Ethnic Studies is a Trojan Horse
plus a video about a hugely important Supreme Court Case and Mother's Day merch!
As many of you know, I write a monthly column in my local paper that I often share here too since so many of you live far away and won’t be picking up our free weekly paper at the grocery store or coffee shop. This piece below ran here last week in The Valley Breeze. As you read, you’ll see that the importance of this subject goes far beyond my little state.
The national and highly controversial push to force high schools to teach ethnic studies has landed on our doorstep here in Rhode Island— House Bill 5836 was introduced on February 28th and all I can say is, buyer beware.
On the surface, a class called “ethnic studies” can sound like a good idea. What’s wrong with students learning about different cultures, histories, and perspectives? But dig a little deeper, and what’s being proposed is not simply about understanding different ethnicities and cultures. It is an academic discipline that seeks to tinker in the minds of students by injecting a deeply ideological, anti-western and anti-Israel framework into their classrooms and making it mandatory.
Let’s be clear: this is not about whether students should learn about slavery, Jim Crow, Japanese-American internment camps, red-lining or the struggle for civil rights. It is about using a captive audience of students to sow distrust, fixate on racial identity and agitate for the deconstruction of American society. It is not about celebrating the “melting pot” that is America; it is a radical movement borne out of the 1960’s that has always been, at its core, about resistance and revolution.
The vast majority of ethnic studies programs are rooted in activism and have never been about encouraging students to think critically, grapple with conflicting ideas or engage with complex topics; on the contrary, these courses promote a single worldview that divides the world into oppressors and oppressed, derides Israel and the Jewish people and characterizes the United States as a settler-colonialist state steeped in white supremacy.
Below is text copied and pasted directly from the ethnic studies framework adopted by the Boston Public Schools and nearly identical to what we see in California and Minnesota as well:
White supremacy is normalized and upheld by ideas and systems of capitalism/slavery, orientalism/war, genocide/colonialism, and heteropatriarchy.
The dominant narrative normalizes, upholds and maintains the white supremacist power structure.
RESIST systems of power and oppression (i.e. white supremacy, colonialism, capitalism, heteropatriarchy).
RESTORE humanity by providing healing spaces and tools for students to examine and embrace their intersectional identities.
REALIZE societal transformation and social justice by providing opportunities for student agency through solidarity and collective action.
The same language we hear from anti-Israel activists on college campuses and in downtown Providence mirrors what all Rhode Island students will be taught as truth in a required high school ethnic studies course funded by taxpayer dollars, if this bill passes.
A long established pattern in Rhode Island is that adult-led left wing activists use students as the public face for political agendas they’ve been pushing for years in blue states around the country, often with classrooms as the battleground. Unsurprisingly, Rhode Islanders are, again, being misled to believe that students are the driving force behind the push for mandatory ethnic studies.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of students in the Ocean State cannot read, write or do math on grade level. When it comes to K-12 education, Rhode Island consistently falls into the “high spending, low performing” category. In many of our school districts, fewer than one in three students is proficient in basic literacy or numeracy and in our capital city, it’s closer to one in ten. But instead of prioritizing the five alarm fire that is our reading and math proficiency, the ten sponsors of this bill are prioritizing an ideological project that, despite loud claims to the contrary, has never been shown to improve student achievement.
In fact, cities and states that have mandated ethnic studies courses are currently in an academic and enrollment free-fall and it would be a massive blunder for Rhode Island to join them in their race to the bottom.
Video
If you are interested in learning about the education related Supreme Court case that was just heard this past week (Mahmoud v Taylor) about parental rights in Montgomery County, MD, we’ve got your covered. My colleague Sarah and I did a whole livestream about it—she is an expert in the laws at issue in this case and also a mom of three boys (like me!) but we talk about it without the legal jargon that can make these cases so confusing for non-lawyers. Feedback so far has been very positive so I think we succeeded in explaining it pretty well!
Move over Kathy Ireland— check out MY models!
Mother’s Day is coming and I’ve got something she will LOVE. But putting aside the shopping potential at LOVE my view, I’m so proud to share with you this gorgeous album of motherhood we’ve built over the past year. Every single one of these moms, from Minnesota to Maryland to New York to Wisconsin to Virginia to Massachusetts to Indiana to Rhode island is their child’s greatest champion — and I’m so grateful to all of them for believing in the simple message of gratitude: LOVE my view.
Trying to piggy-back Zionism onto education reform distorts both, as though Zionism is not distorted enough. Antisemitism is not a major, nor even minor, problem in America. The major problem is Marxist domination of our government and education institution. Feminism is Marxist to the core, driving a class warfare between men and women. And motherhood is one of the casualties in that war, families, too, in the process.
The state of Israel is a Marxist state and a product of Zionism. At least eighty percent of Christian in America are Zionists, falsely believing the state of Israel to be a resurrected ancient Israel, the chosen people of God, and also the necessary precursor of the second coming of Christ, anathema to Jews. The only reason American jews and the Israelis aren't vocal about Christian Zionists is that it would sabotage government and private funding without which Israel could not pursue genocidal war against Arabs in the Middle East. And no I am not Antisemitic. I believe Jews have the right to a homeland where they can escape the Antisemitism they have encountered in most places they were driven into by Rome, Assyria, and Syria two to three thousand years ago, mostly because of their fierce defense of their homeland against imperial conquest.