Let’s Talk About Our Feelings
In an eye-widening article that I recommend reading in full, Paul Sperry takes a look at ‘progressive’ education policy and its consequences:
Thanks to talking circles and peer juries, “young people are now taking control of the environment,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan gushed in a 2014 speech to black students at Howard University. “It’s sort of a counter-intuitive thing for many of us as adults, but the more we give up power, the more we empower others, often the better things are,” Duncan added. “And empowering teenagers to be part of the solution, having them control the [classroom] environment, control the culture, be the leaders, listening to them, respecting them — when we do that, wonderful things happen for kids in communities that didn’t happen historically.”
Just weeks after “empowering teenagers,” San Diego public schools witnessed a surge in violent assaults.
A development repeated elsewhere, in Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Oakland, Santa Ana and Syracuse, and all of which is no doubt bewildering to such educators as Eric Butler, a “restorative justice co-ordinator,” whose prideful mantra is “I don’t blame, I don’t punish.”
How very generous of him.
After a black high-school boy repeatedly punched his teacher in the face, sending her to the emergency room, the teacher, who is white, was advised by the assistant principal not to press charges. The administrator lectured her about how hard it is for young black men to overcome a criminal record. Worse, she was told she should examine what role she, “as a white woman” holding unconscious racial biases, played in the attack…
A white sixth-grade teacher at a mostly black Washington, DC, school told the US Commission on Civil Rights she had similar “conversations” in which she was told that the bad behaviour of black boys is mainly the teacher’s fault. “I have been encouraged to examine and question how my own racial dispositions affect my teaching and my students,” Andrea Smith testified. During cultural sensitivity training required of school districts under restorative justice programmes, teachers are told they are largely to blame for bad behaviour of black students because they “misinterpret” African-American culture.
Via Darleen Click, who asks,
I’m sorry, but exactly how does one misinterpret a punch to the face?
Answers on a postcard, please.
Don’t you realise that this is where the new enlightenment will come from. By empowering “the youth” and transforming white supremacist standards of education and logic we are facilitating a new kind of Western civilization. An improvement on the dead white men of the past. Let me quote renowned philosopher Piddy Dawg
“Unh yea! Unh no nigga! Unh yea! No mans can laugh at me coz my crew gone uncheck you! Unh yea! White supremacy yea! Nigga don’t stare! Yea! And I pull out my gatt, rat-tat brapp brrapp. Why must police always brutalize me. My Glock at da ready shaklack klack! Yea!”
Incredibly profound stuff I’m sure you will agree
This slow train has been approaching the station for many, many years. To call it out many years ago was paranoia and grounds for questioning the critics’s rationality. Even today, one dare not bring it up in meat space even in context. Letting such concerns concern you can get you medication. Nothing to be seen here, so let’s all just move along.. But I repeat myself.
As you quite rightly point out, people can criticise this deadly nonsense behind the anonymity of the internet but to raise these concerns in the real world is practically impossible. It is practically impossible even for a black man. Just look at the treatment of heretics like Bill Cosby or Trevor Phillips.
I grew up with many wonderful black friends and peers and do my best to gently and politely question the assumption that they are oppressed. I have lost a few friends in the process. But my un-anonymous critique consists of nothing more than gently pointing out that the UK’s legal and cultural landscape is incredibly pc, tolerant, multiracial, multicultural and liberal. In fact I constantly point out that it is one of the most liberal and anti racist societies on planet earth and in history and that our police are a soft touch compared to majority black police forces anywhere in the world from Africa to Detroit so are they sure they really are oppressed?
As I said this has lost me some friends both black and white but I am doing nothing more than arguing for the good liberal, multicultural orthodoxy in the UK being evidence of progress.
I doubt I would still be friends with anyone if I began honestly critiquing hyper masculine ghetto culture or quoting black crime rates with regards to police attention on young black men and their subsequent incarceration rates.
It’s one thing to sing the praises of liberal Western democracy but to criticise black people and culture and suggest personal responsibility as opposed to blaming the invisible oppression of the white man is unthinkable.
Even if you are saying these things because you genuinely care about black people, even if you are black and saying these things because you care so much it hurts. It’s unsayable, unthinkable…… It’s thought crime and you will be punished
The data for the Add Health [survey] is largely self-reported
That struck me as telling.
How come it’s not known as the “honesty and self-awareness” gene? 😉
Yes. But it’s not limited to black/white, it is also male/female, public educator/taxpayer, union/right-to-work, etc., though at a lower intensity.
Though at base, such is simply human society trying to be functional. One can find it in conservative US political infighting as well. The scary part is we (should) know so much more today, education is much more widely distributed. The potential for breaking the cycle has never been so great. Yet we have before us a PC tribalism that is insulated from thinking and dealing with the problem thanks to the very education system that makes the aforementioned potential possible. Which itself becomes a feedback loop to create an Orwellian society.
Kudos to you for not breing afraid to broach the subject. It’s a very, very fine line twixt getting the point across and being dismissed as either an asshole or a fool.
Why do ‘racial justice’ warriors sound just like good old-fashioned racists?
Not entirely unrelated.
Thank you.
I think it is a highly effective tactic -when critiquing assertions about systemic racism and white supremacy/privilege- to merely focus on the sheer historically unheard of levels of tolerance and liberalism in the West. Rather than start treading the precarious waters of crime rates, ghetto culture and or immigration.
It really is difficult for anyone to assert that the British police and peoples are uniquely oppressive and bigoted to non white people when it is patently obvious that the British police and legal system is one of the gentlest in the world and in history.
Unless they are willing to argue that they think they would be safer, more prosperous and freer from the dangers of state sponsored violence -and or the random violence of civilians- on the streets of Caracas, Cairo or Cape Town than they would be in Camden or Chigwell they really don’t have a legitimate claim to being uniquely oppressed and persecuted by British society.
If the alternatives to oppression are worse it really isn’t oppression is it?
If the UK were truly that racist and oppressive surely our black neighbours should be clamouring to move to Africa or the Middle East yet the opposite is true. People in Africa and the ME want in to our societies and hardly any Western people of colour want out.
I’m not sure but I would hazard a guess that white emigration surpasses black emigration by a wide margin. If that is the case, how could that be if the West is set up to crush black people and reward white people? If that were the case it would be idiocy for white people to leave and masochism for black people to stay.
Anyway just focusing on the question of whether one would prefer their son to be stopped and searched by a white unarmed officer of the MET or an armed black officer in Detroit or by Harare’s finest, that usually opens up a chink in the “systemic oppression” narrative. This can be done without putting one in the cross-hairs for an erroneous accusation of racism.
I saw that one earlier David. In fact a large proportion of the unambiguous acts of out and out racism and sexism which I have seen circulating on social media over the past few years have turned out to have been instigated by social justice warriors trying to “raise awareness”
There just aren’t enough racists to meet demand
Why do ‘racial justice’ warriors sound just like good old-fashioned racists?
Recently I’ve wondered whether the worst, most bigotted racist bastards in the USA who want to see blacks disenfranchised, humiliated, and doomed to remain an underclass forever could have come up with a more effective strategy than the current combination of education, welfare, and drug laws. I doubt it.