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California To Become Yugoslavia

Social Justice Warriors about to take over state's public school curriculum

It is hardly a controversial opinion to state that the United States is disintegrating. To be more precise: the ties that bind us together as Americans are fraying, and even dissolving. I don’t believe that this is going to result in the political disintegration of America, as in the Civil War, but I could be wrong about that. The forces of disintegration grow stronger, and there are no counterforces of any potency. The media love to bang on about how Donald Trump is dividing the country by practicing racial politics, and they’re not entirely wrong about that. But I submit to you that nothing Donald Trump says will have remotely the impact that the State of California is about to have through revising its public education curriculum to fill it with Social Justice Warrior content, particularly on race.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

In actions that would affect more than 6.5 million California students, state lawmakers are poised to make ethnic studies a graduation requirement in high school and at Cal State universities, raising the stakes for a team of educators drafting the model curriculum, those who are arguing for changes to it, and also for critics — who see an academic field dominated by one-sided, insular political correctness and separatism.

More:

The high school requirement — the first such in the nation, according to a legislative analysis — appears to have broad backing among Sacramento lawmakers and beyond. A separate bill, mandating an ethnic studies class for every Cal State student, has drawn a mixed reaction at campuses. Although there is wide support for ethnic studies courses, some Cal State faculty and administrators strongly oppose a state requirement. The public’s chance to comment on the model curriculum closes Thursday.

“California is committed to getting this work right,” Linda Darling-Hammond, president of the state Board of Education, said in a letter to the Los Angeles Times. “We will not accept a curriculum that fails to address difficult issues in a way that promotes open-mindedness and independent thought — skills our students need to understand vital societal and civic forces.”

At its core, supporters say, ethnic studies classes teach students how to think critically about the world around them, “tell their own stories,” develop “a deep appreciation for cultural diversity and inclusion” and engage “socially and politically” to eradicate bigotry, hate and racism. This description, from the draft of the model curriculum, is meant to guide California K-12 educators in creating coursework whether or not the new graduation requirement becomes law.

Among those who say the proposed curriculum falls short of its lofty goals is Williamson M. Evers, a research fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution , based at Stanford.

“Instead of an objective account of the history of ethnic groups and their current situation, this is a biased portrait emphasizing suffering and victimization, serving as a kind of road map to create ideological activists based on racial identity,” Evers said. “Will you be graded on having the politically correct answers?”

Among other things, Evers objects to the association of capitalism with forms of oppression. He also is put off by the academic language that has grown up around the field, which employs such terms as “herstory” and “hxrstory” to replace “history.”

The curriculum’s supporters don’t deny that it’s politicized:

Supporters of ethnic studies embrace their intensely political focus. The model curriculum dives right into how the Trump administration has handled unaccompanied immigrant children: “Rather than reunifying children with family members, family members are being detained and possibly deported for immigration violations. Furthermore, the administration is trying to roll back existing legal protections for the length of stay and quality of treatment at immigration detention centers.”

“We are teaching an antiracist curriculum,” Espiritu said. “We are trying to teach students what is oppression, what are systems of oppression, how do they interact with minorities.”

Who is “they”? Answer: white students. The purpose of this program is to indoctrinate white students into the claims of the Grievance Studies ideologues. There’s anti-Semitic stuff in it too, by the way. Read the entire story for more.

Here’s a link to the “model curriculum” put forth by the state. I strongly urge you to read it. Here are some excerpts:

At its core, the field of Ethnic Studies is the interdisciplinary study of race, ethnicity, and indigeneity with an emphasis on experiences of people of color in the United States. Further, it is the xdisciplinary [sic], loving, and critical praxis of holistic humanity – as educational and racial justice. It is from communities of color and our intergenerational worldviews, memories, experiences, identities, narratives, and voices. It is the study of intersectional and ancestral roots, coloniality, hegemony, and a dignified world where many worlds fit, for present and future generations.

The field critically grapples with the various power structures and forms of oppression, including, but not limited to, white supremacy, race and racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, islamophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia, that continue to impact the social, emotional, cultural, economic, and political experiences of Native People/s and people of color.

Ethnic Studies is xdisciplinary, in that it variously takes the forms of being interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary, undisciplinary, and intradisciplinary. As such, it can grow its original language to serve these needs with purposeful respellings of terms, including history as herstory and women as womxn, connecting with a gender and sexuality lens, along with a socioeconomic class lens at three of its intersections. Terms utilized throughout this document, which may be unfamiliar to new practitioners of the field, are defined in the glossary.

Oh man. Here we go. More:

Ethnic Studies courses, teaching, and learning will

  1. cultivate empathy, community actualization, cultural perpetuity, self-worth, self-determination, and the holistic well-being of all participants, especially Native People/s and people of color;

  2. celebrate and honor Native People/s of the land and communities of color by providing a space to share their stories of struggle and resistance, along with their intellectual and cultural wealth;

  3. center and place high value on pre-colonial, ancestral, indigenous, diasporic, familial, and marginalized knowledge;

  4. critique empire and its relationship to white supremacy, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society;

  5. challenge imperialist/colonial hegemonic beliefs and practices on the ideological, institutional, interpersonal, and internalized levels;

  6. connect ourselves to past and contemporary resistance movements that struggle for social justice on the global and local levels to ensure a truer democracy; and

  7. conceptualize, imagine, and build new possibilities for post-imperial life that promotes collective narratives of transformative resistance, critical hope, and radical healing.

Here, from the “Sample Course Model” section, is an overview of the general Ethnic Studies course:

Sample Key Concepts of This Course:

  • agency
  • capitalism/class/classism
  • colonialism/imperialism
  • economic/political/social/cultural
  • four I’s of oppression – ideological, institutional, interpersonal and internalized
  • gender
  • hegemony/counter hegemony
  • humanization/dehumanization
  • ideology
  • indigeneity
  • intergenerational trauma and healing
  • resistance
  • patriarchy/sexism/heteropatriarchy/cis-heteropatriarchy
  • race/racism
  • white supremacy
  • xenophobia

The document gets into detail about what it would mean to implement study of these concepts in classrooms. It is entirely ideological, and doesn’t even try to pretend otherwise.

Notice this definition:

Interpersonal Oppression: Interactions between people where people use oppressive behavior, insults or violence. Interpersonal racism is what white people do to people of color up close—the racist jokes, the stereotypes, the beatings and harassment, the threats, the whole range of personal acts of discrimination.Similarly, interpersonal sexism is what men to do to women—the sexual abuse/harassment, the violence directed at women, the sexist jokes, ignoring or minimizing of women’s thinking, etc. Many people in each dominant group are not consciously oppressive. They have internalized the negative messages about other groups, and consider their attitudes towards other groups quite normal.

Got that? Racism is what white people do to nonwhites. Sexism is what men do to women. Only whites can be racist. Only men can be sexist.

Imagine what it’s going to be like to be a white male kid in these classrooms. Imagine what it’s going to be like when you get outside the classrooms, and have to interact with other students who have been instructed by teachers to think of you as evil because you are white and male, and that all the problems your non-white, non-male classmates suffer are ultimately the fault of people like you.

You think I’m making this up? Read the documents.

From the Glossary section, here’s one of the concepts the teachers want to get across:

Accompliceship – the process of building relationships grounded in trust and accountability with marginalized people and groups. Being an accomplice involves attacking colonial structures and ideas by using one’s privilege and giving up power and position in solidarity with those on the social, political, religious, and economic margins of society. This is in contrast to the contested notion of allyship which is often performative, superficial, and disconnected from the anticolonial struggle.

If this passes — and according to the LAT, it has wide support in the California legislature — the public schools in California will undertake to teach students the SJWs consider to be “privileged” (whites, males, Christians) to capitulate to the power of ethnic and other groups the SJWs consider to be “marginalized.” According to this Marxist ideology, “justice” is about power relations between groups.

This is what the State of California is likely to be teaching its students.

Again: read the documents if you doubt me. The leftists are going to destroy that state by institutionalizing ethnic hatred. Serious question to California readers, white and non-white both: why would you stake a future in a state that is forcing its students to drink this poison?

The reader who tipped me off about this does not live in California, but rather in a very blue city in a red state. He says of the proposed California curriculum:

This is advocacy pure and simple, the opposite of inductive study of facts and reasoning, intentionally warping history, and it will destroy the institutions that follow it.

I’m supportive of Benedict Option thinking, but don’t we have an obligation to fight too? I feel like in my life I sort of live out both approaches. I fight and vote one way, but I don’t plan on it getting better any time soon, and I’m not going to sacrifice my children to it — so they will never be exposed to this sort of nonsense — but I’m also paying a lot of property taxes to fund this sort of nonsense. Left-wingers took over institutions in a generation, shouldn’t conservatives even try?

I don’t know — California may be a lost cause (and anyway, the Benedict Option is about religion and culture, not ethnic conflict). But it’s not a lost cause in other states. Are there any Republican state politicians who would be willing to fight this openly, knowing that they will be demonized as white supremacists in the media? Any Democratic state politicians willing to do so? I’m 100 percent in favor of fighting when and where we can. It’s not just about what happens in schools. The kids whose minds become warped by this radical ideology will go out into the world and take control of institutions, companies, and government, where they will turn it into laws and policies.

These radical leftists and the California state legislators who do their bidding are laying the groundwork for civil strife. But somehow, it’s Donald Trump’s fault. Right.

UPDATE: PEG responds to a tweet by a member of the New York Times editorial board, about a massive new project the paper has debuted:

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Meanwhile, a professor at the Penn Graduate School of Education is making sure that his Ivy League pedagogues enter into the profession hating America:

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