In the US there has been a proliferation of racially-based programs and "affinity groups" throughout the school systems, in which the children are expected to grapple either with their "privilege" in the case of whites, or their oppressed status if deemed "non-white".
The author provides an inspirational account of her own schooling, several years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, where she was well taught by excellent teachers and was able to mix freely with other students of all races. It seemed things were moving rapidly toward the fulfilment of Martin Luther King's dream of a society where people would be judged by the content of their character, not the colour of their skin.
Nowadays the race ideologues are working to turn this aspiration on its head, espousing a hyper-awareness of race and the perpetuation of racial grievances. Instead of a colourblind society, they aim to produce an inverted moral hierarchy based on race in which white skin is the new Mark of Cain.
Utterly repugnant—and already rearing its ugly head in Australia. Check out the ABC documentary The school that tried to end racism about a similar program at a Sydney primary school.
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“Young boys and girls must grow up with world perspectives”. On 22nd April 1965, Martin Luther King Jr, speaking at a meeting of the Massachusetts legislature, lamented the “tragedy” of school segregation. With the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the US had finally dismantled the Jim Crow laws — which King had joked about burying a decade earlier. The nation had come to King’s conclusion: “Segregation debilitates the segregator as well as the segregated”.
Almost six decades later, from Massachusetts to Colorado, Jim Crow is being resurrected in public schools — this time through euphemisms such as “affinity circles”, “affinity dialogue groups” and “community building groups”. Centennial Elementary School in Denver, for instance, advertised a “Families of Color Playground Night” earlier this winter, on a marquee board outside the school. Last week, the Wheeler School in Providence, Rhode Island, hosted a “meet and talk” with actress Karyn Parsons from “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” — exclusively for its “Students of Color affinity group”. “If you are a student of color or multiracial, please join us!” the invitation from a seventh grade teacher read.
Bigotry, meanwhile, is back on the curriculum, thanks partly to a “Black Lives Matter at School” campaign, which last week recommended the book Not My Idea: A Book about Whiteness to children as young as six in Evanston/Skokie School District 65, outside Chicago. “Whiteness is a bad deal”, the book argues; it amounts to signing a “contract” with the devil, who is illustrated with an indelicate pointy tail. Meanwhile, in an English lesson in Fairfax County, Virginia, students played a game of “Privilege Bingo”; even “Military Kid” has been shamed as having “privilege”.
It’s a tragedy that today’s schools are more segregated than mine was. I arrived in the United States in the summer of 1969, a four-year-old who knew not a word of English. Born in Bombay, I was part of the first generation of post-colonial Indians. My parents had survived the “white supremacy” of British rule, and witnessed Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent movement, which was an inspiration for the American civil rights movement.