Thursday, February 25, 2021



New York School Official Says She Was Fired For Not Giving 'Wakanda' Salute

A Bronx school superintendent says she was fired as a result of Chancellor Richard Carranza’s “equity” agenda that advanced people of color over whites. Karen Ames is suing the New York schools for $150 million because she says she was targeted by Carranza’s “Disrupt and Dismantle” campaign to oust or marginalize longtime employees.

“The agenda of Chancellor Carranza and his senior leadership team was euphemistically touted as an ‘equity platform’ but in reality, it was a platform used to create gender, age, racial and ethnic divisions in the NYC School system,” she contends in her lawsuit.

New York Post:

Ames was grilled about her “ethnic background,” chastised by a colleague at a training session when she shared her grandparents’ experience during the Holocaust in Poland, and “admonished” when she declined requests at superintendents meetings to take part in the comic book movie-inspired “Wakanda Forever” salute to “black power,” she charges in the legal filing.

Almost too funny to be real, but Ames isn’t laughing.

Ames was praised by Carranza in a visit to her Bronx school. He praised her for raising math scores at troubled schools.

But instead of celebrating Ames’ work, Cheryl Watson-Harris, Carranza’s top deputy — who left last year to become schools chief in DeKalb County, Ga. — interrogated Ames during a chauffeured car ride about her DOE history, her family, residency and “improperly inquired” about her ethnicity, she claims.

I guess the non-discrimination laws are only for little people.

At an implicit-bias workshop where superintendents were asked to tell their personal stories, Amestalked about her grandparents’ loss of two children during the Holocaust — only to have colleague Rasheda Amon tell her, “you better check yourself,” the lawsuit alleges.

“That is not about being Jewish! It’s about black and brown boys of color only,” court papers quote Amon as scolding.

Radical educators are banking on parents either agreeing with them or being too busy to pay much attention to what they’re filling their kids’ heads with for 8 hours a day.

The situation for Ames came to a head in August 2018 when she was summoned to the Department of Education headquarters. There, she was handed a termination letter by Watson-Harris who told her the department was “was moving in a new direction.”

Colleagues were prohibited from communicating with her, and Watson-Harris ordered staff to “eradicate” any reference to Ames, down to the district’s purple color scheme she had designed, she charges.

When the single mom pleaded to keep her employment, retirement benefits and health insurance, the DOE sent her to a Brooklyn “rubber room” with nothing to do.

A month later, Ames was given a choice: take a demotion or be removed from the payroll in 24 hours. She took the demotion.

“This case highlights that those in power often put their own agendas before the well-being of our community. It’s a terrible example for our children to be taught to judge people on anything other than merit,” her attorney Israel Goldberg said.

I suppose Chancellor Carranza’s “disrupt and dismantle” program means disrupting innocent people’s lives and dismantling fairness.

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Cornell Offers a Racially Segregated Rock Climbing Course, Then Scrubs Its Website to Hide Their Racism

Cornell University is very woke. They’re so woke that they offered a rock climbing course for BIPOC students only. BIPOC, for those of you unwoke, stands for black, Indigenous, and people of color — a catchall for everyone oppressed by white people.

The course ain’t cheap. Campus Reform reports that the school charges “$1,890—including the standard cost of a one-credit course, $1,575, and an additional mandatory ‘course fee’ of $315.”

It’s expensive to get woke at Cornell.

Campus Reform confronted school authorities about the blatantly racist course description, which led to the school scrubbing its website to change the course requirements.

If you’re going to be a racist, you should own it.

According to the new description, posted on Cornell’s website, the class will provide a “high degree of individual attention” and a “supportive space” where students will discuss “BIPOC individuals and groups in rock climbing.” The new description states that the class is now “open to all” students who are “interested in learning rock climbing with this special focus.”

The explanation given by the school is comical.

When asked for comment, John Carberry, Cornell’s Senior Director of Media Relations and News, issued a statement to Campus Reform claiming that “all Cornell students” are “welcome” to enroll in the course, contradicting the original course description.

Carberry insisted that the course’s original description reflected an “intentional focus” on “outreach and inclusion,” but that there was “never” any intention to exclude students that don’t identify as BIPOC.

“All Cornell students are welcome to enroll in this course. While the original description of the course represented an intentional focus on outreach and inclusion, there was never an intent to exclude non-minority students. The description of the course has been adjusted accordingly,” Carberry said.

So a course titled “BIPOC Rock Climbing” was so named as “an intentional focus on outreach and inclusion.” I call bullcrap on that. The title and course description were exclusionary and no amount of pussy-footing double-talk will change it.

This kind of stealth brainwashing makes a mockery of academic freedom. Besides, restricting admission based on race is illegal, according to New York state law.

According to the New York State Attorney General’s website, “Students in New York schools are protected by federal, state, and local laws that prevent discrimination on the basis of race, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, religion, disability, and other categories.”

Additionally, the New York Human Rights Law “makes it illegal” for “non-sectarian educational institutions” to “deny their services to students on the basis of race, color, religion, disability, national origin, sexual orientation, military status, sex, age or marital status.”

I guess the BIPOC crowd believes the law doesn’t apply to them.

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Racists Masquerading as Educators

Mark Federman, principal of East Side Community High School in New York City, is a man on a rather dubious mission. In a burst of “wokeness,” Federman sent white parents of students in grades 6-12 a handout asking them to “reflect” on their “whiteness.” It was accompanied by a color-coordinated graph of “8 White Identities,” ranging from a red zone on the left titled “White Supremacist” to a green zone on the far right labeled “White Abolitionist.”

This screed was authored by Barnor Hesse, a Northwestern University professor of African American studies, political science, and sociology. Hesse also teaches a course called “Unsettling Whiteness,” and the professor makes it clear the content of one’s character takes a distant back seat to the color of one’s skin — if it matters at all. “There is a regime of whiteness, and there are action-oriented white identities,” he insists in a statement above the graph. “People who identify with whiteness are one of these. It’s about time we build an ethnography of whiteness, since white people have been the ones writing about and governing Others.”

The graph, developed by the Slow Factory Foundation, a group that bills itself as “anti-racist” and “climate-positive,” contains the following descriptions:

White Supremacist: Clearly marked white society that preserves name and values white superiority

White Voyeurism: Wouldn’t challenge a white supremacist; desires non-whiteness because it’s interesting, pleasurable; seeks to control the consumption and appropriation of non-whiteness; fascination with culture (ex: consuming Black culture without the burden of Blackness)

White Privilege: May critique supremacy, but a deep investment in question of fairness/equality under the normalization of white and the white rule; sworn goal of “diversity”

White Benefit: Sympathetic to a set of issues but only privately; won’t speak/act in solidarity because benefitting through whiteness in public (some POC in this category as well)

White Confessional: Some exposure of whiteness takes place, but as a way of being accountable to POC after; seek validation from POC

White Critical: Take on board critiques of whiteness and invest in exposing/marking white regime; refuses to be complicit with regime; whiteness speaking back to whiteness

White Traitor: Actively refuses complicity; names what’s going on; intention is to subvert white authority and tell the truth at whatever cost; need them to dismantle institutions
White Abolitionist: Changing institutions, dismantling whiteness, and not allowing whiteness to reassert itself

A New York City Department of Education official told the New York Post that it was parents who initially shared the material with school staff, and that Federman then sent it to every parent “as part of a series of materials meant for reflection” and as “food for thought.”

A Department of Education (DOE) official doubled down on this absurd assessment. “Anti-racism and the celebration of diversity is at the core of our work on behalf of the young people of New York City, and the East Side Community School’s students, parents and staff partner together to advance equity in their community,” the official insisted. “The document in question was shared with the school by parents as a part of ongoing anti-racist work in the school community and is one of many resources the schools utilizes.”

The official also illuminated the blowback precipitated by the handout. “Our staff are now being targeted with vile racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic slurs and degrading language from people outside of their school,” the official added, “and nothing justifies the abuse directed at our educators.”

None of this vile nonsense should surprise anyone. NYC Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza has made it clear that a major part of his “education” agenda is aimed at eliminating a “white-supremacy culture” among school administrators.

Toward that end, Carranza held “white supremacy culture training” sessions that included the disparagement of concepts such as “individualism,” “objectivity,” and “worship of the written word.” The basis of this program is “Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change Groups,” authored by Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun. It lists more than a dozen hallmarks of “white-supremacy culture” school administrators are expected to avoid.

Christopher Rufo, who did a masterful job exposing the federal government’s equally corrosive training sessions on white privilege and Critical Race Theory — to the point where former President Donald Trump issued an executive order to end them — was the person who exposed this effort as well. He offered up a succinct take on what’s going on: “This is the new language of public education.”

Actually, this is the language of racist indoctrination and the attempted intimidation of anyone who dares to defy a progressive ideology increasingly exposed as bankrupt.

A concerned NYC parent summed up this orchestrated descent into de facto apartheid. “I grew up partly in New York on the Upper West Side and when I was young, you’d see all these kids playing in the yard at recess — black, white, Hispanic, Asian, whatever — and they all got along great,” he writes. “Now you have the schools teaching white kids they should feel guilty and that black kids should resent them.”

How bad has it gotten? The author of the op-ed wished to remain anonymous — because he was afraid school principals and teachers might retaliate against his children if he went public.

Thus, genuine diversity, as in the ability to challenge contemptible race-baiting drivel, remains beyond the boundaries of “acceptable” discourse. Instead, Americans are faced with a Cancel Culture where one’s choices are silent acquiescence or personal ruination.

All of this is by design. While Americans are force-fed lectures about race, the most divisive and corrosive aspect of American society — as in an elitist class intent on imposing a de facto oligarchy on a constitutional republic — remains purposefully obscured. “The most elite in America are the most likely to damn the privilege of those who lack it,” historian Victor Davis Hanson explains.

What else is being obscured? A black-white educational achievement gap that spans more than half a century. And what is Chancellor Carranza doing about that? Implementing a grading policy more attuned to social justice than academic achievement and eliminating tests for the city’s elite schools because they don’t produce the “proper” racial outcomes — as in not enough blacks and too many Asians.

Thankfully, there’s a light at the end of this repugnant tunnel. Last Friday on Fox News’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Rufo reminded America that his Stop Critical Race Theory coalition will continue filing lawsuits against racist programs being implemented in America’s classrooms and elsewhere. The coalition asserts such efforts violate the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which “prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” Their aim is to get a case in front of the Supreme Court.

It’s what happens when one tries to eliminate racism — with racism.

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Saving Civics From Racism

A reasoned (and reasonable) approach to civics is what our kids desperately need.

For decades the Left has flocked to education as a vocation, taking the open opportunity to pass on a heaping helping of their anti-American and immoral propaganda as part of their lesson plans. As a result, generations of children beginning with the Baby Boomers received a subtle but one-sided message that our nation had flaws and character wasn’t important. (Neither was capitalism, an aspect we covered a year ago.) More recently, the message has gone out via the New York Times’s 1619 Project that our nation wasn’t founded on the concept of Liberty at all but was instead conceived as a means to exploit one race for the benefit of another. Sadly, hundreds of school districts around the country have adopted the 1619 Project as a basis for teaching history despite its numerous and verified flaws.

All that background leads us to the latest development on the educational front — the battle for civics.

The state of Illinois recently proposed new regulations for teaching civics in the state. It amounts to a sweeping change that creates “culturally responsive teachers and leaders” who, in part, “understand that there are systems in our society that create and reinforce inequities, thereby creating oppressive conditions.” Therefore, “Educators work actively against these systems in their everyday roles in educational institutions.” They also should “understand how the system of inequity has impacted them as an educator.” If adopted, the rules will take effect just after the beginning of the 2021-22 school year.

“Illinois is literally about to mandate that every one of its licensed teachers adopt progressive political orthodoxy and impart that ideology to students,” writes an exasperated Stanley Kurtz in National Review. Kurtz, who wrote a longer treatise on the subject for the Claremont Institute, has also proposed model legislation called The Partisanship Out Of Civics Act.

“Instead of inciting students to protest or engage in lobbying based on unexamined prejudices, teachers ought to be cultivating an appreciation for the complexities, unintended consequences, and trade-offs inherent in any policy position, and conveying the importance of tempering advocacy with respect for the rights of others,” explains Kurtz. “Political positions are for students to determine themselves, as free individuals, in the fullness of time. Protest and lobbying are for students to practice outside of formal schooling.”

Kurtz would seem to be a one-man band given his passion on the civics subject, but his battle is being joined by other important allies. Paul Mirengoff at Power Line has also been writing regularly on the subject, but more importantly Bill Jacobson — the mind behind the Legal Insurrection website — has created a clearinghouse website devoted to sharing the truth behind Critical Race Theory (CRT).

In announcing the new website, Jacobson wrote, “The impact [of CRT] on education has been enormous, and destructive. What started on college campuses has moved to primary and secondary education, and into the broader culture. Government agencies and private corporations now are some of the worst offenders of the obsessive focus on race.” He added, “CriticalRace.org is a resource for parents and students concerned about how Critical Race Theory, and implementation of Critical Race Training, impacts education. We have compiled the most comprehensive database to empower parents and students.” One eventual plan for the website is to determine the 10 worst schools for indoctrination into CRT.

Yet while Kurtz, Jacobson, and others are doing yeoman’s work on the subject, they could use all hands on deck. Most of us pay taxes to support our local schools, so it’s worth finding out just how much these anti-American values have permeated your local classrooms. If you have kids (or grandkids), it’s worth remembering the Proverbs admonition to train up your children in the way they should go. That includes critical thinking as part of a well-rounded civics education.

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My other blogs: Main ones below

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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