Tag: race

I Refuse to Stand By While My Students Are Indoctrinated

I am a teacher at Grace Church High School in Manhattan. Ten years ago, I changed careers when I discovered how rewarding it is to help young people explore the truth and beauty of mathematics. I love my work.

As a teacher, my first obligation is to my students. But right now, my school is asking me to embrace “antiracism” training and pedagogy that I believe is deeply harmful to them and to any person who seeks to nurture the virtues of curiosity, empathy and understanding.   

“Antiracist” training sounds righteous, but it is the opposite of truth in advertising. It requires teachers like myself to treat students differently on the basis of race. Furthermore, in order to maintain a united front for our students, teachers at Grace are directed to confine our doubts about this pedagogical framework to conversations with an in-house “Office of Community Engagement” for whom every significant objection leads to a foregone conclusion. Any doubting students are likewise “challenged” to reframe their views to conform to this orthodoxy. 

I know that by attaching my name to this I’m risking not only my current job but my career as an educator, since most schools, both public and private, are now captive to this backward ideology. But witnessing the harmful impact it has on children, I can’t stay silent. 

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Biden’s Infrastructure Bill Includes Making ‘Diverse’ Neighborhoods Across America Through Zoning Laws

The focus of  President Joe Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure bill is allegedly to address aging infrastructure across the country, but the massive bill covers a vast amount of other spending, including money for “diversifying” neighborhoods.

This portion of Biden’s American Jobs Plan would change zoning laws to end single family home neighborhoods and allow for multiple unit “affordable” or low-income rental housing.

According to the White House Fact Sheet, the housing effort is “an innovative new approach to eliminate state and local exclusionary zoning laws, which drive up the cost of construction and keep families from moving to neighborhoods with more opportunities for them and their kids”:

“For decades, exclusionary zoning laws — like minimum lot sizes, mandatory parking requirements, and prohibitions on multifamily housing — have inflated housing and construction costs and locked families out of areas with more opportunities,” the fact sheet states. “President Biden is calling on Congress to enact an innovative, new competitive grant program that awards flexible and attractive funding to jurisdictions that take concrete steps to eliminate such needless barriers to producing affordable housing.”

In contrast to former President Donald Trump’s Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Opportunity Zones program that partnered the federal government with private sector investors to create less rental housing and increase home ownership, Biden’s plan uses tax breaks for state and local governments, the Fact Sheet states:

“[Biden] is calling on Congress to pass the innovative, bipartisan Neighborhood Homes Investment Act (NHIA). Offering $20 billion worth of NHIA tax credits over the next five years will result in approximately 500,000 homes built or rehabilitated, creating a pathway for more families to buy a home and start building wealth.”

Reuters reported on the shift from free markets to government control:

President Joe Biden is seeking to ease a national affordable housing shortage by pushing local governments to allow apartment buildings in neighborhoods that are currently restricted to single-family homes.

The $5 billion plan could inject the White House into a debate pitting older homeowners against younger workers seeking to gain a foothold in the most expensive U.S. cities, where many families spend a third or more of their income on housing.

The proposal, which would provide financial incentives to local governments that change zoning laws restricting many neighborhoods to single-family homes, is an example of the sort of broad social policy changes Democrats are including in Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure bill.

Biden’s plan even designates which workers will benefit from this housing project — “put union building trade workers to work upgrading homes and businesses to save families money,” the Fact Sheet states.

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White professor files racial discrimination lawsuit, says two black colleagues paid far more

Alleges college’s racial pay discrimination has caused him ‘permanent and irreparable harm’

A white professor is alleging racial discrimination after discovering that two of his black colleagues’ salaries significantly outmatch his own.

William Lavell, a professor at the New Jersey-based Camden County College, discovered a salary disparity between himself and two black colleagues, Lawrence Chatman and Melvin Roberts, after filing a public records act request, his lawsuit states.

Chatman and Roberts, both engineering professors, make at least $45,000 more than Lavell, despite both having fewer professional degrees than Lavell, the lawsuit alleges.

“Through his Open Public Records Act request, Plaintiff Lavell discovered stark racial disparities in salary between himself and his similarly situated, non-Caucasian counterparts,” it states.

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Boston hospital set to offer ‘preferential care based on race’

A Boston hospital says it will offer “preferential care based on race” and “race-explicit interventions” in an attempt to engage in an “antiracist agenda for medicine” based on critical race theory.

A Boston Review article titled “An Antiracist Agenda for Medicine” lays out a plan from Brigham and Women’s Hospital that implements a “reparations framework” for distributing medical resources in order to “comprehensively confront structural racism.”

“Together with a coalition of fellow practitioners and hospital leaders, we have developed what we hope will be a replicable pilot program for direct redress of many racial health care inequities,” Harvard Medical School instructors Bram Wispelwey and Michelle Morse wrote in the article.

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Target sells Woke Prayer Book: “Dear God, Please help me to hate White people.”

A prayer book called “A Rhythm of Prayer: A Collection of Meditations for Renewal,” is a number one bestseller on Amazon in the category “meditation”.

One prayer, called “Prayer of a Weary Black Woman,” by Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes, a theology professor at Mercer University, starts:

“Dear God, Please help me to hate White people. Or at least to want to hate them… I want to stop caring about their misguided, racist souls, to stop believing that they can be better, that they can stop being racist.”

The “prayer” then describes the type of White person they want to hate— not the actual blatantly racist ones, but the “wolves in sheep’s clothing” who “don’t see color”, are friendly and accepting on the surface.

“Lord, if it be your will, harden my heart. Stop me from striving to see the best in people. Stop me from being hopeful that White people can do and be better. Let me imagine them instead as white-hooded robes standing in front of burning crosses. Let me see them as hopelessly unrepentant, reprobate bigots who have blasphemed the Holy Spirit and who need to be handed over to the evil one.”

“Grant me a Get Out of Judgment Free Card if I make White people the exception to your commandment to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.”

This is a sick, insane, religious cult of hateful people. But institutions like churches, schools, and corporations are pushing this blatant racism mainstream.

The book is also available at Target— a store which banned a book that gave voice to transgender people who regretted their decisions to transition.

But hatred of white people is perfectly acceptable.

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CDC Deems Racism a ‘Serious’ Public Health Threat

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) deemed racism a “serious” public health threat, according to an entry published on the agency’s website.

In an entry titled “Racism is a Serious Threat to the Public’s Health,” the agency asserts racism is intricately intertwined with public health matters:

A growing body of research shows that centuries of racism in this country has had a profound and negative impact on communities of color. The impact is pervasive and deeply embedded in our society—affecting where one lives, learns, works, worships and plays and creating inequities in access to a range of social and economic benefits—such as housing, education, wealth, and employment. These conditions—often referred to as social determinants of health—are key drivers of health inequities within communities of color, placing those within these populations at greater risk for poor health outcomes.

The CDC cites data suggesting racial and ethnic minority groups experience higher rates of health conditions, including hypertension, diabetes, and heart disease “when compared to their White counterparts.”

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Black Lives Matter Co-Founder Buys $1.4 Million Home in Area With Just 1.6% Black Population

Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors has chosen to live in one of the whitest areas of California after purchasing a $1.4 million dollar home in an area that has a black population of just 1.6 per cent.

A report by real estate website Dirt reveals that Khan-Cullors, who started the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag in 2013 in response to George Zimmerman’s acquittal, has purchased a “secluded mini-compound tucked into L.A.’s rustic and semi-remote Topanga Canyon.”

“A winding 15 minute drive from The Commons at Calabasas and a slightly longer and somewhat less serpentine drive from Malibu’s Getty Villa, the pint-sized compound spans about one-quarter of an acre. The property’s not-quite 2,400 square feet is divided between the a three-bedroom and two-bath main house and a separate one-bed/one-bath apartment capable of hosting guests long term with a private entry and a living room with kitchenette,” writes Mark David.

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Eyeroll: “White supremacy is the root of all race-related violence in the US”

Amid the disturbing rise in attacks on Asian Americans since March 2020 is a troubling category of these assaults: Black people are also attacking Asian Americans.

White people are the main perpetrators of anti-Asian racism. But in February 2021, a Black person pushed an elderly Asian man to the ground in San Francisco; the man later died from his injuries. In another video, from New York City on March 29, 2021, a Black person pushes and beats an Asian American woman on the sidewalk in front of a doorway while onlookers observe the attack, then close their door on the woman without intervening or providing aid.

As the current president of the Association for Asian American Studies and as an ethnic studies and critical race studies professor who specializes in Asian American culture, I wanted to address the climate of anti-Asian racism I was seeing at the start of the pandemic. So in April 2020, I created a PowerPoint slide deck about anti-Asian racism that my employer, the University of Colorado Boulder, turned into a website. That led to approximately 50 interviews, workshops, talks and panel presentations that I’ve done on anti-Asian racism, specifically in the time of COVID-19.

The point I’ve made through all of those experiences is that anti-Asian racism has the same source as anti-Black racism: white supremacy. So when a Black person attacks an Asian person, the encounter is fueled perhaps by racism, but very specifically by white supremacy. White supremacy does not require a white person to perpetuate it.

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