Corruption of K-12 Education through Racism Instruction

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Ibram X. Kendi signing his book “How to Be an Anti-Racist” at an event in Montclair, NJ.

Like many Americans, I am disheartened by the corruption of K-12 education in America. He appears to have inherited everything backslid in our colleges and universities since the death of George Floyd in custody in Minneapolis last year sparked a nationwide paroxysm of self-recrimination, based on the flawed assumptions prevalent in the academia, that America is “systematically racist” and that our country can only be made virtuous, for the first time in its history, through atonement for collective fault.

There is nothing more appalling about this view of America than its implication that the original civil rights movement of the 1960s was a failure. To me, it always seemed like a smash hit. Encapsulated in Martin Luther King’s moving speech at the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963, the movement showed America at its best. King’s injunction that we judge people not on the color of their skin but on the content of their character has become the founding principle of my policy.

But today, at least in academia, that laudable goal is in ruins. King’s invocation of meritocracy and color blindness has largely fallen on deaf ears. In fact, for Ibram Kendi, author of How to Be an Anti-Racist – which on many college campuses is considered the final say on all matters concerning race – personal behavior is entirely reducible to collective genetic inheritance. For this reason, King’s emphasis on individual moral responsibility ignores the racism that Kendi says drives almost everything white people do; indeed, in proposing a solution which cannot eliminate this racism, King was himself a racist.

The solution, according to Kendi, is brutal: Unless preferences favoring blacks over whites are exercised in all aspects of American life in which social and economic benefits cannot be provided to all who seek them. , the Whites will reserve them for themselves. In fact, their racism is so relentless that the racial preferences necessary to counter it will have to be enforced until black people are represented in every American institution according to the exact percentage of their share of the general population. For various reasons having nothing to do with race per se, the likelihood of this happening is close to zero.

In a Kendian world, friendly relations between whites and blacks, let alone any sense of a common purpose, would be impossible.

Until recently, it seemed like there was no escaping this grim prospect. The letters I had sent to all the principals in Connecticut alerting them to the blatant distortions of Project 1619 – which, like Kendi’s book, regards American history exclusively as the history of slavery and racism – were ignored in all but two cases. And when my colleagues at Central Connecticut State University saw my letters, I was publicly denounced as stupid and ignorant, and formally condemned as racist by my college union.

Such incivility and intolerance to dissent have long been commonplace on American college campuses. But the moral corruption he reveals has now metastasized into K-12 education. A Connecticut superintendent went so far as to charge taxpayers in his school district the cost of providing all teachers with copies of How to Be an Anti-Racist, with instructions for instilling its contents in their students. Despite the district’s approval of “diversity” in the curriculum upon which the teaching is based, the superintendent did not include in the shipment any reviews of Kendi’s book, some of the most incisive of which were produced by scholars. black intellectuals such as John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell. The superintendent also didn’t respond to emails I sent him asking why he didn’t.

But all is not lost. Parents appalled by the reduction in their children’s education to indoctrination into the morally heinous and empirically dubious schibboleths of white supremacy and systemic racism are now uniting to save our country from purveyors of racial hatred like Ibram Kendi who seem determined to destroy it. If these parents are successful, they will have gone far in restoring Martin Luther King’s vision of Americans of all races recognizing their common humanity and their inherent worth as God’s creation in its rightful place atop the guiding principles of America.

Jay Bergman is Professor of History at Central Connecticut State University and sits on the Board of Directors of the National Association of Scholars

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