USA- We have all witnessed the American Marxist takeover of education, on steroids since Biden became president but certainly nothing new.
Last month, the president of the National Association of Scholars, Dr. Peter Wood released a position paper outlining the leftist takeover of our educational system through the lenses of primarily Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) and Critical Race Theory (CRT).
In that paper, numbering over 4000 words, Dr. Wood issued a “call to arms” in opposition to this takeover of our schools and colleges titled: “Regime Change: Repelling the DEI Assault on Higher Education,” as reported in American Thinker.
His paper examines the so-called “anti-racist” agenda that has permeated colleges and universities for some time, however more recently, after parents witnessed it first-hand while their children were undergoing remote learning, parents began paying attention.
The seeming hatred of American and the principles upon which our country was founded, primarily so-called “inequitable” treatment of blacks is the focus of such teaching.
While clearly some of that is true, with slavery and the civil rights issues of the 1960s being prominently featured, Dr. Wood notes in many cases, criticism of the United States “veers into simplistic claims and fictions presented as facts.”
In order to understand the agenda being pushed on our kids, it is important to understand the lingo:
Anti-racism is a made-up word invented by Boston University professor Henry Rogers, who now goes by the woke name Ibram X. Kendi because it sounds so…African American.
Kendi proposes that being an anti-racist means outright discrimination of whites as a form of payback which is designed to compensate for so-called “systemic racial injustice,” any speech that doesn’t go along with his preferred speech is racist.
Oh, and you have to say you’re an anti-racist…in other words if you say you’re not a racist, you are therefore a racist in the mind of Rogers, who has become a multi-millionaire pushing this claptrap.
Systemic racism is, Dr. Wood says, defined as “omnipresent racially disparate treatment” of blacks which is part and parcel of pretty much every facet of American life…law, real estate, medicine, and education…” He notes that even those who speak out against racism and don’t themselves hold any racial hostility are still party of “systematically racist institutions.”
Critical Race Theory (CRT) is in keeping with a “social analysis” thought up by a Harvard Law School professor (where else?), Derrick Bell, in the late 1970s.
This proposes that people need to be “liberated” from their illusions about various facets of American life, teaching that American institutions were built upon and continue to push racial oppression.
All activities of daily life, therefore, must be focused through the lens that America is an inherently racist country and must be saved from itself.
Diversity was first addressed by Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell wrote in a 1978 decision that colleges and universities should be allowed to show favoritism toward black students if the institutions could show it would advance so-called “intellectual diversity” of college classes, thusly benefitting all students regardless of race.
In 2003, the high court ruled in a majority decision that “diversity” was a substantial basis for racial preferences in college admissions, although such preferences had to be “somewhat disguised,” Dr. Wood wrote.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) expands on the diversity doctrine.
Dr. Wood explains that equity replaces individual equality and replaces it with the theory that all social goods should be distributed “in proportion to each group’s size relative to the total population.
“Inclusion,” meanwhile which destroys principles of freedom of association and individual merit expands group-identity quotas “to every part of society, public and private, going beyond race to include terms such as “gender identity.”
As with anti-racism, DEI proponents shun opposing viewpoints and seek to suppress them rather than speaking to criticisms.
The 1619 Project, a piece of garbage written by Nikole Hannah Jones of the New York Times claims also that America is a systemically racist country, founded by racists and opines that the founding of our nation didn’t occur on July 4, 1776, but rather in 1619, when the first slaves arrived in North America.
Please note that America as a nation did not exist in 1619, so her premise is absurd.
All of this, Dr. Wood writes, is leading us to National Peril.
All of the above has wound its way into the very fabric of our nation, with some believing it poses an existential threat to our country, through:
Ethnic division and strife…Political opportunism…Cultural impoverishment…Historical amnesia…Professional incompetence…International competitiveness…Destructive orientation.
Have you heard of the latest and not-so-greatest craze taking place, this time in the corporate world? ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance investing) movements are undermining our economy.
This is basically a corporate version of DEI, where corporations use ESG components in their decision-making. For example, UPS recently decided that they were no longer going to ship firearms components to gun stores. This is a classic case of a corporation using ESG in its decision-making.
At one time, DEI wasn’t found in K-12 schools, or certainly not in K-6 schools. However with many new teachers being indoctrinated into DEI in college, many of them take those teachings with them when they find themselves leading the classroom.
In middle and high school, teachers have quite a bit of autonomy, a bit less in elementary schools
Dr. Wood notes that there are still a lot of opportunities to “be indoctrinators in grade schools.”
By the time children reach college, Dr. Wood says they “arrive at college already steeped in CRT and DEI viewpoints,” with the solution being “not just to curtail bad instruction but to replace it with better instruction.”
Once students reach higher education, indoctrination “is actually more intense.”
The NAS writes it “is strongly and energetically opposed to racial preferences and reverse discrimination, and against the canard of ‘Diversity’ that is racialist at its core and ‘climbed from a relatively inconspicuous term in politics and biology to become the master concept of contemporary liberal or progressive thinking.”
The group believes individuality, personal freedom, courtesy, fair-mindedness and even equality” must be elevated above the principle of diversity, not the other way around.
One proposal put forth by the NAS is to Audit the Academic Administrative State and cut back on “anti-racist and radical reformations, end the DEI leavened mission statements, diversity plans, accreditation and faculty hiring and tenure policies, research and curriculum changes, new bureaucracies, and administrative changes intended to promote DEI policies.”
According to Dr. Wood:
A recent study by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) reported that 21.5 percent of all colleges and universities in a survey already have DEI criteria embedded in tenure standards, and another 38.9 percent have such criteria “under consideration.” At large universities, the trend is even more pronounced, with 45.6 percent already imposing such standards and another 35.5 percent considering them—a total of 81.1 percent.
Now you can see what we are truly up against. Over 80 percent of large universities are making DEI one of the primary components involved with professors gaining tenure. There are solutions put forth by Dr. Wood, however given how embedded DEI is in the culture and operations of colleges and universities, it would seem to be an uphill battle.
Dr. Wood suggests one means to foment an antidote to all of this would be to commission an Academic Institutional Audit of “wokeness” projects—DEI/CRT/ESG projects within institutions. He suggests encouraging and protecting whistleblowers and victims of what he calls the “DEI/CRT tyranny.”
He notes that it is his belief that DEI and CRT administrative changes violate at a minimum the First, Fourth, Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, in addition to the “fundamental basis for the anti-discrimination provisions of civil rights legislation.”
Dr. Wood writes, quoting a law professor, that the “fight against CRT is a fight for national survival. Fighting it involves “banning mandatory DEI/CRT training, evaluations, demanding transparency, creating a counter bureaucracy, and gearing funding to penalize DEI/CRT persistence.”
He also suggests vocational and training schools as an alternative to colleges and universities, noting they typically avoid political agendas as a rule and would serve as a “good alternative” to higher education.
Higher education, he says, “should be liberal in spirit but conservative and evidence based in method.”
The garbage being pushed by people such as Rogers and Jones, while being “noisy” and dominating the national conversation, are what is referred to as a “True Believer authoritarian cult.”
Dr. Wood concludes with the probability that the anti-racist agenda will do nothing to move the country in a positive direction, but rather the polar opposite:
“It prepares students to live in fear, resentment, and recrimination in a society dominated by manipulative elite[s]. We look to our elected leaders to stop these developments now, before the damage of so-called anti-racism becomes irreparable.”
It might already be so.
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