In the arena of social policy, many pretty words take center stage within the rigorous discourse on how to encourage a functional society that lives up to the heady ideals of our founding fathers. On the Conservative side, we sincerely invoke good words and phrases like “Liberty”, “Freedom”, “Equality of Opportunity”, and “Individual Rights”. These aren’t perfect words, but the concepts behind them are good and there is always a hearty debate on how we can expand this vocabulary without compromising its foundation of goodness. Those words are the pinnacles of American Conservative Thought, the idea of conserving the liberal ideas of a free society. Leftist Democrats however have a more Libertine approach to social policy. They use words like “Equity”, “Diversity”, “Inclusion”, and “Anti-Racism”. And those words all SOUND pretty like the ones from the Conservative side, but do the actions of the Democrats actually match the concepts they claim to be in pursuit of?
I am not usually one to provide the answers to my readers, I prefer to make my case first and have my readers make their own conclusions when writing on subjects like this. However, this time I cannot resist the overwhelming urge to answer this question for the reader. After all, when the question is, “Do the Democrats actually advance the causes of Diversity and Inclusion?”, I can wholeheartedly say the answer is no. In fact, when the left throws these words out in my experience, it’s usually to cover the fact that whatever they are doing at the moment is in fact bigoted and depends on excluding people or marginalizing people. And what’s most unfortunate, aside from the dishonesty, is that this happens most in education, hiring practices, and in our entertainment industry. Of course, while I intend to provide an example of all three of these, this deception happens most in Education so the majority of my focus is there. This kind of bigotry in our schools is what I find most shocking after all.
The biggest issue of our time of course is the Democrat’s push of their agenda of racial division into education, and that revolves around Critical Race Theory. Critical Race Theory, or CRT, is defined by its proponents as “an intellectual movement and a framework of legal analysis according to which (1) race is a culturally invented category used to oppress people of color and (2) the law and legal institutions in the United States are inherently racist insofar as they function to create and maintain social, political, and economic inequalities between white and nonwhite people.” In reality, though, the actual practice of CRT and its teachings are wildly different. CRT is best summed up by Author and Mathematician James Lindsay in an article he published last year in New Discourses. Lindsay sums it up in the following bullet points in which he states that CRT:
- believes racism is present in every aspect of life, every relationship, and every interaction and therefore has its advocates look for it everywhere
- relies upon “interest convergence” (white people only give black people opportunities and freedoms when it is also in their own interests) and therefore doesn’t trust any attempt to make racism better
- is against free societies and wants to dismantle them and replace them with something its advocates control
- only treats race issues as “socially constructed groups,” so there are no individuals in Critical Race Theory
- believes science, reason, and evidence are a “white” way of knowing and that storytelling and lived experience are a “black” alternative, which hurts everyone, especially black people
- rejects all potential alternatives, like colorblindness, as forms of racism, making itself the only allowable game in town (which is totalitarian)
- acts like anyone who disagrees with it must do so for racist and white supremacist reasons, even if those people are black (which is also totalitarian)
- cannot be satisfied, so it becomes a kind of activist black hole that threatens to destroy everything it is introduced into
Of course, Lindsay condensed these points further in an interview with Breitbart News when he said, “Critical Race Theory is calling everything racist if you want to control it, until you control it”.
Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts takes his criticism a step further. In response to the leadership of The University of Nebraska discussing bringing CRT into “every corner of Campus”, he said, “Critical race theory is talking about resegregation, It is talking about discriminating against people based upon their skin color. It is a betrayal of the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King, who wanted his children to be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.” This is apparent by the types of CRT curriculum being pushed in K-12 schools as well as the policies stemming from it. And make no mistake, despite the claims from the school boards, leftists ARE using CRT in their K-12 teaching curriculum.
Former Indianapolis School Administrator Tony Kinnett knows this best. He was fired from his position for leaking the truth about his district pushing CRT into the K-12 curriculum after the district blatantly lied to parents and told them this was not taking place. On November 4th, 2021, Kinnett posted screenshots of material the school district sent to teachers on how to respond to inquiries about CRT, which basically told them to say CRT doesn’t play any component in the K-12 Curriculum of the School District. However, Kinnett immediately illustrates that this is a lie by sharing screenshots from teacher training in that school district which suggested material on CRT to share with students, including books and podcasts like “Nice White Parents”. Kinnett was fired on December 20th with the school district citing the fact he leaked this material and additionally refused to share the personal information of reporters he leaked the information to. The information he leaked by the way was for the most part publically available in the first place, but not readily provided to the parents. Basically, Kinnett was fired by the school district for providing publicly available information to reporters to bring public attention to the fact the school administrators were lying to parents and pushing racist rhetoric on innocent children.
Before I go further, there are a few things I take away from the information I shared in the last 3 paragraphs. The first, CRT when you sum it up is the worst mixture of Jim Crow and Nazism. Like both of the aforementioned concepts, it relies on lies, racial division, and fascist totalitarianism. The second, like the fascist brownshirts of Nazi Germany, proponents of CRT will violently go after anybody who speaks out against or hinders their destructive agenda, even trying to destroy their livelihood. Third, CRT and its proponents rely on much of the same methodology as pedophiles. By that, I mean that while they abuse children by telling them they are vicious oppressors or inferior victims, they also lie to the parents and even tell the children to lie to their parents about the perverted ideas they are being taught. And we as a nation should be alarmed when our children’s educators are behaving like race-obsessed pedophiles.
Honestly, I could find no good segue from “educators are acting like pedophiles” back to “they are pushing Jim Crow on our kids”, so I am going to go straight into how certain school districts have been segregating students as an effort to achieve “Diversity”. Last year, on December 17th, 2021, A group called Parents Defending Education filed two separate Civil Rights complaints with the US Department of Education based on two incidents in Illinois and Colorado. The Illinois Complaint revolved around a field trip offered by the Downers Grove South High school which was explicitly labeled as a “Field Trip Opportunity for Students of Color”. The trip was advertised with fliers and in a student announcement which said, “Increasing teacher ‘diversity’ & encouraging young people to pursue education as a career is important. If you are a student of color & you are interested in teaching, then this field trip is for you.” The Colorado complaint was over a “Families of Color Playground Night” arranged by Centennial Elementary’s “Dean of Culture”. Honestly, this whole incident and the reason for the outrage over both incidents are best summed up by this tweet from Christopher F. Rufo which included a picture from the Civil Rights Complaint against Centennial Elementary:
In Virginia, a similar issue arose when parents had to file a lawsuit against Fairfax County Schools over anti-Asian bias in their admittance policies for Thomas Jefferson High School, a school known as the “Top Public High School” in the country. The well-documented lawsuit reveals that in 2020, during the first summer of the Covid-19 Pandemic, administrators at the school tried to assuage complaints from activists that there were not enough Black and Hispanic students at the school by changing the admittance policy from one based on academic merit to one that considered race as a more heavily weighted factor. Not only were the changes made behind the scene without public input, but they were also found to discriminate against students of Asian immigrants. In texts, one administrator rationalized it by implying that the Asian students had an unfair advantage since their parents put such an emphasis on studying and education. Additionally, the lawsuit uncovered other anti-Asian biases within Fairfax County Schools in other lesser decisions.
(Edit: On February 25th, 2022, Federal Court Judge Claude M. Hilton ruled that Thomas Jefferson High Schools’ new admission policies were indeed racially biased and declared them invalid.)
But the students aren’t the only victims of this “woke” racial segregation. Last year the Mankato School Board, the school board for the largest school district in the state of Minnesota, passed a policy that included extra pay for non-white teachers and included provisions that allowed for teachers to be placed in work environments based on their race, effectively racially segregating teachers. Members of the school board defended their racist policy, justifying it by citing the emotional fragility of minority teachers. The vice-chair of the board made the most ridiculous claim of course by saying that segregating teachers based on their race would “create[s] global citizens at the end of the day.” Of course, the alarming argument is the argument about the fragility of the “people of color”. You see that is one of the most racist tenants of CRT, it teaches that in effect “people of color” are inferior or incapable of competing in society and that expectations need to be lowered or eliminated altogether. In fact, in some jurisdictions run by Democrats, they have done just that.
Last July, the Governor of Oregon Kate Brown quietly signed into law an education bill passed by Oregon’s Legislature. This law was Senate Bill 744, a bill that suspends the Reading, Writing, and Math requirements for students to graduate High School in the State of Oregon for the next 5 years. Proponents of the bill tried to claim that the bill tries to “truly reflect what every student needs to thrive in the 21st century”, implying that the ability to read or do math is not essential for functioning in modern society, a claim that is totally absurd on its face. What’s more revealing is what Kate Brown’s Communication Director Charles Boyle said about the bill, “the new standards for graduation will help benefit the state’s “Black, Latino, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of color.” Essentially, what Kate Brown and the Democrats are saying is that “minorities” aren’t smart enough to get a diploma, so we are lowering the standards for kids to get one rather than doing the job taxpayers pay us for and making sure kids are properly educated and able to function in society. Again, this is on its face a racist remark, just like Joe Biden’s “Poor kids are just as bright as White Kids” remark in 2019. This is all best summed up as “The racism of lowered expectations”, and it’s based on a faulty concept that a student’s performance in school is dependent on their race and not the quality of their teachers.
This racism doesn’t stop in K-12 institutions though, in fact, it is more rampant in colleges because that is where CRT began. For example, England’s Oxford University is considering a proposal that would make consideration of an applicant’s adherence to the concepts of CRT a requirement for the hiring of prospective academics. This was a part of a wider range of demands from Oxford’s race equality task force, whose stated mission is to achieve “inclusive teaching, curriculum diversification and decolonising activities”. One professor shared some of the questions proposed in the woke questionnaire, questions about how they handle CRT issues like, “Can you give me examples on how you have called out these kinds of issues in your previous appointment?” It basically amounts to an ideological test, which is unfortunately perfectly legal in Great Britain. Although even in America where these kinds of ideological tests aren’t supposed to be legal, there are already over 230 American Colleges that have mandatory CRT training for their students or faculty. And unfortunately, the Universities themselves aren’t the only issue.
Another big issue is certain Professional groups on campus. One of these groups is called “White Coats for Black Lives”, and they have apparently gained huge influence with its 75 chapters at various medical schools throughout the US. The group is openly radical in nature, making political calls for its members to fight against “racist concepts” like the free market system. When it comes to the organization’s views on medicine, radicalism in their message remains steady and deadly. The group claims on pages 8 and 9 of their manifesto that there is a “false equivalency” between weight and health, and that they need to “deconstruct” that “myth”. This of course completely false and dangerous statement that flies in the face of internationally accepted medical science and even CDC Guidance, but it’s a falsehood in the name of “Inclusivity” as far as the people at WC4BL are concerned. And it’s apparent they know they are lying, after all, “False Equivalency” is another one of those pretty words leftists use to justify lies they are telling, which essentially translates to “Even though these are the facts, it’s not true and you should believe what I am saying instead.”
To be honest, the situation in the educational system with the pushes for bigotry and lies in the name of “Diversity” and ” Inclusion” may seem pretty grim, but the only solution is to fight the radicals who are pushing for it regardless of how grim it seems. Parents and students across the country are filing lawsuits against institutions who are calling their blatant racism an “Inclusivity Effort.” Aside from the Thomas Jefferson High School Lawsuit against Fairfax County, Parent’s in Albemarle County Virginia are suing their local school board for their efforts to incorporate CRT into the curriculum, calling it an effort to “indoctrinate students with an ideology that teaches children to affirmatively discriminate based on race”. This lawsuit is a response to the Albemarle County School Board’s decision to push an “anti-Racism” curriculum, which they claim is not a CRT curriculum, but which their own documentation shows relies exclusively on works by CRT authors with no rebuttals or alternative texts provided. The curriculum defines racism as “[t]he marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people” and teaches children to judge themselves and others based on the notion of privilege rooted in race. In fact, the school district’s curriculum only identifies one type of privilege, “White Privilege” as “[a]n unacknowledged system of favoritism and advantage granted to white people as the beneficiaries of historical conquest.” The school district has reportedly defended their racist lessons to parents by claiming that parents who oppose lessons that teach children to judge people based on race are themselves racist, and they have reportedly fired teachers for trying to share the curriculum with parents.
On the front of higher education, two lawsuits may finally ban the practice of racial preference in University Admissions at both public and private Universities. The cases are Students for Fair Admission v. University of North Carolina, No. 21-707, and Students for Fair Admission v. President & Fellows of Harvard College, No. 20-1199, and they were both presented to the court last year. The first case is quite straightforward in that it challenges the ability of public institutions to use race as a determining factor in admissions, making a prima facia case that such policies violate the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. The second case is a bit more complicated, since Harvard is a Private University the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution doesn’t necessarily apply to them. However, the plaintiffs in the Harvard case claim that since Harvard receives federal funds for student loans and other grants, their admissions policy violates Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act forbids organizations receiving federal money from discriminating based on race, meaning that although Harvard is a private institution they cannot continue any race-based admission policies. That said, there are already open statements by far-left “Legal Scholars” that Harvard would find a way to subtly continue their racist admission policies. So of course, even after the battle is over the racist Democrats at Harvard will make sure it isn’t over.
Maybe I am just being a pessimist though, however as I alluded to earlier, while the bulk of the issue of bigoted exclusionary practices disguised as “Diversity” and “Inclusivity” is rooted in education, the cancer has spread to other areas. Now certain employers have openly made their intentions clear that they are making decisions on hiring based on race. Unsurprisingly, one of these employers is the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Last December, the DCCC announced they would be partnering with Blue Leadership Collaborative to push preferential hiring of “people of color, women, and people who identify as queer” for the senior staff on Democrat congressional campaigns. Mind you this kind of racism and hypocrisy from an actual body of the Democratic Party doesn’t surprise me or concern me. I mean Democrats also claim to believe an illegal and almost non-existent Gender Wage gap is wrong, and yet in 2019, Kamala Harris was caught paying women on her Senatorial Staff and Presidential Campaign Staff less than their male counterparts. What’s concerning is when private companies follow this kind of lead.
Last year the NBA on TNT announced a new position for an on-air reporter to do live coverage of its games. There was one caveat though, it wasn’t enough for that reporter to be skilled or to have a passion for basketball, that reporter also had to be black. An article on Outkick.com elaborates on just why this is shocking and unacceptable:
“By joining ‘Lift Every Voice,’ ‘a grassroots initiative centered on empowering the imaginations of Black student journalists,’ TNT sends the message that hiring people based entirely on their skin color is acceptable. It also implies that the sports media industry holds black voices back.”
“TNT’s top NBA journalist Chris Haynes is black. Three of the four members of TNT’s Inside the NBA pregame show are black. In addition, Turner Sports’ Bleacher Report has made Taylor Rook, a black woman, the face of its brand.”
“The truth is, Turner and the NBA are pandering here. By refusing to acknowledge progress in race relations in America and by ignoring other minority groups, TNT ensures that blue checks will applaud the network on social media.”
“Like most other media companies, Turner is now openly racist in an effort to prove it is not racist. It’s so strange how that works.”
Burack, B. (2021, November 19). NBA on TNT says it’s looking for black applicants only for new on-air gig. OutKick. Retrieved January 29, 2022, from https://www.outkick.com/nba-tnt-black-race/
Discrimination in hiring is a huge issue of course, but what about discrimination in casting? Thats has become a new trend in Hollywood, where activists and actors have begun calling on producers to cast like actors in like roles. According to some people in the world of film, only disabled actors should play disabled characters, only Jewish actors should play Jewish characters, and only gay actors should play gay characters. But there are some actors like “Walking Dead” star Lennie James who don’t think that should generally be a rule. In an interview with the BBC, James had this to say about these calls to narrow the scope of casting in film and TV, “Where gay actors have not been given the opportunity to play gay parts, or disabled actors have not even been considered for the opportunity to play disabled parts, in that situation then I would 100% be part of the conversation of saying, why not?” But he also added that he believes that regardless the casting should be “on a case by case basis. I don’t believe in blanket statements… because then the role of the actor slightly changes and is slightly different to the one I hope and pray that it is.”
Essentially, what James is saying is that it’s the actor’s job to act beyond their own experience, and going out of your way to poke people into their square holes when it’s time to cast for a film totally cheapens the whole concept. And while it’s reassuring to hear an actor reaffirm this during the woke firestorms we are living through now, when a creator speaks out then it’s 20 times as amazing!! For those who don’t remember or just never paid attention, such a thing happened WAYYYY back in 2017 when online SJWs stirred up outrage over Scarlett Johansson being cast in the role of Motoko Kusanagi in the live-action “Ghost in the Shell” Movie. The SJW mob claimed that the casting decision was “whitewashing” and that the directors should have picked an Asian actress. But can you guess whose side the Japanese writer/director Mamoru Oshii, who wrote the original “Ghost in the Shell”, took in this controversy over casting?
Much to the surprise of the SJW’s I expect, Oshii-san defended the casting of Johansson in an interview with IGN. He said, “The name ‘Motoko Kusanagi’ and her current body are not her original name and body, so there is no basis for saying that an Asian actress must portray her. Even if her original body (presuming such a thing existed) were a Japanese one, that would still apply.” He went on to further add, “In the movies, John Wayne can play Genghis Khan, and Omar Sharif, an Arab, can play Doctor Zhivago, a Slav. It’s all just cinematic conventions, if that’s not allowed, then Darth Vader probably shouldn’t speak English, either. I believe having Scarlett play Motoko was the best possible casting for this movie. I can only sense a political motive from the people opposing it, and I believe artistic expression must be free from politics.”
That last line really rings true, “I can only sense a political motive from the people opposing it,”. In the end, that’s what it all amounts to, the Democrat’s claims that they believe in “Diversity and “Inclusion” are just a cover for their actual agenda of “Racism” and “Division”. In fact, I would say Democrats are truly afraid of what they claim to champion. Their politics rely on hegemony and fascism, and a true social policy of “Diversity” and “Inclusion” would include some diversity of thought with the inclusion of opposing voices. The ideas of including others do not match with their goal of control best outlined in the bulleted points of what CRT stands for, “[CRT] is against free societies and wants to dismantle them and replace them with something its advocates’ control.” So next time a Democrat screams at me about how I am against “Inclusivity” and “Diversity”, forgive me if I end up rolling my eyes. I just know all too well what they really mean is that I am getting in the way of their racist and totalitarian agenda.
William Hellmann 