Maths teacher Paul Rossi shares his experience of “anti-racism training” at a Manhattan high school, during which he questioned the alleged imperative to foreground each student’s racial identity, and questioned the value of racialising human attributes – including the claim that “objectivity” is somehow a characteristic of “white supremacy”:

When my questions were shared outside this forum [a mandatory, racially segregated Zoom meeting], violating the school norm of confidentiality, I was informed by the head of the high school that my philosophical challenges had caused “harm” to students, given that these topics were “life and death matters, about people’s flesh and blood and bone.” I was reprimanded… He further informed me that I had created “dissonance for vulnerable and unformed thinkers” and “neurological disturbance in students’ beings and systems.” The school’s director of studies added that my remarks could even constitute harassment.

And then the strange became stranger, one might say sinister.

Update:

Very much related. Or, Knowing That It’s Creepy And Immoral, And Harmful To Children, And Doing It Anyway.

We’ve been here before, of course, on more than one occasion.

John Sexton at Hot Air: 

Elisa Parrett teaches at a public technical college outside of Seattle called the Lake Washington Institute of Technology. Last June 19, in the wake of the death of George Floyd, the school held an event called Courageous Conversations which was based partly on Robin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility. 

In short, a two-hour racial struggle session based on stupefying woo. 

Dr Parrett used the session, attended by close to 200 educators, to air some fairly obvious concerns, regarding tribalism, zealotry, and the racially segregated nature of the gathering, speaking for a total of four minutes. A summary of Dr Parrett’s comments can be found at the link above and here, where Jesse Singal shares a longer, more detailed account. Readers are invited to search out anything particularly scandalous.

Five days later, Parrett got an email from President Amy Morrison… It read in part, “Because of your egregious behaviour which has led to substantial harm to hundreds of colleagues on campus, I have asked [Vice President of Instruction, Suzanne] Ames, Dean Doug Emory, and [executive director of H.R.] Meena Park to meet with you in the next few days to have a serious conversation about how successful you can possibly be on campus in the future.” Two days later, Parrett was placed on administrative leave… A disciplinary complaint was filed against Parrett by the vice president… The complaint alleged Parrett had behaved in a “corrupt, insolent and insubordinate manner.”

And because this is Clown World, where there’s always more,

When [Jesse] Singal emailed the Vice President about the story, she doubled down and claimed that Parrett had been “aggressively yelling at folks in the meeting.” At the time, she was apparently unaware that Singal had the audio of the entire session. When he sent her a copy and asked her to point out where Parrett had yelled at anyone, a university spokesperson suggested Parrett’s “visible anger” wasn’t conveyed by the audio.

It was, it seems, a kind of aggressive yelling that was radiated at inaudible frequencies and which therefore cannot be captured by mortal recording devices.

It’s impossible to envision a world without race for the Democratic Party. For such people, it’s impossible to envision a world that gets beyond race because their bread and butter, their bottom line, their raison d'être, and everything that they’re trying to do depends upon people being kept in these boxes.

Professor Glenn Loury.

Martin Durkin’s new documentary, The Great American Race Game.

Mr Durkin’s films, which I strongly recommend, have been mentioned before.

Also, open thread.

Apparently, the way to “help our black students develop positive racial identity” is to ensure that as many of them as possible leave academia sounding uneducated – indeed, unintelligent – and unable to write in an adult manner, and therefore have trouble finding employment, thus leading to plenty of exploitable resentment. I paraphrase, of course, though not by much.

Dr Asao Inoue, whose “research focusses on antiracist and social justice theory,” and whose scholarly insights include “destroy grading,” and “standards… are white supremacist,” has been mentioned here before. As when we learned that grading a student’s ability to convey their thoughts in writing – and to formulate thoughts by writing – is merely a manifestation of “white language supremacy,” an allegedly lethal phenomenon, and therefore to be abandoned in the name of, and I quote, “inclusive excellence.”

Rejecting “white racial habits of language” will, it seems, result in some kind of righteous emancipation, the particulars of which remain somewhat unclear. However, students sufficiently credulous to internalise this pernicious woo may find that their liberation – from being articulate and in possession of their thoughts – evaporates on contact with life beyond the campus. By which time, of course, those tuition cheques will have been cashed.

Update, via the comments:

The assumptions on which this woo is piled are both perverse and laughably impractical. If the broader population regards being inarticulate and unable to write clearly and precisely as warning signs – say, in terms of employing university graduates – then that’s unlikely to change. People will make those kinds of judgments widely and for the foreseeable future. They are not generally wrong to do so. A job application littered with basic errors of spelling and grammar, and which has evidently not been proof-read, is sending a message. One that will be detected and responded to accordingly.

And encouraging university students, would-be intellectuals, to give potential employers the impression that no education has in fact taken place – and that they don’t much care whether they are clearly understood by anyone outside of their immediate social circle – doesn’t seem likely to achieve much of anything, beyond a cycle of failure and disaffection, and more self-flattering fantasies of racial persecution. It’s certainly an odd measure of “compassion,” a term of which pointed use is made. Stripped of woke pretensions, Dr Inoue is encouraging students to waste their time, and money, and prospects, by shouting at the rain.

Noah Carl on fashionable indignation versus probity and thinking: 

There are several things to notice here. First, the signatories use the word ‘revisits’ – rather than say ‘examines’ or ‘investigates’ – to imply that the theories in question have already been disproved, and hence that [economic historian, Gregory] Clark is engaged in some sort of futile exercise. Second, so far as I’m aware, ‘naturalization’ refers to the process of becoming a citizen of another country. I presume the signatories meant ‘naturalization’ in the sense of “nature versus nurture,” but it’s a very odd word to use. Third, the signatories refer to the “vast amount of research” that supposedly refutes Clark’s thesis, but don’t actually bother to cite any.

The unhappy signatories do, however, mention race and racism repeatedly – as, it seems, is the custom – despite the offending paper referring to race precisely zero times. 

Not entirely unrelated.*

Regarding the above, it occurs to me that if people are obliged, on pain of social exclusion and near-immediate career destruction, to mouth pieties that are illogical, blatantly question-begging, and which jar with observable reality, this will tend to result in an erosion of probity, a habit of pretence, and perhaps a kind of neuroticism.

Speaking of academic standards, an Ohio resident shares her displeasure with woke educators and their niche preoccupations: 

“Now, the residents with kids who did find out about your deviant curriculum, they pulled their kids out as fast as they could. More are withdrawing their kids because the school has lost control of the classroom environment,” she said. She took a moment to collect her thoughts, and then went on to say that “in the document for critical race theory, the stated goal is to make children activists in their own home. What does that mean?” She asked. “Why are you trying to create an adversarial relationship between parents and child when that is the relationship that needs to be strengthened?”

And somewhat related, Christopher F Rufo shares a conference for North Carolina’s public school teachers: 

At the first session, “Whiteness in Ed Spaces,” school administrators provided two handouts on the “norms of whiteness.” These documents claimed that “(white) cultural values” include “denial,” “fear,” “blame,” “control,” “punishment,” “scarcity,” and “one-dimensional thinking.” […]