Tag: critical race theory

The University as the Woke Mission Field: A Dissident Women’s Studies Ph.D. Speaks Out

I have a Ph.D. in Women’s Studies, but I’m not woke anymore. I write under a pseudonym because, if my colleagues were to find out about my criticisms of this field, I would be unable to find any employment in academia. That someone who critiques the axioms of a field of study feels compelled to write under an assumed name tells you everything you need to know about the authoritarianism underpinning this ideology. I no longer believe that the fundamental ideas of Women’s Studies, and of Critical Social Justice more generally, describe reality; they are at best partial explanations—hyperbolic ideology, not fact-based analysis. I have seen this ideology up close and seen how it consumes and even destroys people, while dehumanizing anyone who dissents.

I’m sad to say it, but I believe that Critical Social Justice ideology—if not beaten in the war of ideas—will destroy the liberal foundation of American society. By liberal I mean principles including, but not limited to, constitutional republican government, equality under the law, due process, a commitment to reason and science, individual liberty, and freedom—of speech, of the press, and of religion. Because Critical Social Justice ideology is now the dominant paradigm in American academia, it has flowed into all other major societal institutions, the media, and even corporations. Far from being counter-cultural, Critical Social Justice ideology is now the cultural mainstream. A diverse spectrum of liberals, libertarians, conservatives, and all others who, to put it bluntly, want the American constitution to continue to serve as the basis for our society have to team up to prevent this ideology from destroying our country.

Keep reading

Nevada student sues high school for ‘coercive ideological indoctrination’ of woke curriculum

Ahigh school senior in Nevada is suing his charter school over what he calls the “coercive ideological indoctrination” imposed by the school’s Critical Race Theory-based curriculum. 

The student, who is mixed-race, contends that the curriculum forces students at the taxpayer-funded school to connect elements of their identities with oppression.

The lawsuit, which was filed last week in a Nevada federal court, claims that the student (as well as his mother’s) First and Fourteenth Amendment rights were violated when students were told that refusing to identify with an oppressed group was a sign of privilege and an indication of being an oppressor.

The student’s mother, Gabrielle Clark, who is black, claims her son was subjected to a hostile classroom environment at Democracy Prep. She alleges that her child faced discrimination during the school’s year-long, mandatory course “Sociology of Change.” 

Clark claims that she and other parents were unaware of the school’s sharp pivot toward a curriculum of “coercive, ideological indoctrination.” The school’s curriculum had evidently been altered in recent years, but classes kept the same names, meaning some parents were unaware of the substantive change to their children’s education until “they began seeing the detrimental effects it worked upon their children,” reads the suit.

The new curriculum “inserted consciousness raising and conditioning exercises under the banner of ‘Intersectionality’ and ‘Critical Race Theory,'” according to the lawsuit. “These sessions … are not descriptive or informational in nature, but normative and prescriptive: they require pupils to ‘unlearn’ and ‘fight back’ against ‘oppressive’ structures allegedly implicit in their family arrangements, religious beliefs and practices, racial, sexual, and gender identities, all of which they are required to divulge and subject to non-private interrogation.”

Clark’s son was reportedly instructed at school to “unlearn” the “basic Judeo-Christian principles [his mother] imparted to him, and then [the school] retaliated against [him].”

As part of school assignments, students were required to reveal “racial, sexual, gender, sexual orientation, disabilities and religious identities.” Students were also routinely referred to by their instructors as “social justice warriors.” 

Keep reading

University Of Kentucky Segregated Residential Assistance Training By Race, Sent White People To ‘White Accountability Space’

Whites and non-whites training to be Residential Assistants at the University of Kentucky were segregated according to their race and put through different presentations.

The separate trainings were provided to Young America’s Foundation through the organization’s Campus Bias Tip Line, which included emails and documents about the training. White RAs were sent to a “White Accountability Space” where they were given a document that listed 41 “common racist behaviors and attitudes of white people.”

Number one on the list states that white people “believe they have ‘earned’ what they have, rather than acknowledge the extensive white privilege and unearned advantages they receive” and “believe that if people of color just worked harder …” The list also includes claims that white people don’t “notice the daily indignities that people of color experience; deny them and rationalize them away with PLEs (perfectly logical explanations),” “resent taking direction from a person of color,” and tend to ask “people of color to repeat what they have said.”

Brandon Colbert from the university’s Bias Incident Support Services offered a presentation for the training allegedly talking about “microaggressions and microinvalidations in the workplace and the harm that they cause.”

Keep reading

The New York Times Guild Once Again Demands Censorship Of Colleagues

THE NEW YORK TIMES GUILD, the union of employees of the Paper of Record, tweeted a condemnation on Sunday of one of their own colleagues, op-ed columnist Bret Stephens. Their denunciation was marred by humiliating typos and even more so by creepy and authoritarian censorship demands and petulant appeals to management for enforcement of company “rules” against other journalists. To say that this is bizarre behavior from a union of journalists, of all people, is to woefully understate the case.

What angered the union today was an op-ed by Stephens on Friday which voiced numerous criticisms of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning “1619 Project,” published last year by the New York Times Magazine and spearheaded by reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones. One of the Project’s principal arguments was expressed by a now-silently-deleted sentence that introduced it: “that the country’s true birth date” is not 1776, as has long been widely believed, but rather late 1619, when, the article claims, the first African slaves arrived on U.S. soil.

Despite its Pulitzer, the “1619 Project” has become a hotly contested political and academic controversy, with the Trump administration seeking to block attempts to integrate its assertions into school curriculums, while numerous scholars of history accuse it of radically distorting historical fact, with some, such as Brown University’s Glenn Loury, calling on the Pulitzer Board to revoke its award. Scholars have also vocally criticized the Times for stealth edits of the article’s key claims long after publication, without even noting to readers that it made these substantive changes let alone explaining why it made them.

Keep reading

Math Association Say Math “Inherently Carries Human Biases”, Citing Critical Race Theory

The MAA is a professional association of high school and university teachers. It hosts the American Mathematics Competitions for middle and high school students, as well as publishes academic journals. It prides itself as “the world’s largest community of mathematicians, students, and enthusiasts.”

In opposition to President Trump’s recent executive actions to ban the use of Critical Race Theory training in the federal government, the MAA said that critical race theory “is an established social science inquiry which is grounded in decades of scholarship,” further asserting that “it is misguided, at best, to reduce this theory to the race-blaming of white people and to define it and the discussion of systemic racism as a ‘divisive concept.’”

The statement then turned its attention to the inherent bias that allegedly exists in mathematics.

“Although mathematics, science, and higher education develop fact-based theories and practices that should inform policy, they are also political because they exist within a highly politicized system,” says the statement.

“Acknowledging that the United States has serious systemic discrimination has somehow leaped from a political issue to a partisan issue.”

In conclusion, the MMA says that “it is time for all members of our profession to acknowledge that mathematics is created by humans and therefore inherently carries human biases.”

“Until this occurs, our community and our students cannot reach full potential. Reaching this potential in mathematics relies upon the academy and higher education engaging in critical, challenging, sometimes uncomfortable conversations about the detrimental effects of race and racism on our community,” the MMA added. 

Several American university professors signed the document. Among these are Jenna Carpenter, the Dean of Engineering at Campbell University and Victor Piercey, an actuarial sciences professor at Ferris State University.

Keep reading

One Nation, Under Woke

Wokeism aims to remake American constitutionalism root and branch, to transform economics, politics, education, and other institutions and practices. The free and equal individual under the rule of law will be replaced with monolithic voices, united by perceived oppression, who demand a mutating law and politics that reward their grievances with punishments against alleged oppressors and redistributed resources for supposed “victims.”

The first thesis of wokeism is that persons are reducible to their affiliated identity: above all, race or gender. In this view, we understand ourselves solely through these prisms and we apply that understanding to others and to institutions.

The second thesis is that no person, no idea, and no historical account can be understood by independent human reason unfiltered by race, gender, and stories of interlocking oppression, or, as the case may be, by the acts of oppression one has shared in as a member of the dominant group. Everything comes to us and is either understood or projected by us through our racial or gender identity.

The third thesis is that those who have identities that can be grouped under “persons of color” or LGBTQ possess greater authority to speak — owing to the various oppressions they have experienced and the cosmic redress required for justice and liberation —  than oppressor groups in almost every sphere.

America’s national DNA, according to the New York Times’ 1619 Project — wokeism’s anti-American document par excellence — has been encoded with slavery and anti-black racism. Indeed, America left the British Empire for the purposes of retaining the slavery regime, the project’s lead author Nikole Hannah-Jones proclaims (against historical evidence). White males stand as the grand artificer of this oppression, which has been transmitted throughout American history, informing our constitutional documents, politics, and social structures.

Keep reading

Is Critical Race Theory racist?

Critical race theory has been a central focus of news reports, op-eds and social media punditry ever since the Trump administration’s release of a memo condemning the federal funding of any training based on it.

In his debate with Joe Biden, Donald Trump claimed that critical race theory is racist and teaches people that America is a horrible place to which Biden responded weakly by claiming that Trump was the racist. Trump’s previous attacks on critical race theory produced a mass of conflicting claims about what critical race theory is, what precisely has been proscribed by the administration and what its motivations were for doing so.

The memo stated: “[A]ll agencies are directed to begin to identify all contracts or other agency spending related to any training on “critical race theory”, “white privilege” or any other training or propaganda effort that teaches or suggests either (1) that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or (2) that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil.”

The memo also says that “employees across the Executive Branch have been required to attend trainings where they are told that ‘virtually all White people contribute to racism’ or where they are required to say that they ‘benefit from racism’”. The memo describes critical race theory as “propaganda” five times, “divisive” five times, “unAmerican” twice, and “anti-American” once. Critical race theory is declared to be “contrary to all we stand for as Americans.”

This is an odd claim, since racial inequality and attempts to remedy it have been a constant in American history. Consequently, there have been two centuries of scholarship and activism by African-Americans and others in the realm of American race relations.

Keep reading

New York public college offering course called ‘Abolition of Whiteness’

A public college in New York City is offering an undergraduate class called the “Abolition of Whiteness,” adding to what critics say is a growing number of courses aimed at the study of “whiteness” at colleges and universities around the country.

Hunter College — a public school in Manhattan that is part of the City University of New York — is advertising a course in its Fall 2017 catalog that examines “how whiteness – and/or white supremacy and violence – is intertwined with conceptions of gender, race, sexuality, class, body ability, nationality, and age.”

The “Abolition of Whiteness,” taught by Prof. Jennifer Gaboury, can be taken as either a women and gender studies course or a political science class, according to the school’s online course catalog.

Keep reading

20,000 Member Strong Facebook Group Supports Cannon Hinnant’s Alleged Killer

A Facebook group with 20,000 members who support the alleged killer of 5-year-old Cannon Hinnant is going viral both due to its size and the controversial opinions held by group members.

Darius Sessoms, 25, is alleged to have murdered Cannon Hinnant, 5, after shooting him in the head at point blank range when Hinnant rode his bike on Sessoms’ front yard. The incident became an international story as alternative media led the charge, while some mainstream media outlets completely sidestepped a brutal alleged murder that fails to fit their narrative.

The “Justice for Darius Sessoms” Facebook Group still prevails after accumulating a quick five-figure membership number.

The group’s opening statement read: “Darius Sessoms has been accused of a heinous act that he didn’t commit. This is all propaganda from the far-right Trump propaganda machine to make black people look bad.

“We cannot sit idly by while our president plays fast and loose with the laws. That’s why we need to back Darius against these outrageous allegations.”

Keep reading