What Critical Race Theory training looks like

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ASPartOfMe
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19 Dec 2020, 5:46 am

Indoctrinating an entire school system in PC racism

Quote:
Seattle Public Schools recently held a racially charged teacher-training session that convicted US schools of committing “spirit murder” against black kids and demanded that white teachers “bankrupt [their] privilege in acknowledgment of [their] thieved inheritance.”

According to whistleblower documents from the session that I’ve ­reviewed, the trainers began by claiming that teachers are colonizers of “the ancestral lands and traditional territories of the Puget Sound Coast Salish People.” Later: “The United States was built off the stolen labor of kidnapped and enslaved black people’s work.

Organizers identified themselves by gender pronouns and race. For example, one speaker was identified as “He/Him, White.” It has become commonplace in academia and corporate settings to list gender pronouns, but this was perhaps the first example of an institution promoting workplace race-labeling.

The main message: White teachers must recognize that they “are assigned considerable power and privilege in our society” because of their “possession of white skin.” To atone, they must self-consciously reject their “whiteness” and become dedicated “anti-racist educator[s].”

Any resistance, no matter how well-argued or factually grounded, was dismissed as a reflex of white teachers’ “lizard-brain,” which makes them “afraid that [they] will have to talk about sensitive issues such as race, racism, classism, sexism or any kind of ‘ism.’ ”

In the most disturbing portion, teachers discussed “spirit murder.” Schools, according to “abolitionist” pedagogue Bettina Love, who invented the concept, “murder the souls of black children every day through systemic, institutionalized, anti-black, state-sanctioned violence.”

At the conclusion of the training, teachers had to explain how they will practice “anti-racist pedagogy,” address the “social-justice movements taking place” and become “anti-racist outside the classroom.” They were told to divide the world into “enemies, allies and ­accomplices” and work toward the “abolition” of whiteness.

Unless there is a change of course, this new orthodoxy — gradually replacing academics with activism — will yield an educational disaster. School districts will aggregate students on the ­basis of identity and subordinate traditional learning to the latest fads from woke academe.

In this sense, the educational woke regime mirrors the corporate one in function: All this ideological garment-rending and chest-beating serves to disguise the social and material failures of institutions. Teachers can ostentatiously “bankrupt their privilege” in front of their colleagues, but it will do nothing for third-graders who are struggling to read or graduating high-school seniors who can’t solve a single algebra problem or compose a legible sentence.

Bolding=mine:

If anything the headline and article underplays the issues. This is beyond “political correctness” and way beyond “fads”. I have to plead guilty to underestimating this also. For awhile I bought into the idea that this a bunch of fragile SJW’s who will grow out of it. Smug superiority on my part. I and others were played, fell right into this distraction.

Conservatives fear Biden will be hijacked by this, others point out that there is nothing in Biden’s resume suggesting any type of wokeness. Another distraction, at most Washington is tangential to this. This attempted revolution will succeed or fail on the state, community and corporate level.


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kitesandtrainsandcats
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19 Dec 2020, 8:14 am

I got curious about the spirit murder thing and went looking in Google for what could be found in education journals.
Found the following by the Bettina Love mentioned, https://www.edweek.org/leadership/opini ... ts/2019/05

Quote:
How Schools Are ‘Spirit Murdering’ Black and Brown Students
By Bettina L. Love — May 23, 2019

... What I am talking about is a slow death, a death of the spirit, a death that is built on racism and intended to reduce, humiliate, and destroy people of color.

Legal scholar Patricia Williams coined the term “spirit murdering” to argue that racism is more than just physical pain; racism robs people of color of their humanity and dignity and leaves personal, psychological, and spiritual injuries. Racism is traumatic because it is a loss of protection, safety, nurturance, and acceptance—all things children need to enter school and learn.

The spirit murdering of Black and Brown children leaves a trail of unanswered questions: How do children learn after being physically assaulted or racially insulted by a person who is supposed to protect them, love them, and teach them? How does a Black or Brown child live, learn, and grow when her spirit is under attack at school, and her body is in danger inside the classroom? How does a parent grapple with this reality? How are children’s imagination and humanity stunted by the notion that they are never safe in their schools because of the color of their skin or the God they pray to? Where does the soul go to heal when school is a place of trauma?


This looks like the content is related to the concept here, https://www.edweek.org/leadership/next- ... es/2019/05
Quote:
Next Step in Diversity Training: Teachers Learn to Face Their Unconscious Biases
By Sarah Schwartz — May 14, 2019
... This is the tension that school districts face in deciding how to roll out professional learning around implicit bias. Make these trainings optional, and the staff that show up are invested in changing school culture and their own practice. Make trainings mandatory, and you’ll reach everyone but face additional challenges. Before people from diverse backgrounds can feel comfortable discussing their experiences with race, they need to spend time developing “psychological safety,” said Womack. Even once teachers build that trust, they have different beliefs about what causes opportunity gaps, he said.


Also related to the concept, https://diverseeducation.com/article/168105/
Quote:
“Spirit-Murdering in Academia”
February 26, 2020 | :
by Nichole Margarita
... Mariana Ortega, philosopher and academic, in her article “Being Lovingly, Knowingly Ignorant: White Feminism and Women of Color” poses the following question: “Why is it that there is still so much anger on the part of women of color and so much guilt and so much ignorance on the part of white feminists who are supposed to have knowledge of them and who are supposed to have loving perception toward them?”

I have been reflecting on this question and spirit murdering for the past month. When this recent incident happened, I was taken back to my undergraduate experience. I had to process the parallels of both incidents. The aftershocks of the first incident remain with me today. At 18 years old I stayed silent and today I break the silence.


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ASPartOfMe
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23 Dec 2020, 7:53 pm

Searching for the ‘Anti’ in ‘Antiracism’

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The premier expositor of antiracist philosophy, Ibram X. Kendi, is admirably forthright about his prescriptions for allaying America’s legacy of racial prejudice. “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination,” he wrote in the best-selling book How to Be an Antiracist. “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

Proponents of the antiracist theory of social organization fancy themselves insurgents arguing passionately against the country’s prevailing ethos, but that is a dated self-conception. Antiracism didn’t just go mainstream in 2020—it became downright establishmentarian.

As a limited supply of COVID-19 vaccines begins to roll out across the nation, for example, health-care policy experts and political officials tasked with rationing the precious boosters are increasingly attracted to the idea that the population should be triaged not by the relative risk of exposure or vulnerability to infection but based on the principles of “social justice.” Harald Schmidt, a medical ethicist with the University of Pennsylvania, told the New York Times that the vaccine should be withheld from older populations, in part, because they are “whiter” and have already had the benefits of a long life, which is an outgrowth of American bigotry. We should, therefore, “level the playing field a bit.”

This isn’t just the musing of an ideologue whose constituency is limited to newsrooms. Policymakers are seriously considering these views. One of the co-chairs of Joe Biden’s COVID-19 advisory board, associate professor at the Yale School of Medicine, Marcella Nunez-Smith, said that she was “quite excited” by the prospect of “grounding in inequity” phased access to the vaccine. Eighteen U.S. states have applied the “social vulnerability index” created by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a method to allocate vaccines, which compiles into a practical inventory the conditions thought to be a byproduct of social inequities. California is going further than even that by considering the concept of “historical injustice” in their vaccination distribution plan.

This weekend, Congress finally agreed on a framework for another round of relief spending aimed primarily at preventing mass layoffs while giving individuals some belated but necessary monetary assistance. But for antiracism advocates, the egalitarian distribution of funding represents a moral failing.

The last rounds of relief spending were already inequitably distributed, they claim.

To remedy this injustice, “the next pandemic stimulus bill must be race-conscious.” Many of their recommendations are sensible—dedicating federal resources to identify eligible recipients without prior tax returns, for example, and opening the process up to Americans with Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers. But other policymakers have taken their logic to its ineluctable conclusion: A “Black stimulus package” funded by the redistribution of funds expropriated from demographics that are perceived to have benefited unduly from the accidents of their births.

Are the conditions that vex these policymakers rooted in historical inequities? To some extent, that is doubtlessly true (though the disparities that antiracism advocates seek to address are invariably more complex than their philosophy allows). But when their remedy for those injustices necessitates more injustice, it looks less like reconciliation and more like revenge.

We need look no further than the Nation’s Brandon Hasbrouck for evidence of such a thing. The “poisonous legacy of slavery” is so ubiquitous, so inexorably interwoven into our “structurally racist political institutions” that, short of throwing the whole thing out, the only way to rectify this condition is to do away with the “one person, one vote” doctrine affirmed in the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. “We can implement vote reparations by double-counting ballots cast by all Black residents,” he advised.

This suggestion has yet to find many prominent takers, but why would quasi-revolutionary antiracist reformers find it a bridge too far?


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shlaifu
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26 Dec 2020, 1:56 pm

well.... that's what happens when a lie gets uncovered and you trie to save it with more lies....
in this case, the lie is that wealth inequality is always good for a society as long as there is equal opportunity, and the new lies are trying to save wealth inequality by "abolishing whiteness".


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kraftiekortie
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26 Dec 2020, 5:15 pm

“Whiteness” is not a culture.

Only extreme white supremacists believe in the concept of “white culture.” Or even something like the “essence” of whiteness.

This “Woke” nonsense will ruin us. We have to find a compromise.