I Took This New Job For One Simple Reason: Discrimination Based on Immutable Traits is Always Wrong

'Parents Defending Education' is ready to help parents fight back

Parents Defending Education is a brand new organization born out of the ubiquitous activism and indoctrination on display in America’s classrooms. We all remember those teachers who wore their politics on their sleeve or crossed the line in how much political bias they brought into their lessons.

This is different.

The landscape has shifted to something much more serious, insidious and in many cases, illegal. Compelled speech. Political indoctrination. Racial segregation. Oppression matrices. Dangerous generalizations about whole groups of people based on their race, gender and religious ethnicity.

Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is the new name of the game and while it it sounds anodyne, virtuous even, it is often quite the opposite in practice. I used to be a vocal advocate for equity because I believed it meant doing what we could to level the playing field of opportunity; turns out that for many in positions of of power over other people’s children, it means “equality of outcomes.”

Is it any surprise that people whose families fled communist regimes to come to the United States are sounding the alarm about what their children are learning in school?

I have spent the past few years watching in disbelief and horror as self-described “progressives” and “liberals” have embraced ideas that limit free speech, silence dissent, compel certain approved speech, segregate people by race and advocate for deliberate discrimination based on immutable characteristics. They have decided that total moral failure becomes virtue when it targets the right people. It is an insidious worldview and while anyone is certainly free to hold it, it has no place as a learning framework in our schools.

From the homepage of Parents Defending Education:

The new educational mission is not only at war with basic American values, but with our kids’ happiness and ability to succeed in life. Couched in vague rhetoric about “social justice,” the new curriculum divides our children into “oppressor” and “oppressed” groups. To one, it teaches guilt and shame. To the other, grievance and anger. To all students, it spreads unhappiness, radicalism and failure.

We are seeing institutions, including a huge number of schools, being taken over by an ideology and worldview that, as Matt Taibbi writes, “sees the human being as locked into one of three categories: members of oppressed groups, allies, and white oppressors”.

I left the classroom six years ago and would never have believed then that a malignancy like the current DEI trend would find its way into the nation’s schools. I was naive, ignorant to what was bubbling up under the surface in the name of “equity.” The idea that a staff meeting would not be allowed to start until everyone participated in a “land acknowledgement” would have seemed impossible; it is now the norm in more schools than you can imagine. If someone had told me that in the year 2021 students would be sorted by race during the school day for class discussions, I would have scoffed at such a suggestion. I was sorely mistaken.

Parents Defending Education (PDE) seeks to expose, empower and engage by tracking incidents nationwide, building coalitions, and providing resources for fighting back. Investigative reporting, litigation and policy engagement at the local, state and national level are all central to the strategy.

The website has:

• A map that tracks incidences of indoctrination and activism in schools around the country

• Suggestions of curriculum and materials for school districts who want to do Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in a way that unites instead of divides

• Help for understanding woke jargon and how it manipulates language in an effort to silence dissent

• Explainers for Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972

• Advice and helpful tips for speaking up at school board meetings

• Explanations of public school and private school rights

• A parent organization field guide

This is not an exhaustive list but you get the point.

Just to give one very real example of what I’m talking about, students and teachers across America are being asked — required even—to read activist and writer Ibram X. Kendi’s book, “How to Be An Antiracist.” It is a bestseller and you probably have friends or family who have tried to convince you that “you have to read this book!”

In the book, Kendi writes:

The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity. If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist. . . . The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.

Millions of children are being taught, in school, that it is not only acceptable to discriminate on the basis of our immutable traits but that it is their moral obligation. School staff are being told the same in mandatory trainings for which their districts are paying up to $20,000 an hour. School leaders are asking parents to “reflect on their whiteness” and forcing 3rd grade students to list all of their “identities” and then locate them on an oppression hierarchy.

Somewhere former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke and all his minions smile.

We all have to draw our own lines in the sand and I have drawn mine at discrimination and shame based on a person’s immutable characteristics. (I also refuse to accept the idea that being female puts me in an “oppressed class.”) I learned that all of this was wrong and untrue a long time ago and I’m not about to abandon those beliefs because some morally bankrupt ideology sweeping the nation tells me that I should.

An arc that bends toward justice does not allow for the resuscitation of the greatest sins of our past under the guise of progress.

This is a massive fight for sure but it is one that we must win. As the Director of Outreach at Parents Defending Education, I am ready and honored to do my part.