Tag: critical race theory

Woke Math Doesn’t Add Up

Last week, the ODE promoted through its newsletter a short course called the “Pathway to Math Equity Microcourse.” The “microcourse” is designed for middle school teachers to teach them to use its toolkit for “dismantling racism in mathematics.”

The toolkit, according to a Fox News report, includes a list of ways “white supremacy culture” supposedly “infiltrates math classrooms.” The ones cited include that the “focus is on getting the ‘right’ answer’,” and students are “required to ‘show their work,’ ” which used to be keys to teaching math to grade-schoolers.

The toolkit says that “The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so.” It adds that “Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict.”

Objectivity must be banned because its exercise disproves what the wokeist whackos are saying.

The toolkit encourages teachers not to focus on students getting the “right” answer but to come up with more than one answer to questions that are “equally right,” as if that were, ahem, mathematically possible. It also encourages teachers to adopt its guidelines to help “identify and challenge the ways that math is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views.”

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Everything They Don’t Like Is Now a Public Health Emergency

Dissecting the Letter

“White supremacy is a lethal public health issue.” The language used here is important. White supremacy is lethal. Racism kills people. What is not written is, “Sometimes white supremacists, acting out of hatred, kill black people,” or even, “All white supremacists are culpable in the murder of black people.” Instead, the agency is assigned to racism itself. It is racism, not racist people, that is the public health issue; it is white nationalism that kills people. This is the same tactic used by antigun lobbies in their slogan “Guns kill people.” If guns kill people, guns need to be illegal. People killing people with guns is already illegal, just as white supremacists killing black men is already illegal. To advance further legal change, you have to change the language. “White supremacy kills people” leads the same people who want guns outlawed to want white supremacy outlawed. While the letter does not draw out these ideas to their logical conclusions, the logic employed is well down the slippery slope of sacrificing free speech.

“We do not condemn [demonstrations that call attention to the pervasive lethal force of white supremacy] as risky for COVID-19 transmission.” That’s weird because every other kind of gathering is condemned by these people as risky. 

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New York School Principal Urges Parents To Become ‘White Abolitionists’ With Propaganda Graphic

A New York college prep school sent white parents literary materials asking them to identify their “level” of whiteness, ranging from “white supremacist,” which is depicted in red, to “white abolitionist,” depicted in green.

According to race education watchdog Christopher Rufo, white parents of sixth- through 12th-graders received the “tool for action” from the principal of East Side Community School asking them to work toward becoming white traitors and abolitionists by “subverting white authority” as well as “changing institutions, dismantling whiteness, and not allowing whiteness to reassert itself.”

“This is the new language of public education,” Rufo tweeted along with a graphic depicting the “8 white identities.”

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How ‘too white’ has become the meaningless default criticism of the morally superior elite determined to racialize EVERYTHING

Everything from US states to the classics to British TV is now routinely criticised for being ‘too white’. How has this happened when describing something as ‘too black’ would be considered unacceptable?

Have you heard of the expression ‘too white’? In the jargon of the Western elites, ‘too white’ serves as a synonym for words like ‘unpleasant’, ‘problematic’ or ‘toxic’.

Just listen to Tom Perez, the former chair of the Democratic National Committee in the US. He claims that New Hampshire is ‘too white’ to have the first primary for the election of a president. He also thinks that Iowa is ‘too white’ to have the first caucus during the election campaign.

According to the New Republic, the American Department of Justice is ‘too white’. A survey of minority businesses in the US concludes that local chambers of commerce are ‘too white’. Apparently American TV is also ‘too white’. Television in the UK does not get a free pass; Sir Lenny Henry insists that it is ‘too white’. A former head of comedy at the BBC agrees with this assessment and suggests it would not commission Monty Python today, because it is ‘too white’.

It appears that the UK’s green sector is also ‘too white’. Former head of Friends of the Earth, Craig Bennett, insisted that it must leave behind its “white middle class ghetto.” Even poor old Extinction Rebellion is indicted for being “too white, too middle class and lacking in empathy.”

The sense of outrage conveyed by the term ‘too white’ can attach itself to the most unexpected of targets. I am obviously unaware – because I did not know, but now I do – that even ‘dyslexia heroes are too white’.

Numerous sources insist that classical music is ‘too white’. Time and again I hear the claim that philosophy is ‘too white’. Some would even want to cancel the most important philosophers that ever lived, like Plato and Kant, because they are ‘too white’. In fact, virtually every university discipline – from classical music to mathematics through to history – has been condemned for being ‘too white’.

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Now even classical music is racist

In a world where, sooner or later, everything is racialised, it was only a matter of time before classical music became a target of the crusade against whiteness. So I wasn’t particularly shocked when I read this headline in the New York Times: ‘Obscure Musicology Journal Sparks Battles over Race and Free Speech.’

The obscure musicology journal in question is the tiny Journal of Schenkerian Studies. The journal’s editor, Timothy Jackson, a music-theory professor at the University of North Texas, is under fire for his hard-hitting response to the claim that the interwar Austrian-Jewish composer and theorist Heinrich Schenker personified the white racist attitudes that dominate classical music. Jackson’s university has launched an investigation into his behaviour, barred him from editing the journal, and suspended funding for the Schenker Center, which he runs.

Jackson has been vilified by the Twittermob and ostracised by his colleagues. Graduates who have previously worked with him are now worried that their association with this fallen professor could harm their career prospects. How did this all happen?

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When Progressives Say ‘Whiteness’ They Mean ‘White People’

American progressives are the masters of euphemism. They don’t “censor” books or plays; they “retire” them. They don’t “remove” lessons about the founding fathers from our kids’ curriculum; they “de-center” them. At every turn, they find some friendly-sounding phrase to obscure the illiberal and savage attacks they make on our culture. But one progressive euphemism stands out as uniquely dangerous: whiteness.

Whiteness is a fairly new concept, and indeed, the question of who is white is a complex and fascinating one. For some, it is simply a description of a skin tone. For others, it is a cultural construct meant to oppress non-white people. The definition has changed over time to include Catholics and Jews and Hispanics. But at the end of the day, a white person is still essentially a person of European descent.

These latter two definitions are certainly how today’s progressives view the affair. To them, white people are first and foremost the beneficiaries of centuries of systemic racism that created a culture and society that is not only inherently racist but also beyond redemption. This is why they speak so often of the need to “deconstruct” or “destroy” whiteness. They seek to remove whiteness from our institutions and policies.

They tell us things like individuality, work ethic, and perfectionism are whiteness. They tell us to change how we teach math — make is easier, more narrative, less quantifiable, so as to remove it from whiteness and give other kids a chance, as if black kids can’t understand math. They assure us we swim in whiteness, we breathe it in. It is poison, they say, and so long as it lingers in the American air, there are others that cannot breathe.

Let us set aside, for now, the merits of these specious arguments and get back to this idea of euphemisms. When progressives say they want to dismantle “whiteness,” they want you to believe they mean some complicated sociological phenomenon. They do not. They mean “white people.” They mean they want to dismantle the lives of white people. This is a critical thing to understand because if you don’t, you are already playing their game.

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Woke Progressives Target Math Class As Racist For Expecting “Right Answer” Or “Showing Your Work”

The latest target of woke progressive lunacy is facts. Literally, facts.

Mathematics facts, to be exact.

Because now, according to woke progressives, finding the right answer and showing your work is actually racist and white supremacist.

The Oregon Department of Education newsletter promoted a teachers training program called “A Pathway to math Equity Micro-Course,” which is aimed at “dismantling racism in mathematics” through “ethnomathematics.”

Oh, you didn’t know that math is racist? You thought there were just objective facts that follow a set of mathematical laws and rules that don’t care about your feelings or the color of your skin? Just picture me rolling my eyes.

Well, the Oregon Department of Education has put together a toolkit to show teachers how to find the ways that “white supremacy culture” has “infiltrat[ed] math classrooms.”

Apparently, requiring students to “show their work” is racist. They say it is white supremacy to expect a student to write out the mathematical process and show the steps they took to arrive at the answer. Who cares if the teacher needs to see the student’s work in order to  ascertain whether the student understands the underlying mathematics principles or grasps the required processes. It doesn’t matter that showing your work enables teachers and students to identify trouble spots in lengthy or difficult math problems, especially in the event that the student arrives at the incorrect answer.

And speaking of arriving at the incorrect answer, that whole concept is also racist and white supremacist.

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They’ve Come for Shakespeare

A growing number of ‘woke’ academics are refusing to teach Shakespeare in U.S. schools, arguing that the Bard promotes racism, white supremacy and intolerance, and instead are pushing for the teaching of ‘modern’ alternatives.

Writing in the January issue of School Library Journal, Amanda MacGregor, a Minnesota-based librarian, bookseller and freelance journalist, asked why teachers were continuing to include Shakespeare in their classrooms.

‘Shakespeare’s works are full of problematic, outdated ideas, with plenty of misogyny, racism, homophobia, classism, anti-Semitism and misogynoir,’ she wrote, with the last word referring to a hatred of black women.

Apparently, what the world really needs is less Shakespeare and more woke lecturing from self-righteous educators who can’t grasp that a lack of moral perfection in people that died 400 years ago does not negate the importance of their work. By the flawed logic presented by the litany of teachers listed in The Daily Mail’s piece, you can’t teach George Washington either, which would normally sound insane, but that’s exactly what’s where we are already headed. This train has no end of the line. No one will ever truly be pure enough.

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Elementary school goes full Marxist, requires kids to rank their “power and privilege,” assess their racial and sexual identities

In yet another story of full-blown Marxist indoctrination of our children, an elementary school in Cupertino, California was caught using Critical Race Theory curriculum to force third-graders into conversations about sexual and ethnic identity, and then rank themselves on an intersectional sliding scale of worth.

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