In November 2022, Nikole Hannah Jones claimed that Governor Glenn Younkin banned critical race theory (CRT) from Virginia’s classrooms to “protect the feelings of white children”. The 1619 Project author also falsely stated that Virginia’s governor supported “teaching a more sanitized history”. In the lead-up to Virginia’s gubernatorial election in 2021, liberal media reports across the country suggested that parents were imagining things, that CRT wasn’t even occurring in our children’s schools. Meanwhile, the proponents of CRT continue to argue that public school should teach children what activists believe everyone’s racial identity means as a fact. If anyone opposes that as part of the curriculum, then they are “whitewashing history”, perhaps imagining things, and also, of course, racist.
Enter Ibram X. Kendi, the director of the Center for “Antiracist” Research at Boston University. On December 7, 2022, I spent an hour of time I’ll never get back in a Fairfax County library-hosted virtual event with Kendi, who accepted $20,000 from our local school district for a one-hour zoom call in 2020. Meanwhile, the University of Virginia paid him $32,500 to deliver an hour-long speech in February 2022. I’m not sure how much the local government paid him for the library discussion last week, but a lot of Virginia’s tax payer dollars seem to be going to Kendi’s bank account for not too much work.
During the library meeting, Kendi lectured participants on the importance of equal outcomes. He argued that if a workplace was not reaching the right quotas, then selection policies needed to be evaluated to “create hiring processes that are more equitable”. He seems to believe that something is only racist if it is disadvantageous to black people. I posed a question in the chat, asking if overt discrimination against Asians in school admissions processes was racist. Perhaps not surprisingly, he didn’t get around to answering that question.
The most disconcerting part of the meeting, especially given that activist school boards and universities find Kendi’s arguments compelling, is that we need to start pushing his incredibly racially divisive ideas in public schools. He argues that even “the youngest children internalize racism” and we need to think about “how we are confronting these ideas”. He thinks books on this topic in schools are a great idea – even picture books for early readers. According to Kendi, we need to find out why the “black boy” in class thinks something is “wrong with him” and the “white girl”, something is “right with her” because of their race. For Kendi and others, these concepts are completely fair game for public school curriculum. With this concept being so manipulatively named, if you disagree with “anti-racism” as he sees it, then of course, you are racist. But hey, no worries. The good news, according to Kendi, is that the term is “not static”. If you come around to his worldview, then you are no longer a racist.
I didn’t realize how quickly I would encounter one of Kendi’s disciples in our public school. On December 9, only two days after his event, a middle school substitute teacher stood in front of the history class and pontificated that black folks had to go through things that white folks didn’t – and that “white folks just didn’t understand”. I’m guessing the teacher didn’t write that extra-topical detour in his notes for the sub to explain. It was just something she needed to get off her chest, apparently. I notified the school and am waiting to see what they do with a sub who violated Governor Youngkin’s Executive Order 1 on divisive concepts.
Are you experiencing these types of issues in your public school district? How are you responding?
