NYC School Asks Parents to Reflect on Their 'Whiteness,' Become 'White Traitors'
A Manhattan public school principal has encouraged the parents of his students to examine their “whiteness,” particularly as relates to an arbitrary list of various “white identities” ranging from the full-on “white supremacist” to the more preferable “white traitor” and “white abolitionist.”
In short, the list is a hierarchy of right and wrongthink that could only come from a hard-left Northwestern professor pushing thinly-veiled hyper-racialism under the flimsy banner of combating racism.
New York City Department of Education officials confirmed to the New York Post this week that the parents at East Side Community School in Lower Manhattan received literature on “The 8 White Identities,” written by Barnor Hesse, an associate professor of African American studies, political science, and sociology at Northwestern University.
A helpful meter shows the range between the “white identities” from bad, red, “white supremacist’’ to good, green, sufficiently morally repentant “white abolitionist.”
Between “white supremacist,” and “white abolitionist” on Hesse’s list are varying degrees of “white” identities that fail to hit the mark, such as “white privilege” who “may critique supremacy, but has a deep investment in questions of fairness/equality under the normalization of whiteness and white rule” and “white confessional” who are sadly still exposed to whiteness, but do piously seek “validation” and are “accountable” to people of color.
Of the identities, only the “white abolitionist” has achieved nirvana and is “changing institutions, dismantling whiteness, and not allowing whiteness to reassert itself.”
Just think, for a moment, if this were a comparable list of varying degrees of “blackness” in the Jim Crow South. It’s sickening.
An official told the Post that the material had first been shared with staff by some parents. Mark Federman, the school principal, then issued the material to all the parents at the school, which serves grade six through 12, “as part of a series of materials meant for reflection” and “food for thought,” according to the official.
“Anti-racism and the celebration of diversity is at the core of our work on behalf of the young people of New York City, and the East Side Community School’s students, parents and staff partner together to advance equity in their community,” a DOE representative explained in a glowing statement.
“The document in question was shared with the school by parents as a part of ongoing anti-racist work in the school community and is one of many resources the schools utilizes.”
Many would argue that the material itself, however, is flagrantly racist on its face.
According to Hesse’s university bio, his research interests include “modernity and coloniality,” “blackness and affect,” and “conceptual methodologies” and among the courses he instructs are “Post-Structuralism and Black Political Thought” and “Unsettling Whiteness.”
None of those interests and courses are particularly surprising coming from the author of an ideological “whiteness” caste system, and they all seem to confirm suspicions that he is, in fact, an ardent adherent of critical race theory.
“There is a regime of whiteness, and there are action-oriented white identities,” Hesse’s “White Identities” document reads. “People who identify with whiteness are one of these.”
“It’s about time we build an ethnography of whiteness, since white people have been the ones writing about and governing Others,’’ he added.
Principal Federman declined to comment through the DOE on providing the material to parents.
Christopher Rufo, Discovery Institute director and writer for the City Journal, shared photos of the literature on Twitter and noted, “This is the new language of public education.”
Many of his followers noted the troubling implications of such a view on “whiteness.”
SCOOP: The principal of East Side Community School in New York sent white parents this “tool for action,” which tells them they must become “white traitors” and then advocate for full “white abolition.”
This is the new language of public education. pic.twitter.com/0XA3xUpcuT
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) February 15, 2021
“Like other inquisitions (religious or political), the spectrum ranges from the unrepentant to the penitent, not from the innocent to the guilty. Guilt is presumed; it’s acknowledgment is optional,” one astute user noted.
Like other inquisitions (religious or political), the spectrum ranges from the unrepentant to the penitent, not from the innocent to the guilty. Guilt is presumed; it’s acknowledgment is optional.
— Kurt (@cookiekutter84) February 15, 2021
Just as the early 20th Century eugenicists preached genetic purity using detailed charts of the right way to breed the “fittest” families, the chart preaches an ideological purity that essentially deems anything but the hardest adherents of critical race theory intellectually unfit.
To use the language of “whiteness” to deride the undesirables who supposedly stand in the way of true equity and justice is to adapt the tactics of some of history’s most brutal oppressors.
Terms like “asocial,” “capitalist pig,” “enemy of the people,” or “unfit” have been weaponized to marginalize those who stand up to the ruling class in Nazi, fascist, and communist regimes and is now, ironically, being employed to stand up for the marginalized.
Or so we’re told.
It is all the more concerning that language like this is growing more common as cancel culture rages and the slightest slip of the tongue or rebellious utterance of wrongthink can land public figures and the general public with their careers ruined and their families threatened.
How soon before they are advocating for laws to be applied based on varying degrees of repentance for ideological sins rather than by our rights as defined by our common Creator?
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