Do you have Whiteness?

 Mark Charalambous

“Existential threat” is a much overused term. But what is about to be unleashed on the nation’s schoolchildren is the real deal.

No, I’m not talking about authoritarian vaccine and mask mandates. I’m talking about the cultural epidemic of “wokeism” currently sweeping the country, infecting every single institution in our nation, from the arts to the military.

As a result of the BLM/Antifa riots of last year, most schools have been working furiously over the summer assembling “anti-racism” programs for their teachers and staff under the auspices of recently minted Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) regimes.

The “equity” in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion supersedes the tired notion of “equality.” Just a couple of letters, but a whole world of a difference. We all agreed a long time ago that everyone should be treated equally. Equality under the law is one of the cornerstones of Western democracy. Equality recognizes that everyone should play by the same rules. It strives for a laudable goal: meritocracy.

DEI looks at results and sees glaring racial disparities. It holds that these disparities must be due to systemic racism. It mandates that the outcomes must be equal. This is a very different kettle of fish than demanding equality of access.

Built upon Critical Race Theory (CRT), these teaching paradigms are being implemented in every nook and cranny of the educational system. All departments from the humanities and social sciences through to mathematics and the physical sciences, are being purged of their racist foundations and “de-colonized.”

“Whiteness,” “white privilege, and “white fragility” are some of the operational thought contagions of CRT. “Whiteness” is both the physical racial characteristic that those of the “melanin deficient” community exhibit, as well as a cultural construct that exists apart from the people unfortunate to be afflicted with it from birth. These are some of its toxic qualities: self-reliance, emphasis on scientific method, nuclear family, quantitative emphasis, hard work being the key to success, work before play, respect for authority, majority rules, be polite, etc.

These dreadful behaviors and beliefs are now topics of academic inquiry, as if this was actually some kind of legitimate field of study. Don’t look now, but your child’s teachers have been trained in this racist cultural demagoguery. Many parents discovered it by accident last year during school lockdowns when they happened to look in on their kid’s Zoom class. They are outraged that their children are coming home from school being told that they are oppressors if they are White, and victims of systemic racism if they are Black or Brown. What a message for the latter: if you failed a math test, it’s not your fault! You are systemically oppressed by a racist math pedagogy.

What is happening in our schools is incredibly divisive. It is the reason why many parents are raising holy hell at school board meetings across the country, and rightfully so.

Two names that are frequently associated with the DEI/CRT movement are Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi. The former is the author of a book that is guaranteed to have been on every teacher’s mandated summer reading list, “White Fragility.” In a recent interview, DiAngelo described the moment of epiphany when she discovered her “whiteness”:

“I… It was a very abstract sense. I honestly believe I was 34 years old. I was college educated. I was a parent… umm… and someone handed me Peggy McIntosh’s article (a Wellesley College academic). And I read through that list and I had an out-of-body experience. I could tell you where I was sitting.

“I… I’m not ever going to forget that moment where all of a sudden I was like, “Oh my God... I’m white!” And I felt so loudly white that I remember being hesitant to go outside. I don’t want to go outside, because everybody could see that I was white.”

That is how someone might describe receiving a cancer test result. “Whiteness”… a disease.

If, as with Robin DiAngelo, this hatred is self-directed, does that somehow excuse it? Exactly what twisted psychological need—or mental illness—can explain this self-othering?

Ibram X Kendi might be called the Louis Farrakhan of academia. This Boston University professor was celebrated as one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in 2020, and is, like DiAngelo, a campus darling raking in tons of money doing the college guest speaker circuit. He proposes the creation of a Department of Anti-Racism to be promulgated by an “anti-racist amendment” to the Constitution. This soviet style, Central Committee-like agency would be “comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees,” and needless to say would operate impervious to any electoral oversight. These commissars would be responsible for “preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity,” further, to “monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas… empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.”

Whatever happened to taking people at face-value? What about judging people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin? Of what value is the vaunted wisdom accrued from academic credentials and innumerous professional development credits if our teachers succumb so easily to such pseudo-scientific racist drivel?

It is so sad to reflect on the pivotal role that public education once played in preparing youth for participation in the civics of the Great American Experiment while providing the passport to prosperity for all Americans (especially immigrants)—and to now bear witness to this perversion of its purpose. To wit: the deconstruction of our history and culture and the disembowelment of all societal norms, traditions and values.

Our schools have lost their “mandate from heaven.” A great swathe of normal Americans are reaching these same conclusions and voting with their feet, rejecting their schools and teacher-union “family values,” stripping them of their power to corrupt their children, and moving away from Democrat-controlled states and urban centers where these poisonous policies have found fertile breeding ground.

###

Two Plus Two Equals Five: 1984 or Math "Equity"?

Mark Charalambous

“Equality” is so sixties. Insufficient—and indeed, wrong—by the new calculus of “equity.” Equality of opportunity has failed to produce equal outcomes. The only possible explanation is… systemic racism. Hence, the replacement of equality—which implies nothing about equal outcomes—with equity, which does.

What might be unthinkable to past champions of civil rights such as MLK has now been normalized. Skin color as a valid discretionary criterion is promoted not only by the usual suspects in academe, but also by their comrades in Hollywood and mainstream media. Naysayers are “de-platformed”—i.e. silenced—by the woke oligarchs of social media whose control over the public square have made them the ultimate arbiters of reality.

And now, the “decolonization” of the liberal arts in academia breaches the once-sacred halls of mathematics.

For those with no idea what this is about, a movement is afoot across the country to transform education as we know it. A radical thought contagion, Critical Race Theory, has taken hold of the Brahmins of higher ed., those who determine the shape of education in your child’s classroom. Whites, we are told (no further derivative of national origin or ethnicity is required—color of skin is sufficient), wield an imperialist, white supremacist worldview which bulldozes over the timeworn fabric of other,  “oppressed” cultures, creating a “systemically racist” educational system in its own image.

A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction, a training guide for math teachers developed in California, seeks to redirect all facets of mathematics pedagogy through a transformation matrix of “dismantling racism in mathematical instruction.” Math teachers are instructed to “engage, reflect, plan and act” to dismantle white supremacy culture in math classrooms, and become “anti-racist” math teachers.

The introductory paragraph to the first of the five components in the “toolkit” (“Stride 1: Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction”) explains its purpose.

“The framework for deconstructing racism in mathematics offers essential characteristics of antiracist math educators and critical approaches to dismantling white supremacy in math classrooms by visibilizing the toxic characteristics of white supremacy culture with respect to math.”

More edu-speak jargon follows:

“In order to embody antiracist math education, teachers must engage in critical praxis that interrogates the ways in which they perpetuate white supremacy culture in their own classrooms, and develop a plan toward antiracist math education to address issues of equity for Black, Latinx, and multilingual students.”

How does “white supremacy infiltrate math classrooms”? The toolkit includes these examples:

·         “Getting the ‘right’ answer”

You may have thought getting the right answer to a math problem was important… like, that was the whole idea? But you would be wrong:

“The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so. Up­holding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict.”

·         Students are required to “show their work”

This tried-and-true method to determine a student’s mathematical reasoning ability (as well as to preclude cheating) is, we are told, evidence of white supremacy culture:

“Asking students to show their work … becomes a crutch for teachers seeking to understand what students are thinking and less of a tool for students in learning how to process… requiring students to show their work reinforces worship of the written word as well as paternalism.”

·         “Addressing mistakes”

Even correcting errors comes under fire:

“Teachers often treat mistakes as problems by equating them with wrongness, rather than treating them [as] opportunities for learning—which reinforces the ideas of perfectionism (that students shouldn’t make mistakes) and paternalism (teachers or other experts can and should correct mistakes).”

·          “Teachers are teachers and students are students”

Recognizing the different roles teacher and student play in the learning process “reinforces the ideas of paternalism and powerhoarding. When students bring a different approach to doing math, teachers often get defensive and see it as a challenge to the power structures in the classroom.”

Instead, the training directs the teacher to “Learn to shift your position to a facilitator, rather than a knowledge giver, by having someone observe your classroom specifically to identify the way that power is distributed.”

That last instruction is ominously reminiscent of communist re-education camps where Red Guards preside over the indoctrination of the “bourgeoisie.”

This intent is further reinforced in the “Reflect” sections where teachers are required to fill in “Reflection Notes” in response to prompts such as: “In what ways have I incorporated antiracist practices into my classroom? How can I incorporate more antiracist practices into my classroom? Do I see myself as the holder of authority in my classroom? In what ways can this power imbalance affect students’ ability to learn math? How do I or can I share the classroom’s authority and autonomy with students?” and tellingly, “ _________________ will hold me accountable for this plan in the following ways:”

The teacher-training component of the training is explicitly addressed in the Stride 5 component, “Sustaining Equitable Practice.” The compliance directions read like an instructional manual for 1984’s Thought Police or something devised by L. Ron Hubbard.

* * *

The modern history of education in the U.S. has been the march of one pedagogic theory after another, usually purposed to address long-standing disparities in educational achievement by Blacks. The “self-esteem” fad lasted for decades before common sense finally set in. Next, the “multiple intelligences” and “learning styles” theories to explain embarrassing race-differentiated standardized test results. More recently we have the whimsical “flipping” the classroom. In algebra, there’s been movements to re-focus the introductory teaching through application problems first (not as the dreaded word problems that come at the end of the exercise set), rather than starting with the nuts-and-bolts teaching of the grammar of algebra. More often than not such “new” reforms revert back to the previous mode once the novelty has worn off or the grant has run out, and enough time has elapsed. There's a good reason why the college campus has become the national joke that half the country still doesn't get.

Despite their intent, these “reforms” usually end up just further dumbing-down educational standards. (If you don’t believe this, compare primary and secondary school math tests over the last 150 years or so.) But the equity movement’s anti-racist math is far more destructive. None of the previous reform movements specifically targeted one segment of the population, singling them out as villains directly responsible for the failures of others. That many of the people promoting the demonization of “whiteness” are themselves self-othering Whites does nothing to diminish its malignancy.

* * *

Critical Race Theory’s infiltration into the curricula requires discrimination. By race. Yes, by that crudest of measuring rods: color of skin. Consider Columbia U.’s six different identity-dependent graduation ceremonies this year. This is not unique. The segregation by race of graduation commencements, dormitories, freshmen orientations and more is becoming the new normal on campuses across the nation. Apply large angular momentum to the grave of MLK.

This new zeitgeist is some unholy paradoxical combination of diversity-worship with pure racial scapegoating. The woke Left has, indeed, made everything “all about race.” The guiding light of anti-racist teaching is Ibram X. Kendi, a celebrated author and academician who has made a nifty business out of it and is referenced throughout Pathway. He believes literally everything is racist. According to Kendi’s celebrated best-seller, How to Be an Anti-Racist, “there is no such thing as a not-racist idea, only racist ideas and antiracist ideas.” Thoughts inform ideas, and in the realm of government, ideas inform policies. “Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity,” he claims.

Kendi’s hatred of whites is so deep he confesses to once believing they were aliens. His totalitarian worldview presents a terrifying Stalinist vision of a future for the U.S. where a Department of Anti-Racism promulgated by an anti-racist amendment to the Constitution, “comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees,” would operate impervious to any electoral oversight. It would be responsible for “preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity,” further, to “monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas… empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.”

Kendi proudly admits that affirmative action is inherently discriminatory—and justified: “racial discrimination is not inherently racist.” How’s this for Orwellian ‘doublespeak’: “The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity. If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist. . . The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

Orwell’s 1984 redux:

“Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past.”

Kendi is a professor at Boston University, a #1 New York Times best-selling author and celebrated as one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in 2020. Sadly, what he is selling, Americans are clearly buying.

These racial-equity-in-education programs are in the works across the country. Here in Massachusetts, Professional Development Institute on Racial Equity in Pedagogy and Practice is currently in development by the Department of Higher Ed and UMass-Boston.

The reflexive property of mathematics holds that a thing is equal to itself. Ibram Kendi is a racist. A Pathway to Equitable Mathematics Instruction is racist; as are any efforts to deconstruct and “de-colonize” “white supremacist mathematics.” Stop it now.

# # #

  

Transgenderism and Women's Sports: Rubber, meet road

 by Marcus Clintonius Americus

The movement to permit transgender women to compete in women’s athletics is on the fast track to becoming the rule of law for all, thanks to the efforts of newly elected President Joe Biden and his cabinet. Many women directly impacted are calling it a “war on women.”

The normalization of transgenderism is not about any “war on women.” There is no, and never has been, any “war on women” in modern history (herstory?). Rather, what we are seeing play out here is the inevitable consequences of an inherently self-contradictory political creed, one that contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Identity politics is by definition a political struggle between groups of people differentiated by a shared characteristic such as sex, race or religion. It is fundamentally a force of division, antagonistic to harmony-through-unity by its design.

Just as male feminists are inevitably taken down by charges of sexual harassment (can you say Matt Lauer, Bill O’Reilly, Chris Matthews, Al Franken. or the latest, Governor Cuomo?), and similarly as “woke” whites are either guilty of racism if they admit to their unconscious biases or guilty of “white fragility” if they don’t, it was inevitable that feminists, too, would eventually be hoisted on their own “sexual equality” petard.

If, as we are supposed to believe, actual biological differences between men and women cannot possibly manifest themselves in career choices, intellectual pursuits, sexual proclivities, or Legos vs. Barbie dolls… if sex is really just a social construct… then there is no reason to believe transgendered “women” have any inherent advantages over normal women. And no law or policy should dictate otherwise.

Feminists who oppose welcoming transgenders into their circles are called TERFS—Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists. Hence, the “TERF wars” raging over women’s athletics.

The inclusion of biological male “transgender” competitors turns women’s athletics, an important and consequential area of young women’s lives, upside down; and at the highest competitive levels, such as the Olympic podium, poses a true existential threat. College athletic scholarships are also at stake for girls.

These TERF wars are a signal point in the evolution of identity politics. It may be the first time that a defcon-level ideological dispute has pitted two of the three foundational victim groups against one another: women and the sexually non-conforming.

Let’s be clear about this, the actual, operational definition of intersectionality is the mutual agreement between the various “oppressed” groups as to their common enemy: White men. Intersectionality is a reminder to the “woke” of what they all share, despite any disagreements that might pop up between them; that any such differences should always be viewed through the wider lens of what unites them: the patriarchy. So put down your pitchforks, feminists and transgenders, and stay on message.

Women versus transgenders. Rubber, meet road…