The Patriot Post® · BLM: Coming to a School Near You
“If you as a teacher have not committed to doing the work of understanding your internal racism, implicit bias, and prejudice, you are complicit in the deaths of Black people, and people of color broadly, across the nation. If you are not committed to the work of being actively anti-racist, you are complicit in validating the physical and spiritual murders of Black men, women, and children daily. If you espouse the ideology of colorblindness and champion the myth of meritocracy, you are complicit in the vilification and denigration of Black people in this country.”
These are the words of one Shannon R. Waite, a clinical assistant professor of educational leadership at Fordham University, and they appeared earlier this month in Education Week’s “Classroom Q&A” blog. We share them as both a call to action and a warning — because this is the Black Lives Matter curriculum, and it’s likely coming to a school near you.
Make no mistake: BLM is on a roll. What was once a radical fringe organization with support from just 27% of Americans is now viewed favorably by 57% of U.S. adults. And in the wake of the George Floyd riots, it’s raking in money at a stunning rate: $40 million from Nike; $100 each million from Apple, Walmart, Sony Music, and Warner Music; and a whopping $400 million from Pepsi. That money, in turn, is often being funneled to Democrat candidates and causes.
Just imagine what an educational agenda like this could do with money like that.
Max Eden, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, sounded the alarm in City Journal a couple of weeks ago with an article titled, “There is no apolitical classroom.”
“School will be a very different place next year,” he wrote. “Classes will be less full. Desks will be rigorously sterilized. And, if the education establishment has its way, teachers will be aggressively ‘woke.’”
Eden’s headline, and its point about the nonexistence of the “apolitical” classroom, is an ominous one. What he means is that schools and their leaders will be pressured to choose between racism on the one side and “anti-racism” on the other. No neutrality. Fundamental decency and fairness will no longer be sufficient; if you’re not actively fighting racism, then you’re “complicit” in it.
What does “anti-racism” sound like? Our sense is that it’s pretty shrill and peppered with question marks and exclamation points. Take, for example, anti-racist “expert” Lorena German, who chairs the Committee on Anti-Racism for the National Council on the Teaching of English. On May 30, at the height of our nation’s civil unrest, she took her colleagues to task: “Educators: what are you burning? Your White-centered curriculum? The Amy Cooper next door? Your anti-Black behavior policies? The school’s racist policies? Your racist a— principal? The funding for the police in schools vs counselors? WHAT ARE YOU BURNING???!!?!?!?!?”
The incendiary rhetoric isn’t limited to the experts like German, either. The AASA, the School Superintendent’s Association, is a professional organization with 13,000 members and an executive director, Daniel Domenech, who issues statements like this: “We are living at a time of obscene inequities and merely trying to compensate is not enough. Equity is more than making things more accessible and AASA’s work on equity must go further and become actively anti-racist. … Now is the time for all educational leaders to intensify our commitment to address inequities and work to dismantle [wait for it] systemic racism.”
“Give me four years to teach the children,” Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the founder of Russian communism, is attributed with saying, “and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”
Comrade Lenin may have died in 1924, but his words are as lively today as ever, especially within the Black Lives Matter movement. “We’re trained organizers,” said BLM founder Patrisse Cullors in 2015. “We are trained Marxists. We are super versed on ideological theories.”
Gary Bauer detailed BLM’s grotesquely anti-American ideology earlier this month, noting that not even the Obama administration would take its policy prescriptions seriously just a few years ago.
Times have changed, though. If you’re a concerned parent, don’t wait until August to contact your school’s superintendent or principal. By then, it’ll be too late.