[Want even more content from FPM? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more—now for just $3.99/month. Click here to sign up.]
“Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
No, that’s not Alabama. It’s New York whose Department of Education is defying the Trump administration’s orders to end its racist DEI programs or lose federal funding.
Lester W. Young, Jr., the Chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents, reached deep into his classical body of learning and fired back by quoting murdered rapper Notorious B.I.G., accused of being involved in Tupac Shakur’s murder, “If you don’t know, well, now you know.”
Considering that less than half of New York City elementary school students score as being able to read proficiently under the city’s misleading ‘New York City Reads’, that’s not really true. “I mean, we have barely cracked 50% proficiency in E.L.A.,” the Deputy Chancellor admitted.
Among state fourth graders reading proficiency is at 30% showing majority childhood illiteracy.
“We understand that the current administration seeks to censor anything it deems ‘diversity, equity & inclusion,’” Daniel Morton-Bentley, the deputy state Department of Education commissioner, shot back in an official letter to the Trump administration. “but there are no federal or State laws prohibiting the principles of DEI.”
There are multiple such laws against teaching and practicing racism in schools. Like Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As ‘Biggie’ said, “If you don’t know, well, now you know.”
A Freedom Center Investigates review found that the state’s Department of Education’s DEI booklet is packed with racially discriminatory materials like the claim that “for people of color, internalized oppression can involve believing in negative messages about oneself or one’s racial group. For Whites, internalized privilege can involve feeling a sense of superiority and entitlement or holding negative beliefs about people of color.”
White people can only be privileged. Only minorities are oppressed. What message does that send to white students and teachers trapped in a systematically racist school system?
The booklet even links to an article about students taking part in a “weekly ‘deconstructing whiteness’ program” and a poster asking “why do I have to feel guilty about being white?”
The NY Dept of Ed’s DEI program features the Culturally Responsive Sustaining Education Implementation Roadmap which at Phase III demands “tough conversations” and “reflecting on yourself, your role, and implicit bias”. What do those “tough conversations” look like?
The CRSE program recommends ‘‘Cultural Competence Now: 56 Exercises to Help Educators Understand and Challenge Bias, Racism, and Privilege’, a book by a city teacher, that has an exercise headlined “White Fatigue” and includes racist terms such as “White people fatigue syndrome” and “White fragility”.
Exercise 11 of the handout from ‘Cultural Competence Now: 56 Exercises to Help Educators Understand and Challenge Bias, Racism, and Privilege shows a picture of 8 contemporary people and asks participants to categorize them as either “Free White People (does not include Irish, Jewish or Italian)”, “All Other Free White People” and “Slaves”.
There’s no answer key as to whether the Japanese lady is supposed to be white or a slave.
Another exercise proposes having students “write down everything they know to be true about white people. On the other sheet, ask them to write down everything they know to be true about Black people”. (The racially discriminatory capitalization comes from the original text.)
One exercise urges teachers to “discuss the five tenets of critical race theory.” while another
warns teachers against “being colorblind toward your students”.
This seems to be exactly the kind of thing the Title VI of the Civil Rights Act was there to stop. But rather than banning discrimination, New York State’s Department of Education enforces it.
New York State has certified that it’s in compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. It’s clearly not. Teacher training materials with exercises labeling some people as “slaves” or “free white people (does not include Irish, Jewish or Italian)”, telling students to write down things about white people and black people, and using derogatory terms toward white people is so in violation of Title VI, that New York schools might as well start segregating water fountains.
Craig Trainor, President Trump’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights at the Department of Education, has warned that New York State’s racist DEI programs are illegal, and will lead to a cutoff of federal funding. And New York’s response is to go on doubling down on DEI racism.
The inherent problem with the state’s Department of Education is that its mission isn’t education, as the inability of elementary and middle schoolers to read at grade level shows: it’s activism.
The DEI program’s stated endgame is to have “students learn about power and privilege in the context of various communities and are empowered as agents of positive social change…to redress historical and contemporary oppression.”
It doesn’t matter if they can’t read, as long as they come away believing that minorities are victims, white people are privileged oppressors, and riot in the streets for leftist causes.
New York’s children may not be able to read, but instead four year olds are being forced to participate in an exercise to ‘degender toys’ by designing a toy store that has “no gender stereotypes” and “no toy guns or violent video games” and presumably no boys allowed.
The mission of the Culturally Responsive Sustaining Education Implementation Roadmap is to create “sociopolitically conscious” children who “identify and critically examine both historical and contemporary power structures” and “recognize that personal, cultural, and institutionalized discrimination creates and sustains privileges for some while creating and sustaining disadvantage for others”. Or more simply leftists who can ‘degender’ toys, but can’t count.
And it’s working.
New York City has become a political monoculture where radical politics and riots are the norm.
New York’s Democrat hierarchy benefits from this miserable state of affairs while the children suffer. That is why the Trump administration is cracking down on abusive DEI indoctrination systems like these. And New York’s ‘George Wallaces’ insist that they will never stop the hate.
Not unless they’re held accountable.
And to the New York Department of Education and its leaders who deny that their DEI is racist, we have one message. “If you don’t know, well, now you know.” And now everyone knows.
****
This has been an article from the Freedom Center Investigates ‘Hate in School’ project in which the David Horowitz Freedom Center investigates and exposes how schools and colleges are secretly pushing extremism, indoctrination and hate on America’s students.
