Douglas Murray on the “unconscious bias” hustle: 

[“Unconscious bias” testing] became the basis of an industry, propelled by people pushing divisive ideas about identity politics. These people either believed or professed to believe that the exercise was scientific and could actually correct the brains and behaviour of anyone who had beliefs they disagreed with. So far and fast did this run that soon the inventors of the monster realised what they’d created and tried to kill it. Two of the three Harvard academics responsible said publicly that the exercise was not capable of being used in the way it was being used. There are too many variables in peoples’ behaviour over any day, never mind over time, to quantify, pin down - let alone ‘correct’ anyone’s ‘biases’. But that is where the opportunists came in. For in recent years another group decided to claim that these ‘tests’ had some laser-like precision. They began to charge hundreds of pounds to people to tell them that they were biased. A very nice racket to get into. For if anyone objected then this was simply yet more evidence of unconscious bias.

The particulars of “unconscious bias” woo were touched on here, where we learned that guilt – and the need for correction – can be determined by the random positioning of a chair. Such is intersectional science.

Via Darleen, Christopher F Rufo finds more primary school indoctrination: 

A fifth-grade teacher at the inner-city William D. Kelley School designed a social studies curriculum to celebrate [Angela] Davis, praising the “black communist” for her fight against “injustice and inequality.” As part of the lesson, the teacher asked students to “describe Davis’ early life,” reflect on her vision of social change, and “define communist”—presumably in favourable terms. At the conclusion of the unit, the teacher led the ten- and eleven-year-old students into the school auditorium to “simulate” a Black Power rally to “free Angela Davis” from prison, where she had once been held while awaiting trial on charges of conspiracy, kidnapping, and murder. The students marched on the stage, holding signs that read “Black Power,” “Jail Trump,” “Free Angela,” and “Black Power Matters.” They chanted about Africa and ancestral power, then shouted “Free Angela! Free Angela!” as they stood at the front of the stage.

In news that will shock no-one, the school in question is not rated highly in academic terms, with only 3 percent of students proficient in maths by sixth grade, and only 9 percent proficient in reading. Still, fear not. Our peddlers of “equity” have a fix for everything.  

And via Mr Muldoon, whiteness has been helpfully classified. For children. By educators.

When wokeness means gaslighting:

Asian Americans need to locate anti-Asian violence as part of a pattern of white supremacy… even if perpetrators of violence are people of colour.

No, really.

The strained use of the word locate is, I think, the first warning that horseshit will follow. And what follows includes an exhortation to not “fall back on racist assumptions” – from a man making, and taking pride in, racist assumptions. Such that a white majority population is deemed uniquely oppressive and objectionable, unlike the majorities of other, browner countries, and people can be categorised, pejoratively, as “white” or “white-aligned.” Mr Nguyen, whose words are quoted above, is of course an educator. Shaping young minds.

If the above isn’t sufficiently vivid and perverse, I’ll direct you to this, posted recently, and in which children are apparently expected to pretend similar things, quite hard, and pretend until they believe.

Because, you see, when a black thug assaults and murders a frail 84-year-old Thai man – attacking him, unprovoked, and slamming him into the ground – this can only be because of “white supremacy.” Obviously. The thug in question, Mr Antione Watson, apparently having no agency of his own, and no responsibility, on account of his magic blackness. And that’s why Mr Watson looked so satisfied with himself as he strode away afterwards, leaving a man to die.

To watch the footage linked above and then deduce that Mr Watson, the aggressor, is actually a victim, a mere puppet of Diabolical Whitey And His Infinite Cunning – and that Mr Watson’s malevolence is in fact, somehow, someone else’s fault – is, we’re assured, “intersectional empowerment.”

Update, via the comments:

Today is this blog’s birthday. Fourteen bloody years. And the damn thing’s still here. Just sayin’.

Oh, and you may want a moment to process this.  

Consider this an open thread, in which to share links and bicker.

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.