Last week I noted some rather disturbing lessons being taught at Little Rock Central High School. My main point was that pitting kids against one another based on race is not only antithetical to the aims of the Civil Rights Movement, it is also counterproductive. But these sorts of educational problems didn’t begin or end with LRCHS. The University of Delaware gets into the act with an Orwellian program apparently designed to reprogram new students to accept that all white people are racist oppressors, no exceptions allowed (emphasis added):
The University of Delaware subjects students in its residence halls to a shocking program of ideological reeducation that is referred to in the university’s own materials as a “treatment” for students’ incorrect attitudes and beliefs. The Orwellian program requires the approximately 7,000 students in Delaware’s residence halls to adopt highly specific university-approved views on issues ranging from politics to race, sexuality, sociology, moral philosophy, and environmentalism.
[...]
Students living in the university’s eight housing complexes are required to attend training sessions, floor meetings, and one-on-one meetings with their Resident Assistants (RAs). The RAs who facilitate these meetings have received their own intensive training from the university, including a “diversity facilitation training” session at which RAs were taught, among other things, that “[a] racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality.”
The university suggests that at one-on-one sessions with students, RAs should ask intrusive personal questions such as “When did you discover your sexual identity?” Students who express discomfort with this type of questioning often meet with disapproval from their RAs, who write reports on these one-on-one sessions and deliver these reports to their superiors. One student identified in a write-up as an RA’s “worst” one-on-one session was a young woman who stated that she was tired of having “diversity shoved down her throat.”
Some may recognize the definition of racism (in bold above) from an altercation between a Washington State University faculty member and a student where the professor called the student a “white sh**bag” during an event sponsored by the WSU College Republicans to highlight illegal immigration. The professor’s defense consisted of the following:
Respondent insists that he did not utter the phrase as an expression of racism, in part, because he argues that a person of color cannot be racist, by definition, because racism also defines a power differential that is not usually present when a person of color is speaking.
Or perhaps you remember it from another little brouhaha that centered on the (since pulled) Seattle Public Schools definitions of racism:
Are you salting away a little money for your retirement? Trying to plan for your kids’ education? If so, Seattle Public Schools seems to think you’re a racist.
According to the district’s official Web site, “having a future time orientation” (academese for having long-term goals) is among the “aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value and normality to white people and Whiteness, and devalue, stereotype and label people of color.”
Huh?
Not all the district’s definitions of racism (and there are lots of them) are so cryptic. The site goes on immediately to say, “Emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology” is another form of “cultural racism.”
Did I mention that the district thinks only whites can be racist in America?
Although a certain commenter on the Little Rock post will find little to be appalled about here, I’m betting that most people will find this sort of indoctrination (and there really is no other word for it) simply unacceptable. As I said in the Little Rock post:
Honestly, when I see these sorts of things, I worry about how they legitmize the White Power movements among other racist organizations. If the goal is to categorize everyone according to race, and dole out government privileges according to such standards, then how is it possible that racism will ever die? The totally predictable result is that, like in prison, people line up in fealty to their skin color. If we teach our children that this is the optimal result, what advancement is even possible? The only realistic result is a race war. Is that what we want?
That’s not what I want. This sort of systematic redefinition of racism to demonize white people and, seemingly, the American democratic and capitalist systems, can only breed resentment and further racial tension. How does that further the cause of racial equality and understanding? In short, it does no such thing.
[tags] racism, indoctrination, education, FIRE, University of Delaware, Seattle Public Schools, Little Rock, civil rights, Washington State University [/tags]