Fighting Back

In Fighting The Good Fight, I highlighted a group of liberals/progressives and even a couple of socialists who are openly taking on the Woke and Critical Race Theory (CRT) who believe in the conspiracy theory that everything in our society can be explained by race and by the deliberate plotting of white people to maintain their supremacy.  Even as liberals and progressives who dissent from the New Racism of CRT are eliminated from companies, purged from academia, and publicly attacked as racists, no prominent Democratic politician has come to their defense.

Below I bring you three progressives who are speaking out; a private school teacher, the parent of a student, and a law school professor.

Bari Weiss, a progressive purged from the New York Times last year for refusing to "take the knee", recognizing that once you do so you will never be able to stand on your own two feet again, has, like many capable journalists, migrated to Substack where she now publishes a newsletter.  During the past two weeks she's published letters from those subjected to the Woke madness at elite Manhattan private schools.

First up is this from Paul Rossi, a teacher at Grace Church High School.  He knows the risk he is taking by going public.  Some excerpts:

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.  

My school, like so many others, induces students via shame and sophistry to identify primarily with their race before their individual identities are fully formed. Students are pressured to conform their opinions to those broadly associated with their race and gender and to minimize or dismiss individual experiences that don’t match those assumptions. The morally compromised status of “oppressor” is assigned to one group of students based on their immutable characteristics. In the meantime, dependency, resentment and moral superiority are cultivated in students considered “oppressed.”

All of this is done in the name of “equity,” but it is the opposite of fair. In reality, all of this reinforces the worst impulses we have as human beings: our tendency toward tribalism and sectarianism that a truly liberal education is meant to transcend.

Recently, I raised questions about this ideology at a mandatory, whites-only student and faculty Zoom meeting. (Such racially segregated sessions are now commonplace at my school.) It was a bait-and-switch “self-care” seminar that labelled “objectivity,” “individualism,” “fear of open conflict,” and even “a right to comfort” as characteristics of white supremacy. I doubted that these human attributes — many of them virtues reframed as vices — should be racialized in this way.

A few days later, the head of school ordered all high school advisors to read a public reprimand of my conduct out loud to every student in the school.

[Students] report that, in their classes and other discussions, they must never challenge any of the premises of our “antiracist” teachings, which are deeply informed by Critical Race Theory.

One current student paid me a visit a few weeks ago. He tapped faintly on my office door, anxiously looking both ways before entering. He said he had come to offer me words of support for speaking up at the meeting.

I thanked him for his comments, but asked him why he seemed so nervous. He told me he was worried that a particular teacher might notice this visit and “it would mean that I would get in trouble.” He reported to me that this teacher once gave him a lengthy “talking to” for voicing a conservative opinion in class.

More recently Bari published this letter sent by Andrew Guttman to fellow parents of students of the exclusive Brearley School in Manhattan explaining why he had removed his daughter, a Brearley student for seven years, from the school.  Read the whole thing.  Some excerpts:

I object to the view that I should be judged by the color of my skin. I cannot tolerate a school that not only judges my daughter by the color of her skin, but encourages and instructs her to prejudge others by theirs. By viewing every element of education, every aspect of history, and every facet of society through the lens of skin color and race, we are desecrating the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and utterly violating the movement for which such civil rights leaders believed, fought, and died. 

I object to mandatory anti-racism training for parents, especially when presented by the rent-seeking charlatans of Pollyanna. These sessions, in both their content and delivery, are so sophomoric and simplistic, so unsophisticated and inane, that I would be embarrassed if they were taught to Brearley kindergarteners. They are an insult to parents and unbecoming of any educational institution, let alone one of Brearley's caliber. 

If the administration was genuinely serious about “diversity,” it would not insist on the indoctrination of its students, and their families, to a single mindset, most reminiscent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

We have today in our country, from both political parties, and at all levels of government, the most unwise and unvirtuous leaders in our nation’s history. Schools like Brearley are supposed to be the training grounds for those leaders. Our nation will not survive a generation of leadership even more poorly educated than we have now, nor will we survive a generation of students taught to hate its own country and despise its history. 

Lastly, I object, with as strong a sentiment as possible, that Brearley has begun to teach what to think, instead of how to think. I object that the school is now fostering an environment where our daughters, and our daughters’ teachers, are afraid to speak their minds in class for fear of “consequences.”

For the sake of our community, our city, our country and most of all, our children, silence is no longer an option.  

We end with this article from Georgetown Law Professor, Lama Abu Odeh.   Two adjunct law school professors were forced to resign because one was caught on Zoom saying “I hate to say this… I ended up having this, you know, angst every semester that a lot of my lower ones are blacks. Happens almost every semester" (no one dared to inquire as to whether her statement was factually accurate), and the other did not immediately denounce her, despite a lack of any evidence either had ever acted in a discriminatory manner regarding black students or, for that matter, any students.  When two progressive faculty members raised objections to a faculty letter ritually denouncing the professors (a letter Odeh declined to sign) they were met by silence from the other faculty.  Some excerpts:

The silence to my mind is telling. It speaks of the lack of resources within progressive thinking that could be drawn upon to resist the trend that has bedeviled American academia over the past few years. 

Progressive liberals are blind to the fact that there is a regime take-over apace everywhere in academic institutions. A new ruling elite is taking over academic institutions by using its “minority status” to exercise a “soft” coup and is appealing to the minoritarianism of progressive ideology to legitimize its coup—or, if you like, to “manufacture consent.” I will call the adherents of this ideology the “progressoriat.”

The only acceptable response when confronted by any aspect of the ideology that has facilitated this coup is to enthusiastically endorse it—to celebrate it.  

The new elite taking over academic institutions has at its disposal an arsenal of tools to perpetuate its rule. It not only postures as representative of others in the way communists did—the “intelligentsia” representing the worker or the peasant in the latter’s case and representing victim groups in the former’s. The new elite can also represent itself as victims, an opportunity even communists would have baulked at.

The ranks of this new ruling class are refreshed by immigrant academics who come to understand themselves in the way progressivism understands them: as minorities who can also act victim-like if they want—a precious endowment in the cultural academic market.(1)

No hesitation or nuance is allowed: nothing but unequivocal loyalty oaths. The progressoriat can only repeat, “I believe in the cause. I believe. I believe. Believe me I believe.”

If this echoes a Maoist take-over, that’s because it is. It passes the sniff test.(2)

UPDATE:  Recently came across this passage from Jonathan Haidt, a card-carrying liberal Democrat and professor, who wrote about the cult-like nature of all this back in 2017:

Today’s identity politics . . . teaches the exact opposite of what we think a liberal arts education should be. When I was at Yale in the 1980s, I was given so many tools for understanding the world. By the time I graduated, I could think about things as a utilitarian or as a Kantian, as a Freudian or a behaviorist, as a computer scientist or as a humanist. I was given many lenses to apply to any given question or problem.

But what do we do now? Many students are given just one lens—power. Here’s your lens, kid. Look at everything through this lens. Everything is about power. Every situation is analyzed in terms of the bad people acting to preserve their power and privilege over the good people. This is not an education. This is induction into a cult. It’s a fundamentalist religion. It’s a paranoid worldview that separates people from each other and sends them down the road to alienation, anxiety and intellectual impotence. . . .

------------------------------------------------------------------------

(1)  This reminds me of the 2018 incident at Smith College when a black student alleged racist behavior by a cafeteria worker and security guard leading to their dismissal and public humiliation and triggering a cascade of actions by the college administration that eventually triggered the resignation and public activism of Jodi Shaw, an administrator harassed because of her refusal to bow to the Woke (you can read more about Jodi in the Fighting The Good Fight post). 

Though an investigation concluded there was no racism involved in the incident, it was too late for the employees and did not deter the college administration from taking actions as though the incident was racist.

Oumou Kanoute, the student who made the accusation, was from a family of immigrants from Mali.  She had received a scholarship to attend a prestigious private school in Connecticut and a full scholarship to attend Smith.  According to her LinkedIn page she is currently working as a Research Assistant Intern at the Columbia School of Social Work at a lab that "focuses on innovative ways to conceptualize, and measure racism". 

In other words, we have someone whose family voluntarily came to America because it offered them opportunities they could not find elsewhere, and Kanoute was privileged to attend elite institutions for free where she was indoctrinated to believe she was oppressed and discriminated against and taught to interpret every action by white people as driven by racism.  Shame on these institutions!

This, in turn, reminds me of the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 and of the perpetrators, the Tsarnaev brothers, Muslims who emigrated from Russia and settled in Cambridge where they attended and graduated from the public schools.  There was a shocked reaction from Cambridgians when the Tsarnaev's were identified as the culprits because it was believed being educated in Cambridge school they would not have encountered prejudice and learned tolerance.  Having worked in Cambridge for over a decade and being familiar with the schools it did not surprise me.  American history in Cambridge is taught as "black arm-band" history, a sordid tale of racism, colonialism and exploitation.  What contempt the Tsarnaevs must have developed for our country as they listened to this litany of woe and evil!

We are acculturating our young people to hate their country and each other.  This will not end well.

(2) Today's South China Morning Post carried this headline, "Chinese universities should produce inquisitive thinkers who are totally loyal to the Communist Party, Xi Jinping says".  I believe Prof Odeh would say we are on the same track.

And, according to the Daily Mail, "China launches app for citizens to report anyone who has 'mistaken opinions' or 'denies the excellence of socialist culture'".  The app aims to crack down on "historical nihilists".  As the title of this series says, welcome to your future!