Private Schools Go Full Racist, a Response
A recent NEWS article in the Times claims to document the fight surrounding critical race theory while advocating for its proponents
THE NEW YORK TIMES had a now-infamous recording of an internal staff meeting leaked a few years ago that featured an editor advocating that the paper’s coverage should tell its stories filtered through the lens of race.
As of Sunday, the Times continues that propaganda effort with the latest in subliminal indoctrination efforts. This time, the paper’s attempt comes in the form of a front-page story that purports to speak about the differing views of the parents of students in some of the nation’s most exclusive private schools.
But it should be noted that, while the story tells of the clash, it accepts activists’ definition of critical race theory and their take on its outcomes.
Many Substack writers have taken on the topic of Critical Race Theory schools, including — and most famously — former Times reporter Bari Weiss. But I still think it is worth looking at this latest Times article to demonstrate how the publication conceals the truth about CRT while simultaneously ensuring it stays on “the right side of history” by accepting the activist definition of the racist teaching method.
The article opens with a story about an elite private school in New York City:
Several years back Grace Church School, an elite private school in Manhattan, embraced an antiracist mission and sought to have students and teachers wrestle with whiteness, racial privilege and bias.
Emphasis mine. First, the fact that the term “whiteness,” and the article does not put it in quotation marks, should ring some alarms. The term quite literally separates a group of people and several cultures into a category that gets treated like a disease that must be coped with and eradicated. This would rightly be the subject of castigation in any other instance, and this time should be no different.
Teachers and students were periodically separated into groups by race, gender and ethnicity. In February 2021, Paul Rossi, a math teacher, and what the school called his “white-identifying” group, met with a white consultant, who displayed a slide that named supposed characteristics of white supremacy. These included individualism, worship of the written word and objectivity.
Tell me: In what world is segregation a virtue? I would like to think they didn’t put Mr. Rossi’s “white-identifying group” in the basement, next to the boiler, but I cannot be sure. Perhaps, they will claim that the groups were placed into separate but equal facilities.
I would deal with the claim that “objectivity” is a white supremacist trait — a proposition being reinforced by activists who wish “reimagine” how math is taught — but the article continues to Mr. Rossi’s reaction to that very absurd premise:
Mr. Rossi said he felt a twist in his stomach. “Objectivity?” he told the consultant, according to a transcript. “Human attributes are being reduced to racial traits.”
As you look at this list, the consultant asked, are you having “white feelings”?
“What,” Mr. Rossi asked, “makes a feeling ‘white’?”
Mr. Rossi’s question does not get an answer, and I cannot begin to fathom one. More despicable, though, is the intonation that one can infer from the question. Asking someone who is rightly outraged at the purportedly accepted form of racism being hurled at them if they are having “white feelings” leaves one to imagine the image of a child therapist asking a 5-year-old to describe the bad feelings he experiences when he is made to eat his broccoli.
Some of the high school students then echoed his objections. “I’m so exhausted with being reduced to my race,” a girl said. “The first step of antiracism is to racialize every single dimension of my identity.” Another girl added: “Fighting indoctrination with indoctrination can be dangerous.”
This should be the crux of the story. The students are entirely correct. Only the Times and their activist teachers must make them hate themselves to accomplish some kind of utopian future.
This modest revolt proved fateful. A school official reprimanded Mr. Rossi, accusing him of “creating a neurological imbalance” in students, according to a recording of the conversation. A few days later the head of school wrote a statement and directed teachers to read it aloud in classes.
“When someone breaches our professional norms,” the statement read in part, “the response includes a warning in their permanent file that a further incident of unprofessional conduct could result in dismissal.”
“A neurological imbalance?” Now, I “trust the science,” but I fail to see how Mr. Rossi’s defensive questions could possibly change the amount of serotonin or dopamine produced in young students’ bodies. As this poor teacher eventually discovered, though, to rely on a cliche, resistance is futile. If any other teacher dared to pull the children out antiracist Matrix, the school made clear that they will be hunted down and terminated. Their individuality must become part of the collective.
This is another dispatch from America’s cultural conflicts over schools, this time from a rarefied bubble. Elite private schools from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., from Boston to Columbus, Ohio, have embraced a mission to end racism by challenging white privilege. A sizable group of parents and teachers say the schools have taken it too far — and enforced suffocating and destructive groupthink on students.
Now, it is important to notice that the writer choose to state that the elite schools pushing this racist ideology “have embraced a mission to end racism by challenging white privilege.” In his mind, the “mission” is obvious, and the schools have embraced it. Contrast this with parental opponents who nearly “say” the schools have taken it too far. This alone could be forgivable, but more of this occurs.
[…] many private school administrators have tried to reimagine their schools as antiracist institutions, which means, loosely, a school that is actively opposed to any manifestation of racism.
This is wordplay. Here, the author accepts the false definition of antiracism put forward by its creators and supporters. Describing antiracist idealogy as simply being “against racism” is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Antiracism is a belief that claims any disparity of outcome is the result of bias, racism, and, most importantly to proponents, white supremacy. It comes from the school of critical race theory, which advocates largely the same. However, “critical theory” stems from Marxism. Its goal is to tear down, criticize, and deconstruct everything. The difference between this and any regular analysis of something, though, is that, in return, they instill their belief system in place of the rubble they have created. The premise of critical theory has been carried down by followers of Marx, who used the thinking project as a lynchpin in what would be called “cultural marxism.”
Furthermore, the idea that any of this fights racism is pathetic. Propagating racism to fight racism is as ridiculous as the premise that antifascists, through violence, intimidation, and a demand that people live by their code, are fighting authoritarian Nazis.
Kindergarten students at Riverdale Country School in the Bronx are taught to identify their skin color by mixing paint colors. The lower school chief in an email last year instructed parents to avoid talk of colorblindness and “acknowledge racial differences.”
Nothing is more regressive than trying to eliminate “colorblindness.” It is a mystery why activists wish to do this. One can assume that the goal is full-on race essentialism. The fact that, as a society, we have gone from “judge me not for the color of my skin” to the immutable characteristic of race is the most important thing.
Private school leaders, along with diversity consultants, say these approaches reflect current research about confronting racism and stamping out privilege.
Some credit for the author is due here for using the word “say” — but not much, as it simply fits the context of the sentence. Also, you can most certainly believe that these “diversity consultants” (see: snake oil salesman) are not using any serious academic research.
Such aspersions can be cast upon these fields after the “Sokal Squared Scandal” came to light a few years ago. Throughout 2017 and 2018, Philosophers Peter Boghossian, James A. Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose submitted fake papers to academic journals in cultural, queer, race, gender, fat, and sexuality studies to see if they would make it through the review process and get published. Their experiment was a success, and most made it through, a result that elicited just the sort of reaction you think it would from academic circles.
“There’s always the same resistance — ‘Oh my God, you’re going too far,’” said Martha Haakmat, a Black diversity consultant who serves on the board of Brearley. “We just want to teach kids about the systems that create inequity in society and empower them rather than reinforcing systems of oppression.”
To accept that the activists are really fighting racism, then, following the previous statement, one would have to accept the CRT mainstay that institutions in the freest, most open society to ever exist were racist.
Studies show that very young children, she said, are aware of skin color. Better to address it — “Yes, that woman has Black skin. What do you think of that?” — than to let children view white skin as the baseline.
Who is viewing white skin as a “baseline?” To humor this insanity for a moment, to believe this white skin would have to be one individual hue to be a baseline. But that is not the case. There are many hues of white skin as there are in other skin colors. Italians have a more “olive” tone. The Irish are stereotypically paler. And, according to the Times' own reporting, most Hispanics, who are seen as brown-skinned people, consider themselves to be white.
Critics, a mixed lot of parents and teachers, argue that aspects of the new curriculums edge toward recreating the racially segregated spaces of an earlier age. They say the insistent emphasis on skin color and race is reductive and some teenagers learn to adopt the language of antiracism and wield it against peers.
Could anyone possibly be surprised that race essentialism and the otherizing of a group of people have caused a divide? This may be why a Gallup poll recently showed that race relations between blacks and whites have been on a steady decline over the past few years.
Bion Bartning, who notes that his heritage is a mix of Jewish, Mexican and Yaqui tribe, pulled his children out of Riverdale and created a foundation to argue against this sort of antiracist education. “The insistence on teaching race consciousness is a fundamental shift into a sort of tribalism,” he said.
Withdrawing your child from schools that embrace this indoctrination is the correct thing to do. It is also especially telling that the parent featured in this paragraph is presumably not considered white.
I will end my analysis of the article there, but there is plenty more. The moral of the story is that the schools’ psychological beatings on your children will continue into society improves. The problem is: WHO defines what an improved society is?
According to the Times, “tuition at many of New York’s private schools hovers between $53,000 and $58,000, the most expensive tab in the nation.” That is a hefty pricetag to have your child brainwashed into hating himself. The benefit of such an education is nullified by the cheapening of the education that the facility claims to offer in the first place.
But make no mistake: the battle over the indoctrination in our nation’s primary schools will be the defining moment of our culture over the next several years. People, especially conservatives, looked the other way while this ideology infested our college campuses. Now that the graduates of those institutions are in charge of the pre-collegiate realm, they will attempt to supersize their effect on society. The battle may be difficult in public schools, but no one should have to pay for CRT.
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