“The kids don’t even want this stuff,” says [high-school English teacher, Kali] Fontanilla, noting that the ethnic studies course replaced a much more popular health class – in the midst of a pandemic, no less. “Most of them are just like, ‘Why do we have to take this class?’”

Robby Soave on when classroom race-hustling doesn’t impress the kids

As the classroom in question is in Salinas, California, where the children in question are overwhelmingly Hispanic, and therefore supposedly oppressed, and supposedly hungry for “critical race theory,” you can imagine the complications. It turns out that when Hispanic children turn up to learn English as a second language, they’re not overly thrilled to find their time being spent on “institutional, internalised, ideological, and interpersonal oppression.” Or at being told that, on account of not being white, they may suffer from “intergenerational trauma.” Or spending class time on a “privilege quiz,” in which they must rank their imagined victimhood, while comparing “intersectional rainbows.”

However, the disaffection of supposed beneficiaries seems unlikely to deter adult enthusiasts.

Beginning with the class of 2030, all public high school students in California will now have enrol in the same sort of course that Fontanilla’s students already took.

Ms Fontanilla, who happens to be black, isn’t impressed either. Cultivating victimhood and racial resentment is not, she feels, an ideal use of her students’ time, or indeed her own. Believing that parents had a right to know exactly what their children are being taught, she wrote a letter of protest to the school board. It was read aloud during a meeting at which parents were present:

“I do not appreciate constantly being pandered to and treated differently because of the colour of my skin, especially since I did not have the freedom to not go along with it,” Fontanilla wrote, warning that the curriculum was an attempt at left-wing indoctrination. The statement elicited cheers from other parents attending the meeting. In response, the school board prohibited anti-CRT comments at its next public gathering.

And if the air of somewhat creepy condescension isn’t sufficiently obvious,

[Fontanilla] recalls that during the summer of 2020, in the midst of the George Floyd protests, the Salinas administration informed its black teachers – Fontanilla included – that they would be honoured with a gift… [It] included an “I Love Being Black” sticker, and a letter with an ancient African greeting that “acknowledges the god in me and stuff like that.” “It was just so weird,” she says.

Worth reading in full, I think. Oh, and if the dynamic sounds vaguely familiar, you may be thinking of this

Update, via the comments:

Julia adds, “Brave lady. You just know she’s going to suffer for her heresy, don’t you?”

Indeed:

While she has received much praise for speaking out, Fontanilla has also endured considerable online harassment, including threats of violence. One told her to “have fun being a token black friend to racist conservatives your whole life.”

“They’re all basically white liberals,” she says of the harassers.

Fontanilla had already decided that she could not remain a teacher in the school district; she and her husband decided to move to Florida, where she hoped to find a better job.

You see, being so progressive, so unassailably righteous, they’re threatening violence against a black woman for disliking classroom racism. Specifically, a pernicious racial conspiracy theory that is taught to children as if it belonged in the same factual world as the date of the Moon landing or the atomic structure of palladium.

Oh, and if the idea of parents being actively deceived by leftist educators and administrators seems implausible, too fanciful to consider, then you have some catching up to do. Attempts to mislead parents, including bare-faced lies, aren’t exactly hard to find. It seems to me that when every middle and high school principal in a district is told to fabricate a fake curriculum so as to deceive parents, and thereby hide the indoctrination taking place – as happened in Rockwood, Missouri – then there’s a serious problem. To say the least.

And when the very same educators – the ones lying to parents about what’s actually going on in class – refer to “our children,” the term has rather presumptuous, indeed sinister, connotations. 




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