OPINION: The true racists

Here and around the nation, teachers are being re-educated to recognize systemic racism as never before. Mandatory Diversity/Equity/Inclusiveness trainings reveal that doing work on time, completely, to the very best of a student’s ability is really just another form of white supremacy.

To them, individuality violates the communitarian nature of many non-European cultures prior to their contact with the West. These trainings assert that around the world, peoples living at the social and technological level of the New Stone Age were fundamentally communal. Survival depended upon hunting, gathering, and farming that was done by groups of people together.

As Tyrone Howard, a Critical Race Theoretician from UCLA employed to retrain teachers in the Los Angeles County Unified School District, pointed out, “The notion of individualism runs counter to many Los Angeles students’ own cultural norms, which say ‘it’s not about me, it’s about we’”.

Howard is but one of many ideologues who have been empowered to show America’s teachers their alleged “implicit and unconscious bias”. These experts make their living by revealing how no white person can escape their ingrained racism, how no one who is not white can ever really be a racist, and how Western Civilization’s structural racism is unique and irredeemable.

Under the tutelage of such theorists, classroom teachers are being told by their Administrators that the bad old days of a colorblind meritocracy are over. From now on, every single issue will be viewed through the lens of racial and power dynamics. Social justice will finally be achieved when the objective standards heretofore used to assess excellence are replaced by a new ideal of redressing past wrongs by any means necessary.

What this all means is that any educator who conforms to this new ethos will abandon merit. No longer will each individual student be expected to adapt to the standards of any school. Students will no longer be punished for bad conduct, because discipline and self-control are concepts rooted in white supremacy. Doing demanding work to a high standard of excellence will be scrapped in favor of affirmative action grading, where a student’s group identity determines all.

Learning knowledge and mastering skills will be eclipsed by lessons that teach young people that their personal dreams are irrelevant. Instead, what matters is to learn the ways of grievance, where all students know who to blame and from whom to claim reparations to compensate for the inevitable frustration of their own futile ambitions.

This is evil. The worst thing that an educator can do is to teach any student that life is hopeless, that their choices don’t matter, that their efforts to grow up are in vain. Only predators and parasites benefit from killing the spark of hope in an innocent with despair.

More than anything else, young people need to see precisely how their willingness to sacrifice and strive are indispensable for success. Not everyone is brilliant or beautiful, but we can all learn to work hard without any compromise with mediocrity. The one essential for any success is dedication!

These D/E/I advocates are the true racists. They assume that the universal qualities of a well-lived life are only for white people. They make exclusively white those virtues of self-discipline, punctuality, and hard work that would have brought prominence in Cuzco, Tenochtitlan, Timbuktu, Baghdad, Tehran, Agra, Angkor-Wat, Hue, Beijing, or Kyoto as well as in Rome, Frankfurt, Paris, Madrid, or London.

Their interpretation of New Stone Age cultures are also rooted in prejudice. Because most of these societies were not literate, we do not know who their heroes were. That does not necessarily mean that such spoken word societies had no heroes and did not honor personal excellence. In fact, the Neanderthal ceremonial burial of their honored dead certainly indicates that even pre-modern-human peoples had heroes; heroes worthy of making the extra effort to send them properly equipped to the Happy Hunting Grounds.

In my lifetime, our Republic has wrestled to more fully become a colorblind meritocracy; the “Holy Grail” of genuine equality of opportunity. Overt and structural racialism was outlawed the year before I was born, and by the time I reached adulthood the quickest way to ostracism was to behave like a bigot.

It is no longer newsworthy for people to achieve peak success in their fields who are not white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men. Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, Condoleezza Rice and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are but a few whose lives are a living proof that the American Dream is open to everyone who will work for it.

Ideas of Diversity/Equity/Inclusion epitomize the old warnings against the, “soft bigotry of low expectations”. There is nothing soft about the harm that they do. In stealing hope from the young, they ghettoize them; robbing them of what they might have become, if only they had learned to believe in themselves.

We must reclaim our schools from Diversity/Equity/Inclusiveness for the sake of each and every student, of all backgrounds!

In Maine and then Idaho, Ralph K. Ginorio has taught the history of Western civilization to high school students for nearly a quarter century. He is an “out-of-the-closet” Conservative educator with experience in special education, public schools, and charter schools, grades 6-12. He has lived in Coeur d’Alene since 2014. Email: rginorio@cdapress.com