It’s a little strange how much the liberal elite, who tend to congregate in New York’s Upper-East side and in West Hollywood, enjoy punishing themselves by bemoaning their privileged status. The New York Times today [1] published a story on pg. MB1 about a trend of private New York schools hosting seminars, workshops and classroom lessons on “white privilege.” These aren’t college campuses either; they’re doing it at elementary and high schools in elite areas of and Manhattan.
The long-winded Times story had room for everything but skepticism. It relayed several examples where schools were “helping students explore their white identity” through seminars, workshops and discussions led by diversity activists from around the country. But the propagandizing isn’t just happening within the classroom – schools took field trips to march in “Black lives matter” protests after the deaths of Eric Gardner and Michael Brown, and have increasingly started sending students to the annual “White Privilege Conference.”
The curricula include films charging whites with inherent, unconscious racism. One of these, a documentary called, “I’m not racist, am I?” follows 12 students from the area who go “on a remarkable journey to face racism” by meeting and talking about their personal biases and beliefs about race and society.
In the trailer for the film, “They’ll have to push through what they know” floats across the screen as a white girl asks the group of minority teens across from her, “Are you saying that all white people are racist?” The white kids in the clip are shown as being defensive or emotional while the black and brown kids “educate” them on their inherent privilege they don’t recognize. A woman in the trailer tells the kids that “People do not do what you are doing here. That is why there is so much racism.”
Ah, so racism exists because so few whites are willing to humiliate themselves to assuage their guilt? Would sack cloth do? Maybe a scarlet “R?”
At one school, students were asked to write down who they wanted to be and who they didn’t want to be on “identity cards.” Most students wrote skin color, ethnicity or sexual orientations down on these. The teacher then passed these around the room and said, “Society doesn’t value each of these identities equally.”
At a later seminar, students were asked to create a social status hierarchy chart based on current socio-economic conditions in the U.S. and based on general perceptions. The Times reported the students produced “strikingly similar charts” with black people having the least power and white men having the most. One student was shocked about “how easy it was” to realize these hierarchies exist. Yes, when you’re spoon fed racialist propaganda, reaching the “correct” conclusions is easy.
Buried at the bottom of the story, 40 paragraphs in, is the only talk of negative feedback these programs received. When third through fifth graders were put in “racial awareness” workshops at some private schools in Manhattan and the Bronx, there was “fierce resistance by parents,” the Times reports. One anonymous father of a white fifth grade girl, called the program “mind-boggling” and “said his daughter found the entire concept confusing and unsettling.”
Well that’s the idea. After a few years of this, she’ll be steeped in self-loathing, and well on her way to a gig writing for Salon.com … or even The New York Times.
— Kristine Marsh is Staff Writer for MRC Culture at the Media Research Center. Follow Kristine Marsh on Twitter. [2]