In the clown-shoe world of San Francisco public schools, honking ensues:

The director of the district’s arts department told local ABC7 news that a decision has been made to change the name of their department, “VAPA,” which is short for visual and performing arts. The new name will be SFUSD Arts Department. “We are prioritising antiracist arts instruction in our work,” the director, Sam Bass, told the network.

I’ll give you a moment to process the notion of “antiracist arts instruction” and how one might prioritise this feat over more mundane matters. Say, encouraging competence. To say nothing of students of the visual and performing arts who apparently struggle with the words visual, performing and arts.

“The use of so many acronyms within the educational field often tends to alienate those who may not speak English to understand the acronym.”

At which point, readers unmoved by wokeness may be inclined to point out that a way to overcome alienation – here, it seems, a euphemism for ignorance – is via students learning things, perhaps even words. Which is, I gather, what takes place in schools, theoretically, even those in San Francisco.

However, the fretful and enlightened educators wish us to know that unremarkable terms that are not “proactively chosen” by minority students – including departmental acronyms – are “damaging” and “oppressive,” and actually a symptom of “white supremacy culture” and “white supremacy thinking.” Albeit in ways not entirely obvious, and in an environment where the imagined feelings of non-white students, or those who claim to speak on their behalf, seemingly trump those of everyone else.

And if a punchline seems in order:

It was not clear whether SFUSD was also considered a racist acronym.

Via Darleen.

According to the student activists, to disagree with any part of their agenda is to admit to racism.

Christopher F Rufo on the pantomime politics of spoiled children: 

Keep in mind that [The United Nations International School] is the school of choice for the world’s elites, teaching the children of diplomats and leading figures in international banking, finance, technology, and business at a cost of up to $44,000 a year. The school’s political climate was already thoroughly liberal and progressive… The dynamics at this bastion of elite progressivism reveal something important about the American political environment. The children of the most privileged people on the planet have donned the mantle of oppression to satisfy their moral narcissism and to exercise power over their elders. The adults, crippled with anxiety about any threat to their status, immediately bow to anonymous teenagers leading an online mob.

Needless to say, the well-heeled youngsters have eagerly embraced the buzzwords of woke status, such that “intersectionality” trips off the tongue, and standards and expectations are to be “decolonised.” The school must, we’re informed, “revolutionise the curriculum.”

Judging by the various demands and hyperbolical Instagram posts, it seems we’re expected to believe that the wealthy and statusful are paying $44,000 a year to have their own children abused by “oppressors,” that any kind of “disparity” is proof of bigotry, and that having one’s phonetically unobvious name mispronounced, even once, is “thinly-veiled racism” and a form of “racial trauma.” A trauma inflicted by “the white man’s mouth.”

Faced with an upsurge of opportunist theatre – and asked whether he is, as claimed, a “racist” and an “oppressor” – the school’s director, Dan Brenner, has shown all of the probity and spine one might expect. And so, the supposedly downtrodden Mao-lings behave more like aristocracy, with expectations of deference and impunity, as if they were entirely unaccustomed to be being told no. 

Via Nikw211, who adds,

If this is how, as children and adolescents, they are capable of treating people whose names they know, whose faces they recognise, and who they interact with on a regular basis, just imagine the kind of crude, stunted stuff that will have to pass for something like empathy when they inevitably move into the ranks of elite influencers in business and politics.

And they will have learned so much from ‘progressive’ educators.

“There were so many students who came into the school with no preparation for the conversation about race or racism. They knew nothing about white privilege and white supremacy,” social policy professor Amy Hillier said.

It’s a dental school, by the way. For dentists.  

It occurs to me that if you’re brandishing the terms “white privilege” and “white supremacy,” and invoking “implicit bias” as if it weren’t laughable woo, such that the indoctrinated must “come to understand” foregone conclusions, it doesn’t sound much like a conversation. More a series of begged questions, whereby some people can be deemed guilty or complicit by virtue of their skin colour.

And yet, if you plan to be a dentist and attend the University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine, it seems you must first submit to condescension and insults, and accusations of being either a bigot or an enabler of bigotry, based solely on unchangeable aspects of your appearance. Because apparently you can’t do dentistry without the weird political woo of dogmatic parasites who’ve managed to insert themselves into yet another sphere of life.

For newcomers and the forgetful, two items from the archives:

The Blurting. 

A leftist compulsion is pondered.

A more subtle and common example occurred in January, when the family headed out to a Burns Night dinner at a restaurant adjacent to the university. Before the food appeared, we were treated to a brief poetry reading courtesy of a local academic. I was tempted to roll my eyes at the prospect, but he did get the crowd in good spirits. Until a poem about food and good company was somehow given, as he put it, “a political edge.” And so, we endured a contrived reference to Brexit – implicitly very bad – and a pointed nod across the ocean to a certain president, who we were encouraged to imagine naked.

At the time, I was struck by the presumption – the belief that everyone present would naturally agree - that opposition to Brexit and a disdain of Trump were things we, the customers, would without doubt have in common… The subtext was hard to miss: “This is a fashionable restaurant and its customers, being fashionable, will obviously hold left-of-centre views, especially regarding Brexit and Trump, both of which they should disdain and wish to be seen disdaining by their left-of-centre peers.” And when you’re out to enjoy a fancy meal with friends and family, this is an odd sentiment to encounter from someone you don’t know and whose ostensible job is to make you feel welcome.

Trust Me, I’m A Witchdoctor. 

Guardian columnist denounces Western medicine as “outdated,” champions use of bush dung.

From the Times, a tale of evil seen, if you tilt your head and squint:

The three wise monkeys have been a cultural trope throughout the world for centuries as a symbol of seeing, hearing and speaking no evil. Academics at the University of York have decided that they could be seen as an oppressive racial stereotype, and pulled an image of the animals from their website to avoid offence.

Organisers of a forthcoming art history conference apologised for using the picture in their call for submissions. “Upon reflection, we strongly believe that our first poster is not appropriate as its iconology promulgates a longstanding visual legacy of oppression and exploits racist stereotypes,” they wrote. “We bring this to your attention, so that we may be held accountable for our actions and, in our privileges, do and be better.”

I doubt that doing better is on the cards, somehow. Just more of the same.

The fretful academics – who deploy the words “Orality, Aurality, Opticality and Hapticity” and then applaud themselves – claim to be concerned for the feelings of others – others who may, hypothetically, be offended, indeed oppressed, by a seventeenth century Buddhist figurine showing three helpers of the divine, and whose monkey form is a phonetic pun to speakers of Japanese. 

Readers may note that the agonising – in which any depiction of a monkey immediately conjures thoughts of black people – does rather speak to the weirdly dogmatic assumptions of the agonised, rather than the object being agonised about, or how said object is generally understood. It must be those intersectional lenses we hear so much about. Which is to say, lefties project.

Via Mr Muldoon.