The Wacky Woke Pandemic
The resegregation, victimization and historical manipulation of America is advancing.
The radical rambling of the woke crowd – those who want to restructure society by dividing America according race – is advancing, and things are getting truly bizarre.
Seattle’s k-12 Math Ethnic Studies Framework teaches that “Western” math is a means of “power and oppression,” and is used to “disenfranchise people and communities of color.” At the same time, a school district in Maryland has just announced that it is planning to adopt policies that push “anti-racist thinking” in preschool. So instead of fingerpainting, three year-olds can now be treated to a lecture on Hegelian Dialectics or an analysis of Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be An Antiracist.
Not surprisingly, California just might be ground zero for weirdness. The art department of the San Francisco School District has decided that acronyms are “a symptom of white supremacy.” It was nonsensically explained that acronyms often tend to alienate those who may not speak English. Additionally, the school board in San Francisco has decided to rename 44 public schools. Abe Lincoln, Paul Revere, Thomas Edison, Daniel Webster, Francis Scott Key, Dianne Feinstein, et al. have been accused of committing anti-woke actions, and are gone. Malcolm X gets a pass, however. The elementary school bearing his name will not undergo a change. Why would a one-time drug dealer, thief, and pimp be exempted? Because the school board said that he should be “judged by the entirety of his life.” The same board never bothered to explain why Abe Lincoln doesn’t get judged the same way. But being fair, logical, or consistent is hardly a requisite for being woke.
Additionally, as pointed out by The Daily Caller’s Michael Ginsberg, there were many factual errors that informed the San Francisco school board decisions. For example, Dianne Feinstein was canceled because the board alleged that in 1977 she “was responsible for evicting “a whole Pilipino neighboorhood , and the police brutaility , allowed police dogs to atack filipino veteran elders.” Fact is that Feinstein did not become mayor of the city until 1978, and there is no way she could have had sway in the eviction. Feinstein also was eliminated because in 1984, after a protestor removed a Confederate flag that was part of a Civic Center display, she replaced it. She did so because the flag had been there since 1964 as part of an exhibition intended to symbolize the various stages of American history, not as support for the Confederate States.
Another fallacy is at work in the canceling of Thomas Edison. Topsy the elephant was “a well-loved circus elephant during that time,” and the school board blamed the iconic inventor for euthanizing the animal. The brute, you see, was put down after killing three men over a three-month period. All Edison did was demonstrate that electrocution via direct current was a more humane way of killing than hanging. As such, he had no involvement in Topsy’s ultimate demise.
Moving down the coast to Silicon Valley, third-graders are forced to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities, then rank themselves according to their “power and privilege,” according to Discovery Institute scholar Christopher Rufo. After getting standard issue indoctrination about race, class and sexual privilege, students at Meyerholz Elementary School, part of the Cupertino Union School District, are then asked to create an “identity map,” where they “list their race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, gender and age. Genders listed included female, male, nonbinary, cisgender, transgender.” The eight year-olds then had to circle the identities “that hold power and privilege” on their maps. All this does is cause friction between kids, not to mention foster feelings of victimization for those not deemed privileged.
Further down the coast, Los Angeles schools are hardly a beacon of sanity. The school district most recently went all in for “Black Lives Matter Week,” and let teachers know how they could advance the cause. While the district-approved lessons were primarily about race, Wednesday’s entry veered off into sex with lessons on trans- and queer-affirming, and affirming-acceptable language, such as “partner, sibling, folx (sic), etc. “He and she, wife and husband” are taboo for the wokesters.
The United Teachers of Los Angeles is certainly doing its share to spread the word. The Marxist led teachers union featured a web page, “40+ Books for AntiRacist Teachers – White Fragiles Beware!” The list “was inspired by a recent teacher book list (there are so many), that were supposed to ‘change your life.’ But that sh-t was whiter than the Andy Griffith show.”
Classy.
Lastly, it was revealed in December that the San Diego Unified School District had hired Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, two race hustlers, as “trainers” to jam their racial separatist agenda down the throats of the city’s public school teachers. As reported by Christopher Rufo in City Journal, “The training begins with a ‘land acknowledgement,’ in which the teachers are asked to accept that they are colonizers living on stolen Native American land. Then they are told they will experience ‘guilt, anger, apathy, closed-mindedness’ because of their ‘white fragility.’” And at another training session. Bettina Love, a race-obsessed college professor, claimed that American schools are guilty of the “spirit murdering of Black children.”
Interestingly, it’s not only the government schools that are wreaking havoc via indoctrination, resegregation and victimization; some very tony private schools have begun to join the woke revolution. More on that, soon.
* * *
Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues. The views presented here are strictly his own.