This so-called 'anti-racism' ideology is itself deeply racist
Bari Weiss, the liberal journalist forced out from the New York Times for not being radical enough, has written perhaps the most important article of the still-young year. In “The Miseducation of America’s Elites,” published March 9 in the City Journal, Weiss reports on the devastatingly dangerous thought-policing now infecting schools across the country.
Weiss’ focus is on elite prep schools, but she notes that the same stultifying orthodoxy infects public schools as well.
It’s a familiar story by now, but Weiss lays it out in starkly arresting fashion. Rather than teaching children to see past race to find commonalities, today’s educational institutions insist that race is a defining characteristic and that whites are inherently malevolent. Any expression to the contrary can get students disinvited from schools, their families labeled as racist, and their college hopes badly diminished.
“The atmosphere,” wrote Weiss, “is making their children anxious, paranoid, and insecure—and closed off from even their close friends.”
White children aren’t told merely that their skin color makes them guilty but also that it requires them to suffer retributive discrimination. At one top prep school, Weiss reports, “Students are often told ‘if you are white and male, you are second in line to speak.’ This is considered a normal and necessary redistribution of power.”
And when it comes to black and white, everything is indeed (in the figurative sense) black and white: “In this worldview, complexity itself is a kind of racism, nuance is a phobia, and skepticism merely a type of false consciousness.”
At the prestigious Harvard-Westlake School in West Los Angeles, the 20-page “Anti-Racism” document reads like a dystopian self-parody. With respect to curriculum, it's not enough to recalibrate traditional studies to account for prior slights of various ethnic experiences and contributions. Rather, it features an obsessive self-flagellation because of racial sins real and, perhaps, also imagined. Not only are all history courses now consciously shorn of Eurocentrism in favor of using “critical race theory” and being “attentive to the inequities of power, wealth, and privilege in every unit,” but even French language classes will focus on “examining inequity in modern-day France and non-white Francophone countries around the world.”
Weiss quotes parents, all anonymously (because they fear retaliation), at great length. “They are making my son feel like a racist because of the pigmentation of his skin,” one mother says. Another poses a question to the group: “How does focusing a spotlight on race fix how kids talk to one another? Why can’t they just all be Wolverines?”
To read the full Weiss article is to be assaulted with a parade of horribles. The key line comes from a math teacher who identifies as no conservative. “I started seeing what was happening to the kids. And that’s what I couldn’t take. They are being educated in resentment and fear. It’s extremely dangerous.”
The broader result of the misnamed “anti-racism” crusade, which Weiss’s reporting is not designed to address, is that people of goodwill, who are deeply committed to equality and nondiscrimination, find themselves treated not as allies but as enemies. No matter how someone interacts with people from other ethnicities, no matter how much heat someone takes for fighting old-fashioned racism, no matter how much or what sorts of charitable work someone does, no matter how much time and effort someone spends “building bridges,” that person finds himself unwelcome, even branded if he doesn’t adopt the new, vengeful, race-obsessive ideology.
It's a vicious ideology, the antithesis of “liberal” in the word’s classic sense. It must not be allowed to rule our culture.
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