King Turning Over In His Grave

If you’re a public school teacher and you’re white, you’re probably a tool of institutional racism and you need to be re-educated. Don’t fret though. The Obama Administration is issuing guidelines that will help you become more conscious of your “whiteness.”

Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder cautioned school districts about their “overly zealous disciplinary policies” that, according to an AP story: “lead to a school to prison pipeline that discriminates against minority students.” The guidelines “[tell] schools that they must adhere to the principle of fairness and equity in student discipline or face strong action if they don’t.”

Actually though, they’re telling schools they must do just the opposite of [adhering] to the principle of fairness and equity. They’re telling schools to judge students by the color of their skin and not the content of their character. Martin Luther King would be appalled.

Holder and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have been intimidating schools, I mean “gathering data” for a while now and they claim that: “Although black students made up 15 percent of students in the data collection, they made up more than a third of students suspended once, 44 percent of those suspended more than once and more than a third of students expelled.” Neither Holder nor Duncan offer any data evidencing that racial discrimination is what causes the disparity. They assume no one will ask, I guess. To them, the numbers are enough. If blacks are disciplined more, it must be because of racism, not because of their behavior.

Around the country, the school districts being intimidated, I mean, “studied,” have tried kissing up to Holder and Duncan by spending millions re-training teachers to root out their unconscious “institutional racism” and make them conscious of their “white privilege.” According to Williamette Week “Portland Public Schools has [sic] spent millions to help stop racial profiling of students in discipline cases. [but] The problem is getting worse.” Principal Verenice Gutierrez of Harvey Scott K-8 School in Portland said the very mention of eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches could be racist, because minority students may not eat them.

I’m not making this up.

Nathan Harnden, writing in “The College Fix,” describes the extensive trainings, staff meetings, classroom observations and other workshops teachers must deal with to change their teaching methods when dealing with minority students. He quotes the “Portland Tribune”: “[T]he first day of the school year for staff, for example, the first item of business for teachers at Scott School was to have a Courageous Conversation - to examine a news article and discuss the ‘white privilege’ it conveys.”

All this comes from a company called “Pacific Education Group,” or “PEG” owned and operated by Glenn Singleton who has become rich by charging school districts huge fees. Like President Obama, Singleton is a disciple of Derrick Bell’s “Critical Race Theory” which purports that something called “systemic racism” permeates white culture. Virtually all us white people are consciously or unconsciously racist, so Singleton, Obama, Holder, and Bell are determined to cure us of it. PEG sends its trainers coast to coast on the taxpayer dime to do so.

Bell: "I live to harass white folks."

I first wrote about “white privilege” seven years ago. My wife received indoctrination while working at Tri-County Mental Health in Bridgton in the 1990s. At least one, and probably several of the student teachers assigned to my classroom was assigned Peggy Macintosh’s 1988 essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” by the University of Southern Maine as are thousands, perhaps millions of other college students around the country. The 15th Annual White Privilege Conference will be March 26-29 in Madison, Wisconsin. Many, if not most, will attend at taxpayer expense.

In his first major speech after being confirmed as US Attorney General in 2009, Eric Holder said America was a “nation of cowards” when it comes to talking about race. This writer would suggest that Mr. Holder is obsessed with it. He threatens “strong action” against schools that suspend black students or turn them over to law enforcement more often then students of any other color. He wants schools to treat disruptive young black males as victims of racism at the hands of teachers insufficiently conscious of their “whiteness.” Black students need “restorative justice” delivered through “courageous conversations” (whatever the heck those are) rather than discipline.

Our race-obsessed Attorney General wants more power over public schools. He wants to reinforce the idea that all black people are victims and ramp up white guilt because that’s what put the Obama Administration, and him, in power. It got Obama reelected and insulates Obama from criticism for destroying our economy, our health-care system, our foreign policy, for spying on the press, and for using the IRS to harass his political enemies. 

Looks like I retired none too soon from my long career in the public schools. There’s no way I would sit through a training session on “white privilege” quietly.

Cherishing Victimhood

“Well, the cowboys beat the Indians again,” said Rick Doyle, governor of the Passamaquoddy Reservation near Eastport, Maine. He believes Maine voters discriminated against Indians by voting down their second effort to open a casino. “Every time we propose something, we get put down. It feels to me that we continue to be oppressed by the dominant culture.” (Portland Press Herald 11-8-07)

We’ve been hearing it a long time now. Indians are victims. White people took their land and destroyed their way of life. They’re a separate nation within our nation. They receive the benefits of being US citizens as well as maintaining certain other rights the rest of us don’t have like fishing, hunting, educational scholarships and opening casinos. They’re entitled to special treatment.

My wife is half Abenaki. Her mother’s ancestors were Indians from the reservation at St. Francis, Quebec, formerly known as Odonak. My children are one-quarter Abenaki with genealogy records to prove it. One of them learned that she could go to graduate school on scholarship if she could be officially admitted to the “tribe,” so she pursued it. Abenaki tribal headquarters are in Swanton, Vermont near the Canadian border, so she called and wrote to them repeatedly. April, the woman who was chief, was never able to come to the phone and never answered her mail either. After months of this, my daughter and I drove to Swanton with all her paperwork after assurances that the chief would be there on a certain day.

Headquarters were in something resembling an old laundromat. Unused computer stations lined the walls and long tables in the middle. People were playing cards at the tables and smoking so much it was difficult to breathe. Amber stains from years of burning tobacco covered walls and ceiling. The computer stations were piled with papers, dust and other detritus. And, wouldn’t you know it, the head woman wasn’t there. She was out checking an archaeological site at an expanding road project nearby, we were told. We drove out to the site but we couldn’t find her. We spoke to archaeologists from the University of Maine working the site and they were interesting, but they hadn’t seen the head Indian lady either. Back at the headquarters again the chief still among the missing, we were assured that the tribe wanted to do everything right. They had applied to the US Government for official tribal recognition (so they could open a casino I suggested, though they denied it) and they wanted to be very careful. They would examine my daughter’s genealogy records and get back to her, they said, but we knew they wouldn’t. To admit another member would mean a smaller slice of the casino pie for each of them. We knew they would go back to smoking, playing cards and making excuses. My daughter eventually gave up.

The Indians as victims rhetoric is getting old. I’m tired of hearing it and, judging from last week’s vote, the reservoir of white guilt in the rest of Maine is running out too. The day after the vote though, I heard someone read the result and lament their plight, saying: “Well, we took all their land.” I responded that I didn’t know what he might have done, but I didn’t take land from anyone. Whatever happened more than a hundred years ago is history. No white people alive today took land away from Indians. None of their fathers or grandfathers did either. It’s time to move on.

Life is difficult. Of that we can be sure. It’s more difficult for some than others, but nobody really escapes. We’re dealt a hand in life and we have to play it out. Whining about our cards doesn’t get us anywhere. As long as we have equal opportunity to play them out, how we do it is up to each of us as individuals. We have nobody but ourselves to blame for what we do. We should help each other along the way as much as we can, but we must realize that we can’t help people who aren’t willing to do the work necessary to help themselves.

According the November 8th Press Herald article by Josie Huang:

There are plans to build a liquefied natural gas terminal in Passamaquoddy Bay, and strong interest in harnessing tidal waters and the wind for energy production ventures. But the tribe has focused for nearly 15 years on getting a gambling facility, and the latest setback only reinforced nagging suspicions that voters were discriminating against the tribe . . .

Same old - same old. The energy projects sound too much like work. Much easier to let some out-of-state outfit come in and build a casino in the Indians’ name so tribe members can sit back, collect the revenues and whine about what victims they are.