Writing in the Wall Street Journal (paywalled), Bion Bartning talks about when wokeness invaded his children’s posh New York City private school, Riverdale, which costs $58,000 per year to attend. Last fall, the school began to focus on privilege and white fragility. The school began teaching the children to monitor each other for “allyship” and deviation from woke orthodoxy. It began dividing parents up into “affinity groups” by race. Bartning writes:

At this point in the story, perhaps “lived experiences” become relevant. I am half Mexican and Yaqui, an indigenous tribe native to the U.S.-Mexico border region, and half Jewish. I spent the first year of my life on a commune in Berkeley, Calif. Growing up, I was aware that I had darker skin than my mother and my classmates, but I was never taught to define my identity by the color of my skin. My mixed background and ancestry made me feel like nothing more than a typical American.

My wife came to the U.S. as a refugee from the former Soviet Union. She spent the first five years of her life in an intolerant society where her “group identity” as a Jew was stamped in her passport. In school she was taught to keep tabs on friends and family, and after one particularly effective lesson, she was inspired to turn in her own father to the local police for “crimes against the state.” Fortunately, no harm came of it. But suffice it to say we are both allergic to forced conformity, especially when young, impressionable children are trained to obsess over “racial differences” and be on the lookout for deviations from orthodoxy.

We started to ask questions. I have always felt a strong connection with Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of an America where people “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” I advocate genuine antiracism, rooted in dignity and humanity. But the ideology underlying the “racial literacy” guide distributed by the school wasn’t like that. Instead of emphasizing our common humanity, it lumps people into simplistic racial groupings. It teaches that each person’s identity and status is based largely on skin color, and leaves no place for people like me, who are of mixed race or don’t place race at the heart of their identity.

After confirming that the curriculum, obtained from a nonprofit called Pollyanna Inc., was “one of many resources” the school was using, I became concerned by the emphasis on grievance over gratitude and by the stated goal of turning young children into committed activists. “By the end of the unit,” one section of the curriculum explains, “students will set commitments for rectifying current social ills, such as learning and planning how to carry out antiracist activism and/or social advocacy in their communities.”

My concerns multiplied when, going off the Pollyanna curriculum, our fourth-grade daughter and her 9- and 10-year-old classmates were given “The Third Chimpanzee for Young People,” a book intended for middle and high schoolers that covers mature topics such as adultery, self-mutilation and suicide. After we and other parents argued that it was inappropriate, the teachers backtracked and asked students to return the books. But school administrators didn’t want to hear our questions.

The headmaster eventually asked the Bartnings if their kids wouldn’t be happier elsewhere. More:

While many of us have encountered this intolerant orthodoxy only recently, it debuted on college campuses more than 40 years ago. Sensible people thought it was a joke—or at least that it would remain on campus, since it could never survive contact with the “real world.” That was wrong. Masquerading as “antiracism,” this cynical worldview is being spread like a virus by an army of paid consultants and true believers. Few people have been willing to stand up against it. At Riverdale, many parents privately express concerns but aren’t willing to speak up. They fear being called racist—or, worse, losing their coveted spots.

The real story here isn’t about Riverdale. My kids’ school is one tiny data point. This backward belief system is capturing public and private schools across the country.

He’s right. Read it all, if you have a subscription. He’s talking about an elite private school — which is important, because the kids who attend schools like Riverdale are tomorrow’s elites — but as Christopher Rufo has tirelessly documented, this stuff is going on in public schools too. If you think it’s never going to come to your kids’ school, you are deluded. You might be fortunate enough to have a school staff that is resistant to this poison, but they will have to decide to reject it — and be prepared to be denounced publicly as racist for so doing.

This is soft totalitarianism. It’s teaching children to lay the line between good and evil between races, as the Soviets did for class, and it’s teaching them to inform on each other for ideological deviation, which was common policy in the Soviet bloc countries. And if you disagree? You are sent away. What kind of country do you think we are going to have after we have educated a generation in this poison? Roll your eyes at me if you want, but I can see a future in which a racialized version of these words from Soviet secret police official Martin Latsis to his agents, quoted in my book Live Not By Lies, are said by Americans:

Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.

If you think that’s silly, tell me, then: where do you expect the Riverdale ideology to take this country? They are explicitly educating students in race-based grievance and militant conformity (as in, rat out your friends and family). And there are still people who wonder what those who emigrated to America from Communist countries are talking about when they say the same things they fled are now coming to America.

If we don’t take uncompromising public stands now, it may not be possible to do so tomorrow.