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funeralxempire
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23 Mar 2021, 6:37 pm

Complaining about 'the woke' is meant to distract from the fact that the right have no relevant policy ideas. Reactionaries gonna react.



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23 Mar 2021, 6:42 pm

It's almost like they figured out how one can use made up words on internet mobs & no one will care what they actually mean.

It's not righteous indignation when you're full of s**t.

All these people unwilling to learn a word of Spanish not even bothering to speak real English. :lol:


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26 Apr 2021, 3:49 pm

Biden Administration getting "woke"?
The title of the linked article is made up by me.

Quote:
This week, the Biden administration’s Department of Education proposed a rule that will allow taxpayer funds to be spent on anti-racism consultants and critical race theory curricula in public schools.

As the Free Beacon reported, “The rule would allocate federal funding for education contractors who work to ‘improve’ K-12 curriculum by promoting ‘racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically responsive teaching and learning practices.’ The rule would also require the Education Department to encourage social studies curricula that teach students about ‘systemic marginalization, biases, inequities, and discriminatory policy and practice in American history.’”

Lest anyone doubt that the proposed rule change is ideologically motivated, it cites the work of the discredited New York Times’ “1619 Project” (the Biden administration calls it a “landmark” work) whose author, Nikole Hannah-Jones, has recently been peddling lies about the origins of policing.

In other words, the Biden administration is opening the floodgates for anti-racism ideology to be taught uncritically to children in K-12 schools.

If you wonder what this might look like in practice, look at the schools already enacting similar programs (and lining the pockets of “anti-racism consultants”).

The use of “mitigate” in neo-racist ideology is intentional and incredibly polarizing. It is not enough to promote diversity; anti-racism requires that whiteness be “decentered.” This week, parents with children in Washington, D.C. public schools learned that the school system is eager to “mitigate the projected whitening” of many schools in the city. That’s right: Being white is something the school system wants to mitigate—i.e., make less severe. This wasn’t simply a statement about wanting to increase diversity at some of the city’s schools. It’s a distinct action item. The title of the proposal stated: “We need to preserve diversity and mitigate the projected whitening of the feeding pattern” of schools.

As the parent of two D.C. public school kids who happen to be white, how am I supposed to support a school system that is clearly hostile to my children based solely on an accident of their birth?

Never mind that D.C. is already a majority-minority city. Or that white kids are the racial minority in the city’s schools. D.C.’s public school population is 59 percent black and only 16 percent white (with 20 percent Hispanic and 5 percent Asian or multi-racial). Even at the schools considered the “whitest,” such as Wilson High School in the northwest quadrant of the city, whites are still not a majority (39 percent of students at Wilson are white).

Imagine the uproar if a suburban school district in a majority white state published a proposal that blatantly declared its intention to “mitigate the projected blackening” of its schools. It would be properly denounced as the worst sort of racism.

And yet, blatantly promoting the “mitigation” of whiteness is now hailed as the solution to structural racism by anti-racism ideologues and the many consultants and profiteers that have sprung up to promote their message in recent years. They have brought us such fads as mandatory racial “affinity group” meetings in schools and workplaces—merely a more anodyne way to say racially segregated.

One educational equity consulting group that trains teachers in anti-racist ideology claims that “racial affinity groups can help you dismantle white supremacy culture and build antiracist schools.” Interestingly, it is only “white folx” who are told to “excavate and reckon with their Whiteness, including their privilege and power. By contrast, for “BIPOC” participants, such groups are a time “to take care of themselves and one another while doing the following in the absence of Whiteness: Discuss the impact of White Supremacy Culture and the pressure of assimilation.”

Like many anti-racism grifts, the organization, Culturally Responsive Leadership, is also advertising a “Dismantling White Supremacy Culture in Schools Conference” this summer, at the cost of $1,000 per ticket.

“Culturally responsive teaching” is another way of mitigating whiteness in schools, evidently.

If the Biden administration’s funding of anti-racist ideology in schools succeeds in indoctrinating children with the idea that they should “mitigate” their own immutable characteristics, they won’t be helping “marginalized people.” They will be marginalizing people of all races and backgrounds in the U.S. who understand the difference between healthy diversity with equality of opportunity and ideological power grabs pursued in the name of “equity.”


The answer is no. Biden is doing what politicians do, see which way the political wind is blowing, and jump on the cause. It is not any different than what he did decades ago when he palled with segregationists and helped pass anti-crime laws people are trying to dismantle. He is seeing and reaching the conclusion influential people in many endeavors have reached if you don't go woke, you will go broke.

Conservatives naturally are expecting a backlash in 2022 and beyond. Normally I would agree, but there is the reality is that the Republican party, and conservatism these days are defined by insurrectionist aging people. So what poison will people pick?, damn if I know.


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01 May 2021, 5:27 am

Schools indoctrinate children as young as eight in race and gender essentialism

Quote:
Many American parents may assume that culture-war battles over critical race theory and “wokeness” are fought on legitimate terrain, involving such matters as how high school students can best grapple with our nation’s complex past. Perhaps they think that the suddenly ubiquitous topics of gender identity and preferred pronouns rankle only those parents who are old-fashioned in their thinking. If only. America’s youngest students are being bombarded with classroom activism and indoctrination that is inappropriate not only developmentally but for public school systems in general.

The contemporary obsession with identity has made its way into elementary school policy, curricula, and standards approved by state boards. While we continue to see poor reading and math scores, schools spend money and time confusing and shaming other people’s children. Many educators and elected leaders have good intentions; they believe deeply that they are part of a necessary and long-overdue movement to teach racial literacy, social justice, equity, and antiracism. But as virtuous as these terms may sound on their face, they mean something else in far too many classrooms. American schools are teaching young children race essentialism: reducing them to identity groups, putting them in boxes labeled “oppressor” and “oppressed,” and often inflicting emotional and psychological harm.

If this sounds extreme, that’s because it is. It is not happening everywhere—but it is happening enough to have juiced a multibillion-dollar, nationwide industry. Sometimes the source is a rogue teacher whom the principal and superintendent admit they are trying to rein in; but increasingly, it is simply public officials implementing approved policies.

Consider Bellevue, Washington, home to Cherry Crest Elementary School. The school website indicates that students “will have explicit conversations about race, equity, and access” and “will identify culture and begin to recognize and identify white culture through storytelling, sharing, and conversation.” The school promises to hold monthly assemblies that focus on culture, identity, and race, and has created a group called SOAR (Students Organized Against Racism) for fourth- and fifth-graders. These children, who range from ages nine to 11, are tasked with “implementing learning and start implementation of school-wide learning and strategies for being anti-racist.” Left unclear is whether these students have been made aware that modern antiracism requires discrimination on the basis of race.

In Oregon, teachers can use new state standards in “ethnic studies” starting in September 2021; the standards will become a mandatory part of the curriculum in 2025. The Oregon Department of Education released an update on the standards last year. While most Americans may not consider gender an essential component of ethnic studies, the Oregon Department of Education does. The revised recommendations for the standards require kindergartners to “understand their own identity groups, including but not limited to race, gender, family, ethnicity, culture, religion and ability.” First-graders will be able to “describe how individual and group characteristics are used to divide, unite, and categorize racial, ethnic and social groups.”

This past February, students in Evanston, Illinois, listened to the book Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness. Parents were asked to discuss the book with their children at home. The book says that “whiteness is a bad deal” and “always was,” and that “you can be white without signing on to whiteness.” As Conor Friedersdorf reports in The Atlantic, Evanston schools ask kindergarten parents to quiz their five- and six-year-olds on whiteness and to give them examples of “how whiteness shows up in school or in the community.”

In Cupertino, California, third-graders at R. I. Meyerholz Elementary School were required to deconstruct their racial identities and then rank themselves according to their “power and privilege.” The teacher asked all students to create an “identity map,” which required them to list their race, class, gender, religion, family structure, and other characteristics.

Some parents may agree with such content. But public institutions funded with public dollars do not exist to groom activists for particular causes, shame children for their immutable traits, or deny them their agency or their childhood. We are talking about eight- and nine-year-old kids who believe in Santa Claus, hide their lost teeth under their pillow for the tooth fairy, and curl up in their parents’ laps for comfort and love. It is immoral—at least—to reduce them to confected racial and gender categories and to teach them to do the same to others.

Bolding=mine
The headline is incorrect. According to the article, it is children as young as 5 that are being indoctrinated.

I would have never thought in the 60s growing up as an undiagnosed autistic when bullying was just boys being boys, when you had to fit in or be a loser that those were the good old days. They were not, believe me they were not but compared to today they were.


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01 May 2021, 5:57 am

I have never encountered anyone who describes themselves as "woke," but I've heard hundreds of people complaining about "the wokes." I can only conclude the original meaning is obsolete and it's now just an insult. Same as how "hippy" no longer describes the hippy subculture, it's an insult flung at people whose beliefs or apperance are superficially hippy-like.

Also, the horde of alt-right sheep bleating on about "SJWs this, SJWs that, SJWs the other" are attacking a label that no-one has ever used of themselves. While usefully outing themselves as social injustice warriors, which is an odd thing to be proud of. Bloody SIWs, ruining everything again.


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01 May 2021, 6:53 am

PhosphorusDecree wrote:
Same as how "hippy" no longer describes the hippy subculture, it's an insult flung at people whose beliefs or apperance are superficially hippy-like.

That happened to me frequently as a teenager.

PhosphorusDecree wrote:
Also, the horde of alt-right sheep bleating on about "SJWs this, SJWs that, SJWs the other" are attacking a label that no-one has ever used of themselves. While usefully outing themselves as social injustice warriors, which is an odd thing to be proud of. Bloody SIWs, ruining everything again.

Hear hear!


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04 May 2021, 4:40 am

Teaching tiny babies about critical race theory and modern understandings of gender theory is based. That said, I do think the conflation in terminology of whiteness and white people is terrible optics and makes people think that the left is trying to destroy white people. We should find another word to describe the white supremacist tendencies in traditional white identity. Saying that we need to abolish whiteness sends ignorant people who can't be bothered to learn what the terms mean into a tizzy.

The idea of "whiteness" was a term used to describe a social construct identified in academia. It needed to be translated into something palatable before being foisted on the public.



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17 May 2021, 9:40 pm

Critical Social Justice Therapy
Sally Satel MD is a visiting professor of Psychiatry at the Columbia University’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

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One of the earliest stains on the legacy of psychiatry, my medical specialty, dates to the American 1840 census, when the US government first began systematically collecting information on “idiocy” and “insanity.” According to the results, the purported rates of mental illness among free blacks in northern cities were deemed to exceed those among enslaved blacks in the south by an 11-to-one ratio. South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun, a notoriously strident defender of slavery, seized upon the results as “proof” that “the African is incapable of self-care and sinks into lunacy under the burden of freedom. It is a mercy to him to give this guardianship and protection from mental death.”

Five years later, the American Statistical Association published a new analysis of the census data, in which it illuminated what distinguished American psychiatrist Edward Jarvis called the “inconsistencies, contradictions, and falsehoods” of the original. Jarvis’s own review revealed recording errors and deliberate misuse of data. Yet many citizens in pro-slavery states continued to believe that enslaved blacks were less inclined toward insanity because they were spared the social pressures associated with owning property, engaging in commerce, and participating in civic affairs. So comfortable was the state of bondage, this perverse thinking went, that slaves who fled must have been impelled by madness.

In 1851, Samuel Cartwright, a Louisiana physician (though not a psychiatrist) gave that invented form of madness a name: Drapetomania (in Greek, drapétis means fugitive). Some called it “runaway-slave syndrome,” and suggested it could be prevented through whippings and the amputation of toes. Cartwright also claimed to “discover” something called dysaesthesia aethiopica (an “abnormal sensation” characterized by reduced intellectual ability, laziness, and partial insensitivity of the skin). The American Psychiatric Association (APA), formed in 1844 as the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane, isn’t known to have formally commented on these invented diagnoses, nor their application.

Cartwright’s taxonomy expired with the formal abolition of chattel slavery. But the relationship between the psychiatric profession and black Americans remained a deeply troubled one. During the Civil Rights movement, for example, many psychiatrists considered the anger of black patients to be a form of “neurotic hostility.” A 1970 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry devoted a special section to racism, in which an article detailed the custom of regarding black patients as “not motivated for treatment, having primitive character structure, not psychologically minded, and impulse-ridden.” It was also common that behaviors deemed criminal in blacks were regarded as the product of sickness when they manifested in white patients.

Even today, there remains a tendency among psychiatrists to misdiagnose blacks with the more severe diagnosis of schizophrenia while categorizing whites with similar presentations as having mood disorders. The genuinely shameful nature of this legacy moved the association to issue an apology this past January, and announce that “the APA is beginning the process of making amends for both the direct and indirect acts of racism in psychiatry.”

A concerned London-based psychotherapist, Val Thomas, has warned of a new trend that she terms Critical Social Justice Therapy, or CSJT: “a practice that views people not as individual actors but rather as representatives of particular groups which are nested within systems of power and trains therapist-activists to diagnose patients through a collective lens.” Last year, Thomas founded an online community, Critical Therapy Antidote, as a hub for practitioners and clients dedicated to “protecting the integrity of talking therapies.”

(Before proceeding further, it is worth setting out the somewhat confusing professional typology at play here. The word “therapist” describes anyone who talks to patients or clients with a view toward providing psychological aid. The term “psychotherapy” sounds more specific to a layperson—but, in practice, that term, too, is also applied widely. A “counselor” usually has a Master’s degree in counseling, and a counseling psychologist usually has a PhD—though practitioners in these areas will use different terms, including “psychodynamic psychotherapy” or “behavioral therapy,” to describe their work. Many psychiatrists, who are physicians by training, also provide psychotherapy. Finally, there are “analysts,” who can come from a variety of educational backgrounds, but generally must attend a lengthy program of formal psychoanalytic training at a recognized institute. For a time, only medical doctors could train as analysts, but that has changed.)

To picture CSJT in its purest form, imagine a black patient whose white therapist systematically conceives of the patient’s problems in love, work, and family life as products of racism. Odd as that may sound to anyone familiar with conventional psychotherapy, this overtly ideological approach is becoming increasingly prominent among a cadre of counseling professionals. At the Graduate Counseling Program at the University of Vermont, for instance, the coordinator has issued a proposal to “structurally align” the program with the Black Lives Matter movement and begin “the work of undoing systemic white supremacy.”

According to a detailed blueprint recently sent out to Counseling Program staff, the revised program would “take up the work of Dr. Ibram X. Kendi [and] adopt his definition of both racist and anti-racist, and integrate these definitions into our program philosophy”—though the coordinator also concedes that “my internalized whiteness limits even my best intentions in brainstorming how to operationalize anti-racism within our program.”

Aaron Kindsvatter, a professor in the University of Vermont’s department of Education and Social Services, recently spoke out against these pending changes in an interview with YouTuber Benjamin Boyce. “Eventually counselors are going to feel that it is their job to help clients who are experiencing mental distress understand themselves in these terms of racist or antiracist,” Kindsvatter said. “Children and people who are in mental distress need nuanced conversations about morality and ethics and this is an ideology that says no there is no nuance to those conversations. Two years ago, I would have said this could never happen.” (Needless to say, critics at the university are now calling for his resignation.)

The American Counseling Association, the organization representing licensed American counseling professionals, features a division called “Counselors for Social Justice,” which “works to promote social justice in our society through confronting oppressive systems of power and privilege.” Some counseling programs now teach students how to organize protests. And journal articles are appearing with titles such as Black Lives Matter: A Call to Action for Counseling Psychology Leaders. Gauging applicants’ commitment to social-justice advocacy has become part of some admissions processes.

Alexander Adams, a pseudonymous recent graduate of an American Master’s program in counseling, recently wrote an essay for Critical Therapy Antidote entitled, My Master’s Degree in Counseling Psychology Taught me a lot about ‘Social Justice’ But Very Little about Counseling or Psychology. He describes two and a half years of “incompetence and mediocrity”—at a cost of $70,000 in (borrowed) money—during which teachers felt free to lecture students about their political beliefs, and trainees were instructed on “the dynamics and dilemmas of microaggressions,” and “developing a nonracist and antiracist white identity.”

On the same site, a Master’s degree candidate in counseling (identified pseudonymously as “Student J”) asked what this pedagogy would mean for white patients: “When you seek counseling, how [would] you feel knowing that the person supposedly providing you with empathy and care sees you as an oppressor? … How is this healthy and productive for anyone?”

A therapist is free to personally believe that Black Lives Matter and Ibram X. Kendi should (or should not) serve as guiding lights in the creation of a new kind of social contract. But in regard to clinical practice, Critical Social Justice Therapy violates core tenets of sound psychotherapy. Instead of addressing the individual person in need, it applies a pre-programmed ideological agenda that classifies individuals as oppressor or oppressed based on identity group.

The task of the therapist, said Anthony Storr, the late British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, is “to get the patient to talk as freely as possible whilst he himself stays in the background.” But talking freely is possible only if a therapist assumes a posture of caring neutrality, openness, and curiosity. And learning to maintain compassionate detachment lies at the heart of practitioner training.

The “therapeutic alliance” between therapist and patient depends on their agreement in regards to the methods employed and the goals pursued.

When a therapist comes to the first session armed with an ideological program that dictates what the patient should become, such an alliance is doomed. Even insofar as a patient may agree to this program before treatment begins, what they will be receiving isn’t psychotherapy so much as anti-racism cant delivered under the pretext of therapeutic treatment. Where the patient should be inculcated in the habit of self-observation, he will instead be taught to search outside himself for sources of all duress; instead of traveling a path to greater autonomy, he will be instead rewarded for adopting the victim role.

How could a therapist wedded to anti-racist sentiments relate empathically to, say, a white, straight young man who voted for Donald Trump? How could a patient regard a therapist as benign and caring if she tells him, or even strongly implies, that she thinks he is a bigot—and, furthermore, that many of his personal problems are rooted in this presumed bigotry?

This is not to say that psychotherapists shouldn’t be sensitive to matters of race, and racism more generally—much as they should be familiar with the other important dynamics that shape one’s mental life. Before the dawn of the civil rights era, psychotherapy was overwhelmingly the province of white practitioners and the white patients who could afford their care. After World War II, the number of public mental-hygiene clinics expanded markedly. Some of the new clients were black workers who sought assistance in adjusting to newly integrated workplaces. The American Psychological Association recognized the importance of doctoral students becoming “familiar with the broad problems of social structure and organization, with cultural conditions, and with the heterogeneity of subgroup patterns within our culture.” And rightly so.

In 1950, psychologist Ralph W. Heine addressed the issue in a Journal of Clinical Psychology article entitled, The Negro Patient in Psychotherapy. Heine considered whether “the notion of communicating real feelings or interpersonal problems [to a white therapist] would be difficult for [a black patient] to accept.” In turn, he wondered whether the therapist could respond to a black patient as an individual rather than a member of a minority group. Perhaps, Heine speculated (prophetically, I might add), the white therapist might feel “too guilty to be of help.”

According to the plain wording contained in the most recent iteration of the American Counseling Association Code of Ethics, the ACA should condemn CJST:

Counselors are [to be] aware of—and avoid imposing—their own values, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Counselors respect the diversity of clients, trainees, and research participants and seek training in areas in which they are at risk of imposing their values onto clients, especially when the counselor’s values are inconsistent with the client’s goals or are discriminatory in nature.

The imposition of a particular set of “values, attitudes, and beliefs,” remember, is what the CJST project is all about. It threatens to collapse a time-honored sanctuary for introspection under the weight of stereotyping, conditional compassion, rehearsed oppression narratives, and, perhaps most pernicious of all, the gratification of the therapist’s own quest, sincere as it may be, for high moral ground.

Certainly, it speaks volumes about the current ideological environment that officials at the University of Vermont’s Counseling Program would feel at liberty to endorse the adoption of Kendi-esque imperatives without any apparent fear of censure from the ACA. Yet it is difficult to gauge how deeply the CJST ethos has penetrated the real world of practicing counselors.

The American Psychiatric Association has just wrapped up its 2021 annual meeting. To the extent that the association’s incoming leaders are sincere about making amends for the APA’s sordid past, when patients were judged by the color of their skin instead of the content of their thoughts and feelings, I would encourage them to state as much, and in resolute fashion. No one disputes that social justice is (in theory, at least) a worthy political goal. But neither political activism—nor crude race-based stereotypes—have any place in the relationship between a psychotherapist and her client.


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18 May 2021, 2:04 am

Is it pronounced as 'woke' as in 'woke up' or as wokee?



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18 May 2021, 2:12 am

The_Face_of_Boo wrote:
Is it pronounced as 'woke' as in 'woke up' or as wokee?


As in woke up.


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19 May 2021, 1:52 am

jimmy m wrote:
Elmer Fudd has made a big change for the newest series of "Looney Tunes" cartoons. The iconic character will no longer use a gun, according to the people behind the show. [The show apparently doesn't want to be associated with gun violence.]

That's a real shame. I heard in the latest Looney Tunes cartoon Elmer tries to shoot the rabbit with a camera instead of a shotgun. Oh wait, that's Elmer's Candid Camera from 1940.


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26 May 2021, 1:33 pm

The Child Soldiers of the Culture War

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Last October, a group of New York City parents gathered outside City Hall to defend accelerated academic programs. The city’s Department of Education had been chipping away at those programs for over two years—part of its "equity"-oriented agenda—and the predominantly Asian crowd was fed up. "Keep SHSAT," many signs read, a reference to the Specialized High School Admissions Test that by law determines admission to the city’s top public schools.

The rally was proceeding without a hitch—until a group of student activists shoved their way into the middle of it, blocking speakers and unfurling a large banner that read "Unscreen Our Schools." The 16- to 17-year-old activists belonged to a group called Teens Take Charge, which argues selective public schools are a form of modern-day "segregation." Amid the ensuing tumult, one parent pushed the banner aside, while others threatened to call the police.

The skirmish was an especially bitter episode in the ongoing debate over New York City’s elite public schools, where standardized tests are an important factor in admissions. Those tests, the city’s education department has argued, are systemically racist, since very few black and Latino students do well enough on them to be admitted to top schools like Stuyvesant or Bronx Science.

On the other side of the debate are parents—particularly low-income Asian parents—who see the tests as engines of upward mobility and oppose efforts to eliminate them. Public opinion is on their side; an April poll found that a majority of New Yorkers support keeping gifted and talented programs for younger students, while a plurality oppose eliminating the admissions test for specialized high schools.

But the education department has a potent cudgel against that opposition: the high school students of Teens Take Charge, who have been weaponized as child soldiers in the culture war. The fracas at the rally was part of a pattern, nearly a dozen parents said, in which adult activists sic students on anyone who challenges the department’s anti-test agenda.

At the adults’ direction, members of Teens Take Charge launch smear campaigns against supporters of merit-based admissions, branding them as "racists" and "segregationists." If the targeted parents push back, they are accused of attacking kids—making it difficult to avoid reputational ruin.

It’s like what Hamas does with human shields," one parent born in China said. "Immigrants recognize in Teens Take Charge the Soviet Youth and the Chinese Red Guard."

The result has been a feeling of powerlessness among parents and administrators, who fear that going against the youth group could jeopardize their careers. "You can’t debate children," Deborah Alexander, a Queens parent-leader, told the Washington Free Beacon. "Nobody wants to attack a child."

It isn’t children who are setting the agenda, though; it’s adults plugged into the education department.

Teens Take Charge is run by an organization called The Bell, whose cofounder, Taylor McGraw, is part of a "youth-adult Student Voice Working Group with the Department of Education." Under McGraw’s auspices, Teens Take Charge has set up regular meetings with top department officials, including former schools chancellor Richard Carranza, who tried and failed to eliminate the Specialized High School Admission Test. Sutton, the group’s program manager, is also well-connected: She is the president of her district’s Community Education Council, an elected "policy advisory" group that serves as a liaison between the department and district parents.

At these adults' behest, members of Teens Take Charge use a variety of tactics to intimidate their political enemies. The group has falsely accused parents of doxxing students and harassed a city council candidate who criticized Carranza. Sometimes, it lodges an allegation so absurd it baits parents into responding to their teenage tormentors, who promptly play the victim and claim they’ve been harassed. And if the Department of Education gets wind of those claims—having been alerted by the students or their adult handlers—it invariably takes the students’ side.

Maud Maron is a candidate for city council and the cofounder of PLACE NYC, a group that supports competitive admissions to public schools. Like Chu, she also sits on her district’s Community Education Council. After Maron criticized the "simplistic narrative" of "white privilege" being peddled by the Department of Education under Carranza, a group of Teens Take Charge students demanded she "release a public apology" for her comments by 5 p.m. the following Monday. "If you do not," their email went on, "we will start a petition calling for your resignation from [the council]."

Teens Take Charge made good on the threat and then some. Maron wouldn’t apologize but did offer to host "an open dialogue" with the students. They didn’t take her up on it. Instead, they posted a Change.org petition—"Tell Maud Maron to resign from Community Education Council 2″—that falsely claimed she hadn’t responded to their email and accused her of "disregarding the safety" of students in her district. Since then, Maron says, members of Teens Take Charge have shown up to almost every public meeting and event she’s spoken at, asking pointed questions about why she supports "segregation."

It may also have been trying to elicit from her the sort of outburst it elicited from Tom Wrocklage, a white education council member whom a fellow parent accused of racism for holding a friend’s black baby on his lap. When some members of Teens Take Charge amplified the accusation over social media, Wrocklage got into a heated back and forth with them, demanding they explain how his conduct was racist. Sutton seized on the back and forth to argue Wrocklage was "stalking students,"

The friendly interplay between Teens Take Charge and the Department of Education has made some parents wonder if the groups are coordinating.

It has also given the group preferential access to admissions data, which are cherry-picked to support its anti-test narrative. The department completed a public-records request filed by Teens Take Charge in just four months but has yet to complete similar requests filed by journalists and outside researchers, some of whom have been waiting years for the data. The data the department made available through Teens Take Charge only includes the racial breakdown of competitive high schools, not their socioeconomic makeup, making it seem as though the Specialized High School Admissions Test is biased toward the privileged.

In fact the opposite is true: Not only do Asian Americans, who score best on the test, have the highest poverty rate in New York City; the students trying to eliminate the test are often the rich kids who couldn’t ace it.

Bolding=mine


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26 May 2021, 9:10 pm

If the future is female, I want to get the hell off this planet.


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27 May 2021, 11:55 am

The Woke-Industrial Complex
Christopher Rufo is a magna cum laude graduate of Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the the Manhattan Institute

Quote:
Last year, Lockheed Martin Corporation, the nation’s largest defense contractor, sent white male executives to a three-day diversity-training program aimed at deconstructing their “white male culture” and encouraging them to atone for their “white male privilege,” according to documents I have obtained.

The program, hosted on Zoom for a cohort of 13 Lockheed employees, was led by the diversity-consulting firm White Men As Full Diversity Partners, which specializes in helping white males “awaken together.” The Lockheed employees, all senior leaders in the company, included Aaron Huckaby, director of global supply chain operations; retired Air Force lieutenant colonel David Starr, director of the Hercules C-130 military transport program; retired Air Force lieutenant general Bruce Litchfield, vice president of sustainment operations; and Glenn Woods, vice president of production for the Air Force’s $1.7 trillion F-35 fighter jet program. (Lockheed Martin did not return request for comment.)

At the beginning of the program, the diversity trainers led a “free association” exercise, asking the Lockheed employees to list connotations for the term “white men.” The trainers wrote down “old,” “racist,” “privileged,” “anti-women,” “angry,” “Aryan Nation,” “KKK,” “Founding fathers,” “guns,” “guilty,” and “can’t jump.” According to the participants, these perceptions have led to “assumptions about white men and diversity,” with many employees believing that white men “don’t care about diversity,” “have a classical perspective on history and colonialism,” and “don’t want to give away our power.”

The White Men As Full Diversity Partners team—Jim Morris, Mark Havens, and Michael Welp—framed the purpose of the training session as providing a benefit for white men who embrace the diversity and inclusion philosophy. In response to a prompt about “what’s in it for white men,” the participants listed benefits such as: “I won’t get replaced by someone who is a better full diversity partner,”“[I will] improve the brand, image, reputation of white men,” and “I [will] have less nagging sense of guilt that I am the problem.”

The firm’s training programs are designed to assist white men in discovering the “roots of white male culture.” That culture, according to Welp and Proudman, consists of traits—such as “rugged individualism,” “a can-do attitude,” “hard work,” “operating from principles,” and “striving towards success”—which are superficially positive but are “devastating” to women and minorities.

At the Lockheed training, following the baseline exercises, the trainers proceeded with the “hearts and minds” portion of the session: deconstructing employees’ “white male privilege” through a series of “privilege statements,” then working to rebuild their identities as “agent[s] of change.” The trainers provided the participants with a list of 156 “white privilege statements,” “male privilege statements,” and “heterosexual privilege statements” to read and discuss,

Finally, in order to cement the idea that white male culture is “devastating” to racial minorities and women, the trainers had the Lockheed employees read a series of “I’m tired” statements from fictitious racial minorities and women.

Last year, I reported on the company’s white male training program for employees at the Sandia National Laboratories, which began a series of reports leading to President Trump’s Executive Order 13950, banning racial stereotyping, scapegoating, and discrimination in federal diversity programs. The Trump ban, however, was temporary; President Biden rescinded the order on his first day in office.

Today, it’s back to business as usual. Consultants such as White Men As Full Diversity Partners peddle fashionable racial theories and attach themselves to bloated government contractors such as Lockheed Martin. Presidents change, but for now the woke-industrial complex has no term limit.

Bolding is mine because I read that statement as an implied threat.

Quote:
As Full Diversity Partners, which specializes in helping white males “awaken together”

I guess Full Diversity Partners did not get the memo that “woke” is a own the libs term.

Lockheed Martin is a huge company but only 13 were chosen for this program, why? Do these employees have issues? Is this a test to see how it goes before the program is “offered” to all whate males?

Is this program voluntary, mandatory, or technically voluntary but with the implication you better attend?


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27 May 2021, 12:18 pm

CockneyRebel wrote:
If the future is female, I want to get the hell off this planet.


Why?


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15 Jun 2021, 3:36 pm

North Korean defector says 'even North Korea was not this nuts' after attending Ivy League school

Quote:
As American educational institutions continue to be called into question, a North Korean defector fears the United States' future "is as bleak as North Korea" after she attended one of the country's most prestigious universities.

One of several hundred North Korean defectors settled in the United States, Park, 27, transferred to Columbia University from a South Korean university in 2016 and was deeply disturbed by what she found.

"I expected that I was paying this fortune, all this time and energy, to learn how to think. But they are forcing you to think the way they want you to think," Park said in an interview with Fox News. "I realized, wow, this is insane. I thought America was different but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying."

Those similarities include anti-Western sentiment, collective guilt and suffocating political correctness.

Yeonmi saw red flags immediately upon arriving at the school.

During orientation, she was scolded by a university staff member for admitting she enjoyed classic literature such as Jane Austen.

"I said ‘I love those books.’ I thought it was a good thing," recalled Park.

"Then she said, 'Did you know those writers had a colonial mindset? They were racists and bigots and are subconsciously brainwashing you“

It only got worse from there as Yeonmi realized that every one of her classes at the Ivy League school was infected with what she saw as anti-American propaganda, reminiscent to the sort she had grown up with.

"’American Bastard' was one word for North Koreans" Park was taught growing up.

"The math problems would say 'there are four American bastards, you kill two of them, how many American bastards are left to kill?'"

She was also shocked and confused by issues surrounding gender and language, with every class asking students to announce their preferred pronouns.

"English is my third language. I learned it as an adult. I sometimes still say 'he' or 'she' by mistake and now they are going to ask me to call them 'they'? How the heck do I incorporate that into my sentences?"

"It was chaos," said Yeonmi. "It felt like the regression in civilization."

"Even North Korea is not this nuts," she admitted. "North Korea was pretty crazy, but not this crazy."

After getting into a number of arguments with professors and students, eventually Yeonmi "learned how to just shut up" in order to maintain a good GPA and graduate.

Because I have seen oppression, I know what it looks like," said Yeonmi, who by the age of 13 had witnessed people drop dead of starvation right before her eyes.

"These kids keep saying how they’re oppressed, how much injustice they've experienced. They don't know how hard it is to be free," she admonished.

I literally crossed through the middle of the Gobi Desert to be free. But what I did was nothing, so many people fought harder than me and didn't make it."

Park and her mother first fled the oppressive North Korean regime in 2007, when Yeonmi was 13 years old.

After crossing into China over the frozen Yalu River, they fell into the hands of human traffickers who sold them into slavery: Yeonmi for less than $300 and her mother for roughly $100.

With the help of Christian missionaries, the pair managed to flee to Mongolia, walking across the Gobi Desert to eventually find refuge in South Korea.

In North Korea I literally believed that my Dear Leader [Kim Jong-un] was starving," she recalled. "He's the fattest guy - how can anyone believe that? And then somebody showed me a photo and said 'Look at him, he's the fattest guy. Other people are all thin.' And I was like, 'Oh my God, why did I not notice that he was fat?' Because I never learned how to think critically."

"That is what is happening in America," she continued. "People see things but they've just completely lost the ability to think critically."

North Koreans, we don't have Internet, we don't have access to any of these great thinkers, we don't know anything. But here, while having everything, people choose to be brainwashed. And they deny it."

Having come to America with high hopes and expectations, Yeonmi expressed her disappointment.

"You guys have lost common sense to degree that I as a North Korean cannot even comprehend," she said.

“I guess that's what they want, to destroy every single thing and rebuild into a Communist paradise."


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