The Revolution in Minnesota’s Schools
Article publisher:
Center of the American Experiment
Article date:
23 January 2021
Article category:
Our American Future
Medium
Article Body:
In fall 2020, a fourth-grade class in Burnsville read a book that warns students that police are “mean” to black people, but “nice” to white people...
At Eagan High School, a 9th-grade class began the 2020-21 school year by watching a YouTube video entitled “Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man.” In the words of one parent who saw the video and the leading questions students had to answer: “It was white guilt, all the way down.”...
The upside-down thought world of “racial equity” advances in the name of justice and harmony. Yet its fundamental premise is deeply divisive: It teaches that life is a relentless power struggle, and splits human beings into two hostile camps (white and non-white), labeling whites as perpetual oppressors and BIPOC (“Black, Indigenous and People of Color”) as perpetual victims....
Why now?
... Since the 1960s, elite opinion in university “oppression studies” departments, at teachers’ colleges, and in the media has laid the groundwork. Racial identity politics, rooted in neo-Marxist Critical Race Theory (CRT), provided the ideological framework. More recently, concern about the racial learning gap has given rise to lawsuits and “equity plans” that have failed to move the needle on minority academic performance. At a deeper cultural level, family breakdown, social fragmentation and secularization have created a communal vacuum of meaning and purpose, and have left many yearning for a cause larger than themselves.
Today, the Black Lives Matter Global Fund (flush with millions of dollars from corporate America) and countless other activist organizations are aggressively peddling free lesson plans, videos and “racial equity” training to K-12 schools....
BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors has described herself and co-founder Alicia Garza as “trained Marxists.” Her book When They Call You a Terrorist has a foreword by Angela Davis, her “mentor,” whom Cullors describes elsewhere as a “Marxist” and “former Black Panther” whose “reflections on anti-capitalist movements” have sought to “transform U.S. society.”...
Racial identity politics, in its guise as “racial equity,” is not education, but indoctrination....
The three stages of coercive thought reform
...
- First, manipulators seek to undermine the subject’s identity— destabilizing his or her sense of self in order to sow self-doubt and increase vulnerability to outside influencers.
- Second, they introduce an alternate, closed system of reality, and restrict access to ideas that challenge it.
- Finally, they use “emotional blackmail” tactics—including threats of social rejection backed up by group pressure—to compel subjects to accede to groupthink....
Some of the 20th century’s most loathsome dictators have used identity politics this way. They have often enlisted young people to do their dirty work, writes Morabito, because youth are especially susceptible to coercive thought reform. Many will do “whatever it takes to be accepted.”
Lenin was a skilled practitioner of identity politics. “We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion and scorn toward those who disagree with us,” he wrote. In the 1930s, Stalin used the Communist League of Youth, or Komsomol, to foment hatred among Ukrainian peasants in a bid to seize control of that rich agricultural area....