As a Boston high school sophomore, Keondre McClay said he was pressured by the head of a district-sponsored youth advocacy programme to attend an overnight retreat in Newton, where white adults asked the black teenager to wrestle out his emotions on a gym mat with them. They said it would help him purge his trauma from experiencing racism.

Um. A little odd. But hey, we mustn’t judge. After all, these are progressive, caring people, tumescent with compassion for the brown-and-therefore-downtrodden. 

McClay fled to his room. Jenny Sazama, the programme leader, and other retreat participants chased after him. For more than an hour, he recalled recently, they hugged him on his bed and entreated him to return to the group “counselling” session while he hid under the covers screaming, “Please leave me alone!”

As you can see, they care an awful lot. 

When they eventually left, he locked the door, but someone got the facilities manager to unlock it. McClay called someone to help him get home at midnight. “I was, for lack of a better word, assaulted,” said McClay, now 21.

Boston Public Schools saw fit to endorse this programme of “Re-Evaluation Counselling” for fifteen years. And the counsellors declare that they are “dedicated to eliminating racism in the world,” thereby enabling “deep relationships across racial lines.” Hence, one assumes, all the chasing and screaming.

And yet they say you must gargle it.

In her blueprint, [Tigard-Tualatin School District Director of Equity and Inclusion, Zinnia Un] describes the new oppressor as an amalgamation of “whiteness,” “colour-blindness,” “individualism,” and “meritocracy”… For Un, they are the values of white society, the primary impediment to social justice.

What is the solution to pathological whiteness? According to Un and the Tigard-Tualatin School District, the answer lies with a new form of “white identity development.” In a series of “antiracist resources” provided to teachers, the Department of Equity and Inclusion includes a handful of strategies for this identity transformation… Couched in the language of professional development, the process assumes that whites are born “racist,” even if they “don’t purposely or consciously act in a racist way.”

The first step in the training document is “contact,” defined as confronting whites with “active racism or real-world experiences that highlight their whiteness.” The goal is to provoke an emotional rupture that brings the subject to the next step, “disintegration,” in which he or she feels intense “white guilt” and “white shame,” and admits: “I feel bad for being white.”

Christopher F Rufo on the indoctrination of children, and their teachers, in Portland schools.

Once suitably ashamed and disintegrated, the victim – and the word victim is entirely apt – is quizzed on whether their submission to this psychological abuse has resulted in sleep deprivation and broken relationships – these are good signs, apparently. Signs of “change-making” and “solidarity.” Of emerging wokeness.

At which point, readers may recall the openly sadistic ravings of “diversity” pioneer Jane Elliott, another psychological molester of children, and who described, with satisfaction, how one of her younger victims went from being a “brilliant, self-confident, excited little girl to a frightened, timid, uncertain little almost-person.” This state of demoralisation and neurosis – of children being manipulated and bullied, and bullied again, until they feel “discomfort, guilt, shame, embarrassment and humiliation” – is an achievement, you see. The way white children should feel – if they are to be saved.

If the prospect of eight-year-olds being told that they are “of course” racists, by definition, and that they are, on account of being white, complicit in oppression and murder… if that sounds too grotesque to actually be happening – in taxpayer-funded schools – do read Mr Rufo’s article in full.

Update, via the comments:

From the world of campus wokescolds, where innovation never ends:

The opinion editor of the Northwestern University’s student newspaper recently published an article asserting that white people walk awkwardly on sidewalks because of their internalised racism.

The editor, Kenny Allen, who is black, is quite confident on this point.

Laying out the claims by University of Richmond sociologist Bedelia Richards for determining “whether one’s university is racist” — such as which groups feel most “at home,” whose “norms, values and perspectives” are legitimated, and “who inhabits positions of power” — Allen concluded that “White people” meet most of the criteria.

A shocking twist. Feel free to gasp.

You see,

People at this predominantly White school would not move out of our way on the sidewalk. This was one of many reminders that diversity does not mean inclusion at NU.

Sadly, and perhaps oddly, no particulars or examples are offered to support this claim. Despite the alleged ubiquity, Mr Allen shares no damning anecdotes of obstinate white people failing to accommodate the brown and downtrodden-by-default. Apparently, we are to accept as obvious, as beyond question, that any such failures of politeness and spatial reciprocation are exclusively the fault of white people, on account of their being white, and therefore oppressive. Indeed, we’re told that pavement users of pallor are actually re-enacting “the rules of Jim Crow,” which “required Black people to yield to White people whenever possible.”

Many White people walk around campus having unknowingly absorbed this particular facet of White supremacy, and the leaders of the institution do little to make us believe that White supremacy is something worth challenging in the first place.

That the cultivation of a chippy, racially paranoid attitude may itself increase the likelihood of pavement collisions and general frustration, and be a self-reinforcing phenomenon, is a possibility that has seemingly eluded Mr Allen, who instead directs his energies to bemoaning the “violent feedback” to his pronouncements. A violence that includes gentle mockery and, it would appear, demurral of any kind.

Further to this lively exchange, a new form of “violence” has been conjured into being: 

Or, “Yes, you pretend what I tell you to pretend, but I can still tell that you’re pretending.”

Or, “Your perceptions are still your own and this outrages me.”

Update, via the comments:

A bold use of the word gaslighting.

The damsel in question, aka “Commie DickGurl.”

It does, I think, inadvertently get to the nub of things, a common source of friction in this particular kind of drama. Which is to say, who’s gaslighting whom?

Update:

Very much related.

Via Darleen.