Reform, asked the class for thoughts on a Coca-Cola slide which read, “To be less white is to be less oppressive, be less arrogant, be less certain, be less defensive, be less ignorant, be more humble, listen, believe, break with party, break with white solidarity.”

“I think, you know, it’s more or less just recognizing the advantages you have in life,” James, a student, responded. “Whatever that may be, and not thinking yourself superior because of that.”

The professor was pleased with that answer, then turned to another student, Brian, and asked, “What White people would find that offensive?”

“Conservatives, I guess,” Brain responded.

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Biden Admin Linked Radical Handbook Instructing Teachers To ‘Disrupt Whiteness’ As Part Of School Reopening Guidance, Admits ‘Error’

The Biden administration has admitted the Department of Education made an “error” after Fox News revealed that the DOE promoted a radical handbook from the Abolitionist Teaching Network as part of its COVID-19 school reopening guidance. The Fox News report added that the ATN instructs teachers to “disrupt whiteness” and that an ATN founder sees it as her mission to “trouble [white teachers’] internalized White supremacy and anti-Blackness.”

The ATN handbook, titled “Guide for Racial Justice & Abolitionist Social and Emotional Learning,” is linked in the Biden administration’s Department of Education “Ed COVID-19 Handbook” which is designed to guide teachers in “reopening safely and meeting all students’ needs.”

The guide promotes the “historic American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (ARP),” and provides “resources” to schools looking to spend the $122 billion in ARPA funds earmarked for public schools to help correct the “disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on students of color, students from low-income backgrounds, students with disabilities, English learners, students who are migratory, students experiencing homelessness, students in correctional facilities, and students in foster care”

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‘It’s unavoidable’: Marc Lamont Hill says all white people are inherently racist

Temple University professor Marc Lamont Hill gave an unequivocal answer when asked if he believed that all white people were inherently racist.

“I don’t know if you’re backing me into a corner with that question but yes, I do,” Hill responded.

The former CNN contributor was discussing the controversy over critical race theory when he made the comments to political commentator Liz Wheeler on the “Black News Tonight” show.

“I do believe that all White people are at some level, at the unconscious level, connected to racism, it’s unavoidable,” he explained. “I think all men are sexist at some level. I think that’s absolutely the case.”

Hill went on to quibble with historical accuracy of one of Wheeler’s examples, but he quickly ended the debate after answering her challenge.

Their debate centered on whether critical race theory was Marxist, with Hill challenging Wheeler to identify specific supporters of CRT who were also Marxist.

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Science Journal Decries Racism in Geology, Claims Black People Are Too Scared to Hold Hammers

Enlightenment is a process, and as we’ve learned on a near-daily basis for quite some time, many things are racist.

Thanks to a recent paper published in science journal Nature Communications, more light has now been shed.

Another of society’s racist realms, as it turns out: geology.

On June 22nd, a group of scientists offered “An Actionable Anti-Racism Plan for Geoscience Organizations.”

As indicated by the article, white supremacy is alive and well amid the study of earth and rocks.

In the write-up — headed by Fort Hays State University professor Hendratta Ali and signed by 18 other academics — experts lament the lack of diversity in geology.

It is, they assert, one of the least diverse areas of engineering and science.

And for a sinister reason:

Racism has led to the geosciences becoming one of the least diverse among all science and engineering fields.”

The “R” word isn’t merely present; it thrives:

Racism thrives in geoscience. Geoscience organizations function alongside the same racist ideologies and practices shaping society.

Hence, changes must be made.

Among them: an end to terribly racist, judgmental attitudes.

According to the manifesto, geoscience is rife with “expectations around manners, clothing, hair, professional attire, language, and diction.”

So how’s about a great push for “diversity”?

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Dozens of School Districts are Using Book that Claims ‘Whiteness’ is the Devil and That White Children Sell Their Soul for “Stolen Land and Stolen Riches”

Investigative Journalist and avid CRT opponent Chris Rufo has identified over 30 school districts across 15 different states that are teaching the radical ‘anti-whiteness’ book, “Not My Idea” by Anastasia Higginbotham.

Rufo notes that the book, meant for children as young as kindergarteners, ‘traffics in the noxious principles of race essentialism, collective guilt, and anti-whiteness.’

One part includes images portraying whiteness as the devil, offering the reader a contract that ‘bids them to whiteness’ in exchange for stolen land and the ability to ‘mess endlessly’ with the lives of people of color.

The book teaches children to primarily identify by their skin color while it paints white children as evil, saying: “Whiteness is a bad deal. It always was.”

Another page says, “Racism is a white person’s problem and we are all caught up in it.”

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Ibram X. Kendi Equates Parents Fighting Critical Race Theory To The KKK, Segregationists

Critical race theorist Ibram X. Kendi likened parents’ reactions to critical race theory to the pro-segregation and pro-Klu Klux Klan response after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education desegregation case. School curriculum based on critical race theory indoctrinates children with racist ideas, but in a Wednesday livestream with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), Kendi called this education is “crucial” for students.

“The only thing that I can compare this recent wave of what is happening in our school districts, what’s happening in our school districts, what’s happening in our communities, is it really reminds me of the reaction and the response to the Brown v. Board of Education decision when there was widespread fear in certain schools and certain communities that, quote, those desegregated schools with those black children were going to be harmful to white children,” Kendi said.

“It’s similarly being cast, or framed, as if teaching about history, teaching about racism, even teaching about slavery is going to somehow harm white children,” he said. 

On Thursday, AFT president Randi Weingarten claimed that critical race theory wasn’t taught in K-12 schools, even though her own union said “critical race theory allows educators to give our students the opportunity to understand the full breadth and depth of the American society.”

Kendi went on to criticize legislators who have been pushing to limit the spread of critical race theory in schools, stressing the importance of such teaching. 

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Nation’s largest teachers union mysteriously scrubs pro-critical race theory pledge from website

The National Education Association, the largest teachers union in the United States, mysteriously scrubbed from its website a recently adopted plan to combat opponents of critical race theory.

What is the background?

As TheBlaze reported, the NEA adopted a resolution at its annual meeting last week that pledged to “fight back” against groups working to stop critical race theory from being taught in schools.

Not only did the NEA’s resolution vow to “fight back against anti-CRT rhetoric,” but the resolution reaffirmed the NEA’s view that developing curriculum based on critical race theory and other similar ideologies is important “for understanding and interpreting the impact of the past on current society.”

The action plan is necessary, according to a separately adopted resolution, because “the attacks on anti-racist teachers are increasing.” That resolution was also removed.

What happened now?

The NEA removed its pro-CRT resolutions from the union website sometime this week after its plans generated attention, and predictable backlash, online.

Jessica Anderson, executive director of Heritage Action, an organization that NEA cited specifically as one group the union would “fight back” against, noted Tuesday, “[Three] days after their annual meeting concludes, @NEAToday, the nation’s largest teacher’s union, scrubs the agenda items announcing their nationwide campaign to push CRT from their website.”

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