Separately this April, at two elite private schools in New York City, a teacher and a parent are paying a price for speaking out against anti-racism teaching that emphasizes identity politics and white guilt.
Paul Rossi, for ten years a math teacher at Grace Church School in lower Manhattan, declared on 13 April that he could no longer remain silent while students were indoctrinated in critical race theory. He was particularly upset at the requirement that students sign a ‘student life agreement’ promising to acknowledge their biases while seeking to overcome them.
On 18 April Rossi was fired. A Grace Church School spokesman said Rossi could no longer be effective, as numerous students had asked to be removed from his class.
Accepting his punishment for challenging the new orthodoxy, Rossi expressed the hope that Grace Church School would eventually renew its commitment to free expression, diverse viewpoints and true education.
At the exclusive Brearley School for girls on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, parent Andrew Gutmann announced that his daughter would be withdrawing from the school she had attended for seven years. Gutmann sent a letter to 600 parents complaining that Brearley was obsessed with race. He wrote that ‘by viewing every element of education, every aspect of history and every facet of society through the lens of skin color and race, we are desecrating the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’.
Brearley’s headmistress responded on 16 April, telling parents that Gutmann’s letter was deeply offensive and harmful. Several students, she said, ‘told us that they felt frightened and intimidated by the letter and the fact that it was sent directly to our homes’. She continued: ‘(We) express our unequivocal support for our Black, Asian, Indigenous, Multiracial and Latinx students….’
Roundly denounced
On social media, Gutmann has been roundly denounced as racist, especially for his assertion that systemic racism hasn’t existed in America since the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s.
The letter-writers at the schools – which charge $53,000 in tuition – say several parents and teachers agree with their critique but fear retribution if they speak out.
Whether cancel culture or identity politics, the new orthodoxy racialises education and history. Classics like Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn can be banned because they contain the N-word. American icons like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington are castigated because they owned slaves. The new purveyors of truth are telling students what to believe. They fail to acknowledge the fallacy of judging historical figures by today’s standards, ignoring earlier cultural norms.
Jefferson’s moral failing, according to the revisionists, trumps his Declaration of Independence or his robust defence of free enquiry: ‘I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.’
This awakened elite is powerful in education and media. Free speech, for decades a bedrock in American protest, is replaced by ideas and people being cancelled if they don’t conform to the new orthodoxy.
We are, says dissenting New York parent Andrew Gutmann, teaching students what to think instead of how to think.
The implications of suppressing alternative viewpoints is scary, disturbingly close to Orwell’s Ministry of Truth (propaganda) in his novel, 1984. In Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 classic film Alphaville about a technocratic, dystopian future, the word ‘why?’ does not exist.
Totalitarianism of the Left
Historian Niall Ferguson worries about a totalitarianism of the Left imposing its values on society. Fear and intimidation become tools for enforcing conformity. Bari Weiss, who resigned in disgust from the opinion page at the New York Times, says the ‘great awokening’ is akin to a religious movement that forces everyone to conform and obey.
As in South Africa with Rhodes Must Fall, a strong element of guilt over past injustice infuses the white liberal embrace of the Black Lives Matter protests.
The excesses of critical race theory – its revisionist history and the shaming of whites for society’s ills – may be prompting a backlash. If that is the case, the two letter-writers in New York City will have made useful contributions.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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