#-> if so. how indoctrinating are said history classes
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i think one thing i frequently forget about teyvat lore is how. nobody knows jackshit about khaneri'ah. like i know we know because we're out and about looking at stuff that would get us celestia nailed if they cared enough actively. but if you asked the average citizen they'd treat us like they treat fischl
#does teyvat have history classes.#-> if so. how indoctrinating are said history classes#' oh yeah. the khaneriahns only really made bread and food with their alchemy; so celestia cursed & murdered them for their transgressions-#most insane shit being said#i respect the. determination#its so funny; every other interpretation of khaneriah DIRECTLY contradicts itself#what the hell is the curriculum around it. or do they not teach it#'teacher; what happened over this huge gap in history?' 'uh.'#crepe rambles
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AITA for disrupting a teacher's religion lesson?
I (currently a senior) have been made to go to a before school church class every morning (6am-6:50am) from freshman year to senior year of high school. (my family is Mormon if that matters) I have really bad insomnia and have been struggling in school a lot from lack of sleep. Granted, I'm still a A and B student so it is not seen as struggling.
I am not religious at all and am really uncomfortable with being made to go as this class features a lot of required sharing of your opinions on the doctrine. I have talked to both parents (divorced my entire life) and my dad agreed that I could do online along with my mom (primary placement) in the past, around the start of my junior year. However, when the class started back up for the school year, I was still made to go. Both of my parents know I am not religious, but they do not care. (my mom scolds me for "attacking" her religion if I point out the inconsistencies in what is being taught, then says I need to respect it, but when I ask her to respect my beliefs by not making me go, she ignores me)
This year, the teacher for the class switched. As mentioned before, I am not comfortable in this class as a lot of the doctrine taught sounds very much like it is indoctrination to me. The first 3 years I was in the class, I would parrot the answers they wanted, with only the occasional mention of a contradiction (especially with the church's history with polygamy and pedophilia) but this year I have been too fed up with being made to go to this class so I have been a bit more sassy in my responses, sometimes saying things like "I can't answer this because I don't believe it"
The specific instance in which I may be TA happened a few days ago. I was more tired than usual that day, my mom and I had had a particularity bad fight as I was leaving the house, so when the teacher asked me to analyze a scripture and say what I found meaningful about it, I told her in front of the class that I did not find anything about the religion meaningful, which I realized may have been a little harsh
Extra info:
the teacher's response was to tell me to "fake it till you make it" and continue making me do it
she called on me after this and asked me what I found meaningful to which I said I simply had nothing to add
This teacher often talks about her life specially the 1 1/2 years she spent teaching about this as a 19 year old in another country and especially talks about how her mistreatment made her really love the church which makes me very uncomfortable as my sister was the same way before leaving this church so I am definitely biased against her
I tend to spend a lot of the lessons in this class on my phone, obviously ignoring the lessons, which is definitely rude, but I feel I'm justified in not wanting to pay attention
What are these acronyms?
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By: Bridget Phetasy
Published: Jun 22, 2023
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably witnessed the backlash to Pride. There have been mass boycotts of Bud Light after the beer company partnered with trans woman and TikTok influencer, Dylan Mulvaney, sending her a custom can to celebrate her first year of “girlhood.” Target was next to come under fire for its Pride display targeting children and their “tuck-friendly” bathing suits for women.
This set the stage for the most divisive Pride month in some time. First, the boycotts. Then videos of angry parents at school boards went viral. Conservative radio hosts and commentators vowed to make Pride “toxic” to brands. But it’s not just conservatives who are pushing back; according to a recent Gallup poll, even Democrats have seen a drop in the acceptance of same-sex relations.
Which begs the question: what happened to Pride? After decades of progress for gay rights, growing acceptance of gay marriage and the normalization of same-sex relationships, Pride is unexpectedly political again. Why?
In search of an answer, I spoke to prominent LGBT thinkers and writers, many of them dissenting voices when judged against the views of many LGBT advocacy groups. Their answers surprised me. Across the board they all said some version of “this was inevitable.”
“When it comes to gay issues, conservatives largely lost the culture war,” Katie Herzog observes. “But something about recent trends has reignited that passion — and issues that seemed resolved are up for debate again. I guess the Nineties really are back.”
“The core reason for the backlash is pretty simple: children,” Andrew Sullivan explains. “The attempt to indoctrinate children in gender ideology and to trans them on the verge of puberty has changed the debate. Start indoctrinating and transing children… and you will re-energize one of the oldest homophobic tropes there is: ‘gays are child molesters.’”
Glenn Greenwald largely agrees: “What destroyed the culture war consensus was their cynical and self-interested decision to transform the LGBT cause into one that no longer focused on the autonomy of adult Americans to live freely — which most people support — but instead to demand the right to influence and indoctrinate other people’s children.”
“They are calling them ‘trans kids’ and medicalizing them at an early age. Lying about puberty blockers. Lying about young girls getting irreversible surgery and so on,” says trans man Buck Angel.
In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriages, and with bipartisan support it seemed there was a consensus on this one culture war issue, as well as broad support for the legal rights of trans adults to be free from discrimination. The war was largely won. But rather than shutting up shop or refocusing their efforts on parts of the world where gay and lesbian people faced serious discrimination, activists and NGOs moved onto the transgender issue.
“There are countries in the world where you can be executed for being gay,” says James Kirchick, author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. “That’s what the Human Rights Campaign [America’s foremost LGBT campaign group] should be saving its ire for.”
An average person will likely refer to this shift as “woke” and wonder how “the trans stuff” is suddenly everywhere, all at once. Parents are baffled when three out of four of their twelve-year-old daughter’s friend group “identify” as boys or, even more confusingly, nonbinary. People started putting pronouns in their social media bios, on their work résumés and in their email signatures. Biological men are competing in women’s sports and being placed in women’s prisons. In medical magazines and birthing classes, women are suddenly referred to by dehumanizing terms such as “birthing persons” and “uterus havers.”
“It’s like a new enforced public holiday thing and people smell a rat,” says Douglas Murray. “The wiser people realize that something weird is being smuggled in. This isn’t just like, ‘don’t beat up your gay neighbor.’ It’s like ‘there is no such thing as gender.’ ‘There is no such thing as sex.’”
We’ve arrived here thanks to a confluence of forces. Perpetual victimhood pushed by activist groups that need a reason to exist and continue collecting money. The corporatization of Pride. The hijacking of the movement by gender ideology.
“You can’t dress toddlers up in extreme political propaganda while lecturing the parents on committing child abuse for not transitioning their kids and expect everyone to keep quiet,” trans writer Chad Felix Greene tells me.
To a normal, not especially political person going about their life, it can seem like gay culture is everywhere. Pride was once just a day to have fun, go to a parade, and “for those who have just come out as a way to cement their self-confidence in public” as Sullivan says. Now every June it becomes “the Holy Month of Pride” as Murray dubs it. Corporations change their social media logos to rainbows (unless, of course, it’s their Saudi account). Pride™️ has become so accepted it’s inescapable.
On the surface this might look like capitalism at work. These companies just want the gay dollar! Though there’s some truth to that, there’s also an undertow dragging these huge corporations down. They aren’t making decisions that are in the best interest of their shareholders; they are acting out of concern for their social credit score.
“These corporations aren’t getting any gay dollars from these fiascos. Gays hate corporations at Pride,” said publicist Mitchell Jackson. “Worst of all, these corporate campaigns just backfire on LGBTQ people. Gay rights are now being threatened again because big-box stores needed to sell tucking underwear.”
Jackson is exasperated that corporations listen to the advocacy groups in an attempt to do the right thing: “Corporations go to these groups for advice, hoping to avoid a woke controversy, and they get led into a hornet’s nest — and then these non-profits can fundraise off of the Bud Light controversy of the week.”
“What changed is that LGBT activist groups could not afford to obtain victory,” Greenwald says. “When activist groups win, their reason for existing, and their large budgets and salaries, dry up. They always have to push debates into whatever places Americans resist. They also have to be losing, have a claim to victimhood, a reason to assert that they are righting the bigotry of Americans.”
“It’s so tragic because we’ve reached this moment when gay people have finally won mainstream acceptance for the first time in, like, 2,000 years of history,” Kirchick said. “It’s OK to be gay pretty much everywhere in America — and there are obviously pockets where it’s still a problem, I’m not gonna deny that — but majorities of Republicans support gay marriage. I’ve seen it in my own life as a thirty-nine-year-old gay man: it’s a lot easier to be gay now than it was six years ago. And just when we’ve reached this moment, these activists have decided, in our name as gay people, to just piss off America and to make them think that we are a threat to their children.”
“I am so upset that my community has been co-opted and has been used for some other agenda,” Angel told me. “The work we have done to get here is profound and should never be forgotten. All we want is to live our lives just like you, but of course that’s not what you see now with the people driving the LGBTQIA+++++ bus.”
The real slippery slope hasn’t been the gay rights movement, as right-wing pundits often say. “When I see some of them going after Pride, they appear to blame gay people for the nonsense peddled in the name of Pride today — when in truth gay people are the victims of it,” comedian Andrew Doyle said.
At the heart of the problem is the fact that LGBT was never the package deal that most people consider it to be. “LGBT people don’t exist,” says Sullivan. “We’re very different from each other.”
Generally speaking, it’s “the Ts and the Qs” that insist it’s all or nothing. Trans activists demand acquiescence to all their demands no matter how insane and pseudo-scientific, push to allow men in women’s shelters and allow kids to be put on puberty hormones or you’re committing genocide. People are are increasingly saying, “OK — it’s nothing then.”
“I think gays and women in general are bearing the brunt of the gender ideology nonsense,” Murray said. “And it has itself piggybacked like some kind of parasitic entity onto gay rights.”
“Gender identity ideology is essentially anti-gay,” said Doyle. “Gay rights were secured through the recognition that a minority of people are instinctively orientated towards members of their own sex. Gender identity ideology seeks to break down the very notion of biological sex and claim that it is unimportant.”
Underneath the rainbow facade are illiberal forces such as “queer theory” that have been eroding the classically liberal foundation of the original civil rights movement that won gay and trans folks the rights they have now. We’ve gone from “love is love” to trans women insisting if a lesbian doesn’t want to suck their lady dick, they’re a fascist.
If you’re confused, that’s the point; confusion and contradiction are features, not bugs. In order to understand how this happened, and why, you need specialized knowledge. The average person can’t explain exactly what’s going on, because it’s nonsensical, you can only intuit it; but call it out and you’re dubbed a bigot — and so you retreat, keeping your head down while the gender borg marches on.
The temperature has been raised further by the Biden adminstration’s unambiguous embrace of this ideology. The White House is quick to paint anyone doubting the wisdom of what they euphemistically call “gender-affirming care” for minors as a knuckle-dragger, even though the overwhelming majority of Americans support a ban on such care and many liberal, tolerant European countries have banned it or scaled it back.
No wonder dyed-in-the-wool Democrats who disagree with the idea of biological men in women’s spaces — or are confused about the pseudo-religious idea that you were born in the wrong body, and wonder whether or not pausing puberty is even possible — are terrified to speak out.
“It was once ‘live-and-let-live’ said Sullivan, “Now it’s ‘embrace the ideology — or else.’”
Herein lies the problem with Pride. You can no longer opt out of the ideology. The trans activism changed everything. It is coercive. It is everywhere. Big Tech acts as an enforcer, in conjunction with the state, policing language, pronouns, exacting punishments for refusing to repeat the mantras “trans women are women” and “gender-affirming care is reproductive freedom.”
“I know many gay activists from yesteryear who are coming out of retirement to address this new anti-gay movement which has usurped Pride,” said Doyle. “It doesn’t help that all criticism of Pride is interpreted as homophobic or transphobic. These are important conversations. Like most culture-war issues, we need to stop thinking of this in terms of ‘left’ and ‘right’. These things are irrelevant. There are left-wing gay people and right-wing gay people — and all of them are harmed by Pride in its current form.”
The backlash is veering into a full-blown moral panic. “I’m seeing a lot more people online talking about gay people as though we are all pedophiles who want to groom children into becoming cross-dressing strippers, and a lot of what’s going on feels like good old-fashioned bigotry rearing its ugly head once again,” said Herzog.
Might the public backlash to Pride push moderates and independents to the left the way the overturning of Roe v. Wade did? From an optics perspective, attacking Pride can often look like attacking the whole LGBT community; just from what I’ve witnessed online, an unsettling amount of homophobia is rearing its head, using boycotts as cover for bigotry. Last week a video went viral that showed Muslim children stomping on the rainbow flag while their parents cheered them on.
“I don’t want to name names but there are certain conservative commentators who are using the backlash against LGBTQIA plus to include a backlash against gays,” says Murray. “But I think it’s inevitable because not enough gays try to do the decoupling that I’ve tried to do myself in recent years and say, ‘Sorry, not my party.’”
Yet the decoupling has begun and it seems to be the only way to navigate our way out of this moment without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. #LGBwithouttheTQ and the #LGB have been trending on Twitter almost every day in June. Even if people don’t understand the forces at work, I think most Americans are smart enough to make the distinction between their gay loved ones and friends and some of the more insane gender stuff.
Like most things, this requires nuance. “You have to say, ‘we respect the rights of adults to undergo a gender transition,’” says Kirchick. “And ‘we want full equality and non-discrimination for transgender people in society, but there are real live debates about at what age it’s appropriate to administer these sorts of medical treatment to kids.’”
“Keep biological sex as a central characteristic in the law and culture,” Sullivan says. “Gender can be added, but can’t replace.”
“I think many LGBT people see this mess but are scared to lose friends and community if they speak up,” said Angel. “But it’s our duty as LGBT members to call this out. To show the world that these people are not a representation of us.”
#Bridget Phetasy#gender ideology#queer theory#pride month#pride#authoritarianism#gender cult#gay rights#homophobia 2.0#woke homophobia#backlash#pride backlash#leave kids alone#religion is a mental illness
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https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/education/article278582149.html
Tallahassee
When Florida rejected a new Advanced Placement course on African American Studies, state officials said they objected to the study of several concepts — like reparations, the Black Lives Matter movement and “queer theory.”
But the state did not say that in many instances, its reviewers also made objections in the state’s attempt to sanitize aspects of slavery and the plight of African Americans throughout history, according to a Miami Herald/Tampa Bay Times review of internal state comments.
For example, a lesson in the Advanced Placement course focused on how Europeans benefited from trading enslaved people and the materials enslaved laborers produced. The state objected to the content, saying the instructional approach “may lead to a viewpoint of an ‘oppressor vs. oppressed’ based solely on race or ethnicity.”
In another lesson about the beginnings of slavery, the course delved into how tens of thousands of enslaved Africans had been “removed from the continent to work on Portuguese-colonized Atlantic islands and in Europe” and how those “plantations became a model for slave-based economy in the Americans.”
READ MORE: DeSantis says AP African-American studies class was ‘pushing an agenda’
In response, the state raised concerns that the unit “may not address the internal slave trade/system within Africa” and that it “may only present one side of this issue and may not offer any opposing viewpoints or other perspectives on the subject.”
“There is no other perspective on slavery other than it was brutal,” said Mary Pattillo, a sociology professor and the department chair of Black Studies at Northwestern University. Pattillo is one of several scholars the Herald/Times interviewed during its review of the state’s comments about the AP African American Studies curriculum.
“It was exploitative, it dehumanized Black people, it expropriated their labor and wealth for generations to come. There is no other side to that in African American studies. If there’s another side, it may be in some other field. I don’t know what field that is because I would argue there is no other side to that in higher education,” Pattillo said.
Alexander Weheliye, African American studies professor at Brown University, said the evaluators’ comments on the units about slavery were a “complete distortion” and “whitewashing” of what happened historically.
“It’s really trying to go back to an earlier historical moment, where slavery was mainly depicted by white historians through a white perspective. So to say that the enslaved and the sister African nations and kingdoms and white colonizers and enslavers were the same really misrecognizes the fundamentals of the situation,” Weheliye said.
DeSantis’ efforts to transform education in Florida
The commentary is also an example of how Gov. Ron DeSantis has transformed the state’s education system in his quest to end what he calls “wokeism” and “liberal indoctrination” in schools — a fight that began in the aftermath of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement that followed the high-profile murder of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minnesota.
“It’s not really about the course right? It’s kind of about putting down Black struggles for equality and freedom that have been going on for centuries at this point in time and making them into something that they are not through this kind of distorted rightist lens,” Weheliye said.
When asked about the findings of the previously unreported internal reviews, the Florida Department of Education said the course was rejected after state officials “found that several parts of the course were unsuitable for Florida students.”
Cailey Myers, a spokesperson for the agency, cited the work of many Black writers and scholars associated with the academic concepts of critical race theory, queerness and intersectionality — a term that she said “ranks people based on their race, wealth, gender and sexual orientation.” The term, however, refers to the way different social categorizations can interact with discrimination.
Brandi Waters, the executive director of the AP African American Studies course, said it is hard to understand the Florida Department of Education’s critiques on the content because state officials have not directly shared their internal reviews with the College Board. The state and the College Board, however, were in communication about the course for several months before it was rejected.
Waters maintains the coursework submitted to the state was the most holistic introduction to African American Studies.
A deeper look at Florida’s objections
The course materials provided by the College Board were reviewed by Florida Department of Education’s Bureau of Standards and Instructional Support and the decision to reject the course was made by “FDOE senior leadership,” records show.
John Duebel, the director of the state agency’s social studies department, and Kevin Hoeft, a former state agency official who now works at the New College of Florida in Sarasota, were identified as the two evaluators in the review. Hoeft is listed as an “expert consultant” to the Civics Alliance, a national conservative group that aims to focus social studies instruction in the Western canon and eliminate “woke” standards. His wife is a member of the conservative group Moms for Liberty.
Duebel declined to comment on the story and referred questions to the Department of Education, which did not respond. Hoeft did not respond to a request seeking comment. While the documents say that Duebel and Hoeft led the state reviews, much of the comments included in the state review are not attributed, making it hard to tell who said what.
The documents reviewed were provided to the Herald/Times by American Oversight, a left-leaning research organization that sued the state Department of Education for the records.
“We sued the Florida Department of Education to shed light on the DeSantis administration’s efforts to whitewash American history and turn classrooms into political battlegrounds,” American Oversight Deputy Executive Director Chioma Chukwu said in a statement. “The records obtained by American Oversight from Florida’s internal review of the AP African American Studies course expose the dangers of Gov. DeSantis’ sweeping changes to public education in Florida, including preventing students from learning history free from partisan spin.”
READ MORE: How a small, conservative Michigan college is helping DeSantis reshape education in Florida
The documents offer more detail into the state’s reasoning for rejecting the pilot course from being offered to high school students in Florida — and how topics related to racism, identity and gender were continually flagged out of concern that lessons were biased, misleading or “inappropriate” for students.
And, in cases where state officials did not find a violation of a state law or rule, concerns were often raised about how educators would teach the content, underscoring the growing distrust between state officials and educators as disputes over social issues engulf local school politics.
For example, the state worried educators teaching about how the 1960s Black is Beautiful movement helped lay a foundation for multicultural and ethnic studies movements, could “possibly teach that rejecting cultural assimilation, and promoting multiculturalism and ethnic studies are current worthy objectives for African Americans today.”
“This type of instruction tends to divide Americans rather than unify Americans around the universal principles in the Declaration of Independence,”the state officials wrote about a lesson in the course.
Records also show how some of the comments made by the state evaluators contained contradictions, such as advocating for primary sources and then later writing that certain primary sources contained “factual misrepresentations.” Many comments from the state pushed for the material to include perspectives from “the other side” but failed to elaborate whose perspective they wanted to be added.
Slavery
One of the lessons in the course, for example, set out to teach students how slavery set back Black people’s ability to build wealth.
“Enslaved African Americans had no wages to pass down to descendants, no legal right to accumulate property, and individual exceptions depended on their enslavers’ whims,” the College Board’s lesson plan said.
When reviewing the content, however, state reviewers said the lesson plan might violate state laws and rules because it “supposes that no slaves or their descendants accumulated any wealth.”
“This is not true and may be promoting the critical race theory idea of reparations,” state officials wrote in documents reviewed by the Herald/Times. “This topic presents one side of this issue and does not offer any opposing viewpoints or other perspectives on the subject.”
While there were scattered instances where enslaved people were given the chance to earn money to pay for their freedom, the wealth they accumulated still did not belong to them, said Paul Finkelman, the editor-in-chief of Oxford University Press’ “Encyclopedia of African American History 1619-1895.”
“Under the law of every slave state, including Florida, no slave could own anything. That is, slaves did not own the clothes on their back. They did not own the shoes on their feet,” said Finkelman. “So for the Florida Education Department to question whether slaves accumulated property is to not understand that slaves owned no property. In fact, they were property belonging to slave owners.”
Even in cases where slaves were allowed to make money, Finkelman argued, it would be a stretch to say they were able to accumulate wealth.
Black middle class
Evaluators also objected to a lesson plan that taught how Black Americans, even after slavery, continue to experience wealth disparities due to ongoing discrimination.
The coursework included the following statement: “Despite the growth of the Black middle class, substantial disparities in wealth along racial lines remain. Discrimination and racial disparities in housing and employment stemming from the early 20th century limited Black communities accumulation of generational wealth in the second half of the 20th century.”
State reviewers, however, said the unit could potentially violate state rules because it failed to offer other reasons outside of systemic racism and discrimination for the wealth disparity between Black Americans and other racial groups.
“The only required resource in this topic cites ‘systemic racism,’ ‘discrimination,’ ‘systemic barriers,’ ‘structural barriers,’ and ‘structural racism’ as a primary or significant causative factor explaining this disparity of wealth,” wrote one evaluator. “This topic appears to be one-sided as non-critical perspectives or competing opinions are cited to explain this wealth disparity.”
Pattillo said that while many of the comments made by the state in the review claimed that they wanted to see more balance of perspectives in the course materials, she felt state officials largely tried to minimize the topics of discrimination.
Abolitionist Movement
When it came to teaching students about the movement to end slavery, the College Board highlighted some of the prominent activists who led that abolitionist movement and the ways the government tried to stop those who resisted slavery.
“Due to the high number of African Americans who fled enslavement, Congress enacted the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850, authorizing local governments to legally kidnap and return escaped refugees to their enslavers,” the lesson plan stated.
Primary sources were scrutinized
When the College Board addressed the resistance to slavery, it wanted to teach students how to “describe the features of 19th-century radical resistance strategies promoted by Black activists to demand change.” In that unit, the state objected to two primary sources: “The Appeal” by David Walker and “An Address to the Slaves of the United States” by Henry Highland Garnet.
State reviewers said that “The Appeal” included “content prohibited under Florida law,” but does not offer more details; and that “An Address to the Slaves of the United States” contains “factual mis-representations” and potential violations of state rules.
“They complain that this primary source is not historically accurate. Well, of course it’s not historically accurate because it’s a political speech. It is not a piece of history, but it’s a perfectly historically accurate primary source to understand the anger of a Black abolitionist,” Finkelman said.
However, earlier in the review, the evaluators applauded the College Board for stating that “anchoring the AP course in primary sources fosters an evidence-based learning environment” and that the course will be focused on the works and documents of African American studies rather than “extraneous political opinions or perspectives.”
“This is exactly how all courses are to be taught in the state of Florida and we commend [the] College Board on this position,” wrote the state reviewer .
Scholars’ political leanings questioned
In one review, one of the state evaluators questioned the balance of the content because of the individuals the College Board picked to develop the coursework.
But one of the evaluators had a gripe: they claimed that there were no conservative Black scholars. This was a concern because, as the state evaluator put it, there may not be an “adequate level of intellectual balance.”
“Conservative and traditional liberal members may need to be added to the committees to bring balance and ensure compliance with Florida statutes, rules, and policies,” the state evaluator wrote.
Waters said the College Board is focused on having scholars on their committees who are the leaders in the field of African American studies and that their political background isn’t something they take into consideration.
“In terms of the scholars, we never really asked them ‘what is your political background?’,” Waters said. “I don’t assume that is a characteristic that remains static in a person’s life over time.”
“What we do is look for scholars who represent the expertise needed for the course. So who is leading the field in how we understand the origins of the African diaspora? Who is leading the field in cutting edge research on unearthing new perspectives of the civil rights movement? We look for their expertise and also the different backgrounds that they represent,” she added.
How did we get to this point?
While Florida law requires the study of African American history, the state reviews of the AP course show how the DeSantis administration and Republican policymakers are implementing changes to how schools can teach about race, slavery and other aspects of Black history.
In 2021, Florida barred lessons that deal with critical race theory, a 1980s legal concept that holds that racial disparities are systemic in the United States and not just a collection of individual prejudices. Critical race theory was not being taught in Florida schools. The state also barred lessons about “The 1619 Project,” a New York Times project that reexamines U.S. history by placing the consequences of slavery and contributions of Black Americans at the center.
A year later, the Republican-led Legislature approved a new law, known as the “Stop W.O.K.E. Act,” which prohibited instruction that could prompt students to feel discomfort about a historical event because of their race, ethnicity, sex or national origin.
To DeSantis, the restrictions are a necessary effort to protect students from what he sees as a cultural threat that, as he puts it, teaches “kids to hate this country.” But the policies have been widely criticized by Democrats, educators, historians and even a few Republican lawmakers who see the laws as an attempt to distort historic events.
State officials’ interpretation of these policies collided with many of the learning objectives outlined in the A.P. courses. This collision, some scholars say, is emblematic of the chilling effect the state’s vague laws can foster in academia.
“I think this is the point that many people have been saying,” Pattillo said. “That the misguided blanket use of this term critical race theory, and in the absence of some definition of what that means or what they think it means, makes any teaching of racism questionable per that vagueness...”
Based on the state reviews the Herald/Times provided to him, Finkelman said it appeared the state was “hunting for bias.”
“And if you hunt long enough, you can find bias anywhere,” Finkelman said, noting that “anyone can find faults, and even small mistakes with any scholarly enterprise.”
To do the job right, Finkelman said, the state should ensure the course is reviewed by historians, with expertise in the specific subject area — not political scientists or state bureaucrats. He questioned whether the state prioritized reviewers’ credentials after seeing the state’s comments on the topics of slavery, or subjects that took into account the issue of racism and identity.
Based on Finkelman’s review of the content, he said, the state reviewers were more interested in correcting content based on their reading of the material over “scholarly accuracy.”
Read more: Only 3 reviewers said Florida math textbooks violated CRT rules. Yet state rejected dozens
Since Florida rejected the pilot course in January, students in other parts of the country have been taking part in the pilot program. Education officials in only one other state — Arkansas — are disputing whether to make the AP course eligible for credit. The Arkansas Department of Education — led by Florida’s former K-12 Chancellor Jacob Oliva — recently removed the class from its course code listing.
In November, the College Board plans to submit the final version of the course’s curriculum for approval. But with Florida’s laws still in place, the fate of the course remains in limbo — and the outcome could potentially make Florida students in public high schools less likely to have access to the course. If approved, parents and students can choose to enroll in the course.
College Board officials are aware of this possibility, but remain hopeful.
“We certainly hope that Florida students will have the opportunity to take this course,” said Holly Stepp, a spokesperson with the College Board.
Myers, the Florida Department of Education spokesperson, said the College Board is welcome to resubmit the course for review in November.
But, Myers said, “at this point, it is inappropriate to comment on what the future could hold – it is just speculation.”
This story was originally published August 29, 2023, 5:30 AM.
#florida#white washing history#Black Lives Matter#Black History Matters#ron desatan#white lies#florida department of education#florida students
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A controversial Seattle teacher allegedly told students that identifying as “straight” is offensive. He even scolded some of his male students for being a “product of the patriarchy that teaches young boys not to care.” It resulted in a parent filing a complaint with Chief Sealth High School. In defending the teacher, Seattle Public Schools (SPS) offered what appears to be a verifiably false statement to the media.
Tenth-grade Ethnic Studies World History teacher and self-identified communist Ian Golash asked students to complete a “Social Identity Wheel” worksheet, according to the parent, who asked for anonymity. It asks students to explain their various identities, including racial, ethnic, gender, socio-economic status, physical, emotional, or developmental disabilities, and sexual orientation. The worksheet is intended to tell students that their identities determine whether they receive unearned privilege or oppression.
The parent’s 15-year-old son labeled himself “straight.” Golash took issue with that word “because it implies that to not be straight is to be ‘crooked’ which could have a negative connotation.”
‘Straight’ is offensive to Ian Golash
The student’s mother shared an email thread with The Jason Rantz Show on KTTH. In it, she complains about the comment to Golash and the school’s principal, Ray Garcia-Morales.
“When filling out a Social Identity Wheel, he (her son) was told that if he identifies as straight that he needed to pick a term that was less offensive. It is completely inappropriate to dictate what terms a student can and cannot use to identify themselves with,” the mom wrote in the September 24, 2023 email.
Golash said he did not target her son with his comment. He did, however, admit to saying something similar to the entire classroom.
In the email response to the mother, Golash allegedly told the parent that he “stated explicitly that I was not going to tell them how they should identify except to explain the difference between race, ethnicity and nationality.” But he did cast aspersions on identifying as “straight.”
“Because I think language has power and that it shapes the culture that we live in, I did say to the class, in response to a student, that I do not use the term ‘straight’ because it implies that to not be straight is to be ‘crooked’ which could have a negative connotation,” Golash wrote. “But, again stated that I am not interested in telling them how they should identify and that the wheel they are completing is for their own reflection, not for me to assess.”
A very contrived position
Golash taking offense to the term “straight” in this way may be the only such example in the country. It’s a common and accepted term.
Chief Sealth High School has a Gay-Straight Alliance Club. Even GLAAD (formerly the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) uses “straight” as an alternative descriptor for heterosexuals. The term “straight-ally” is still used by LGBT groups.
The contrived issue came up in a 2015 Washington Post column about etiquette. The readers (not Golash) asked if the term “straight” is offensive. Steven Petrow (the author of “Steven Petrow’s Complete Gay & Lesbian Manners”) responded by saying he’s never been asked that before. He concluded it was neither offensive nor a slur.
“I’ve never heard of a gay person saying they were offended by the use of straight. Do some straight folks find it problematic? I think you are saying that you are and, if so, I’d like to know why,” he wrote.
‘Product of the patriarchy that teaches young boys not to care’
The parent also claimed in the email that Golash shamed her son during a conversation about Florida banning left-wing classes with critical race theory indoctrination. Her son had missed the day the class watched a video about the topic, and told Golash he didn’t know why the state legislature forwarded the ban, according to the mom.
“I’m told that rather than converse about the topic and provide him with information and an actual answer, he was told that he was a ‘product of the patriarchy that teaches young boys not to care,'” the mom wrote in the email. “You missed an opportunity here to teach your student about current events and instead shamed him for being a male. To assume that he’s being raised in a patriarchal household is a very mistaken one.”
Again, Golash disputes some specifics but admits to bringing up the issue.
“My response about patriarchy was not directed at one student, it was connected to discussions of systems of power that we had been having in the previous few days and the behavior of several boys in the class,” he wrote, according to the email. He did not dispute saying the quote the mother provided.
The Jason Rantz Show on KTTH asked Golash if the emails properly depict what he sent to the parent and if he wanted to offer additional context. He did not respond.
It’s part of a political agenda
Golash focuses a portion of his curriculum on issues around gender identity. The same parent previously complained that Golash failed her son on a quiz for correctly saying men cannot get pregnant and that women do not have penises. The mom eventually pulled her son from his class.
“Mr. Golash has introduced many controversial topics into the classroom and instead of inviting open, constructive and truthful conversations, he provides biased resources that only aid in pushing his own ideological agendas,” the mom told The Jason Rantz Show on KTTH. “In this particular instance, he tried to persuade the language the students used in an attempt to censor them. Mr. Golash instructs his students what to think and not how to think. This in no way provides identity-safe classrooms that allow students to feel visible and valued.”
She says her son started to “self-censor … due to Mr. Golash’s intolerant teaching tactics.” Only after this incident, she said Golash accused her son of being disruptive and disengaged. She called it “retaliatory in nature.”
In the email thread, Golash did accuse her son and other classmates of unruly behavior. He said his frustration with their alleged behavior, “resulted in words I said that day that I might not phrase in the same way today.”
Seattle Public Schools is mostly silent
According to a screenshot of an email shared with The Jason Rantz Show on KTTH, the district is investigating the two separate complaints against Ian Golash.
First, the school is reviewing the quiz that the student failed for taking objectively true positions: Men can’t get pregnant and women do not have penises. Second, according to an email, Chief Sealth principal Garcia-Morales told parents there was an investigation into a separate incident where antisemitic curriculum was taught to students.
Seattle Public Schools (SPS) won’t say much about Golash, including how far the investigation has progressed. They also would not comment for this story, neither confirming nor denying Golash’s purported communication with the parent. Even if they did comment, they’ve previously misled the media with a statement.
More from Jason Rantz: Democrats reject child marriage, but accept their gender reassignment
Misleading the media and public
When The Jason Rantz Show on KTTH exclusively reported the “men can get pregnant” quiz, the story ignited a firestorm of criticism and ridicule towards Golash and the district. SPS appeared to give out the same statement to multiple outlets, but added an extra detail to Fox News.
In the original report, the mother complained that Golash and another teacher engaged in name-calling. One teacher allegedly called her son “f****d and racist,” and Golash allegedly made the comment about being a “product of the patriarchy that teaches young boys not to care about anything.” SPS denied the claims when asked by Fox News.
“Claims that the student was called names have not been reported to SPS. We have confirmed with the school’s principal that this is the first reference to any name-calling,” a spokesperson told Fox News.
The statement appears to be false.
In a February 2, 2023 email, the mother’s husband emailed a teacher and principal Garcia Morales. In it, he complained of conduct against his son. He wrote that his son told him the teacher explained to the classroom, “If you’re white, that’s f****d up and racist.” The principal was also on the email over Golash’s comments about the patriarchy.
SPS would not say why they told Fox News that my report was the first reference to any name-calling.
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If you talk to an ordinary American, or, in my experience, if you talk to an average Israeli, for that matter, they don’t know anything about who the Palestinians are. They don’t know where they come from, they don’t know how they live, what they believe, and they don’t want to. Right? Because that just complicates things… – historian Sam Biagetti.
Last month, The New York Times conducted a series of interviews with a number of American Jewish families and the way they have been dealing with what the paper calls a “generational divide over Israel.”
The Times notes a trend that has been developing for a long time—younger American Jews becoming markedly more critical of, sometimes downright hostile to, Israel than their elders. The piece looks at “more than a dozen young people…[who] described feeling estranged from the version of Jewish identity they were raised with, which was often anchored in pro-Israel education.”
One such person is Louisa Kornblatt. She is the daughter of liberal Jewish parents, who grew up experiencing the cruelties of anti-Semitism in suburban New Jersey. Her grandmother “had fled Austria in 1938, just as the Nazis were taking over.” Partly as a result of this legacy, Louisa Kornblatt “shared her parents’ belief that the safety of Jewish people depended on a Jewish state” as a child.
However, her views began to shift once “she started attending a graduate program in social work at U.C. Berkeley in 2017.” As she recalls it, “classmates and friends challenged her thinking,” with some telling her that she was “on the wrong side of history.”
While in graduate school, “she read Audre Lorde, Mariame Kaba, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and other Black feminist thinkers,” who further made her re-think ingrained assumptions. Eventually, “Kornblatt came to feel that her emotional ties to Jewish statehood undermined her vision for ‘collective liberation.’”
“Over the last year, she became increasingly involved in pro-Palestine activism, including through Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist activist group, and the If Not Now movement.” She now goes so far as to assert, “I don’t think the state of Israel should ever have been established,” because “It’s based on this idea of Jewish supremacy. And I’m not on board with that.”
Also interviewed are the parents of Jackson Schwartz, a senior at Columbia University whose education there has significantly altered his outlook on Israel:
“The parents of Mr. Schwartz…said they listen to him with open minds when he tells them about documentaries he has seen or things he has learned from professors like Rashid Khalidi, a prominent Palestinian intellectual who is a professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia. Dan Schwartz said his son helped him understand the Palestinian perspective on Israel’s founding, which was accompanied by a huge displacement of population that Palestinians call the Nakba, using the Arabic word for catastrophe.”
“It wasn’t until Jackson went to Columbia and took classes that I ever heard the word Nakba,” Dan Schwartz said.
These interviews are hugely instructive for two reasons. For one thing, they demonstrate very clearly why power centers are so critical of higher education, especially in the humanities: They are afraid young people might actually—horror of horrors—learn something, particularly something that challenges the status quo.
American culture overflows with accusations from parents that their kids went off to college only to be “indoctrinated.” But at least in these instances, the opposite is what happened—far from being brainwashed, the kids read books and learned history, and were forced to think hard about the implications. In other words, higher education did exactly what it is supposed to do—forced students to encounter and engage with perspectives and thinkers they otherwise never would have.
In reality, most parents (and certainly media outlets) who complain of indoctrination are actually worried about education—that is, that their children will develop more nuanced, critical and informed views of the world after engaging with unfamiliar viewpoints. Such aggrieved elders don’t see it this way, of course, largely because they themselves never shook off the propaganda of their youth. Indeed, they likely are not even capable of perceiving it as such. But that is what it is.
The interviews from the Times piece also demonstrate what Sam Biagetti refers to in the quote that sits atop this article: the phenomenon of older Americans who profess attachment to (and presumably knowledge of) Israel, displaying aggressive—no, fanatic—ignorance about basic Israeli/Middle East history.
That Mr. Schwartz had never heard of the Nakba until his son learned about it from Rashid Khalidi speaks volumes about the way young people in this country are “taught” about Israel, as well as how much their parents actually “know” about it. It is the equivalent of a German father professing fierce attachment to the German nation-state, but never hearing the word “Holocaust” until his child tells him about it after learning the history from a Jewish professor.
The new documentary Israelism explores this issue of younger Jewish people raised to reflexively identify with Israel and to view it as a “Jewish Disneyland,” but who changed their minds (and behavior) upon encountering the brutal realities of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
It is a powerful film, one that takes a look at the too-often ignored indoctrination regarding Israel taking place in many Jewish day schools, the way younger people are starting to de-program themselves from it, and where they go from there.
Directed by first-time filmmakers Erin Axelman and Sam Eilertsen, Israelism largely follows two protagonists whose experiences mirror those of the filmmakers.
The first protagonist, Eitan (whose last name is never revealed), grew up in a conservative Jewish home in Atlanta. Typical of such an upbringing, he was steeped in pro-Israel PR.
He recounts that “Israel was a central part of everything we did in school.” His high school routinely sent delegations to AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, also known as the “Israel lobby”) conferences.
Outside of school, the PR continued. He describes going to Jewish summer camp, where each year the staff included a group of Israeli counselors, brought in “to connect American Jews to Israeli culture.”
This included having the children playing games designed to simulate being in the Israeli military, including the use of actual Israeli military commands.
The film intersperses interviews of its protagonists with interviews of prominent individuals who promote this Israeli PR.
For instance, Rabbi Bennett Miller, the then-National Chair of the Association of Reform Zionists of America, asks with a laugh, “does [my] average congregant understand that I’m teaching them to become Zionists? Probably not, but it is part of my madness, so to speak.”
Enamored with what he saw as the glory of military service, Eitan told his parents that he was going to join the Israeli military rather than go to college. He had always thought of Israel as “my country,” and learned from numerous childhood visits there that he “fit in” better in Israel than in the United States.
During basic training with the IDF, he was trained as a “heavy machine gunnist” [sic] with an emphasis on urban warfare. After seven months of this, he was deployed to the West Bank. His life in the IDF involved operating the various checkpoints which comprise the apartheid system, as well as patrolling Palestinian villages on foot in full gear with a bulletproof vests. He recounts that on such patrols, the mission of his unit was to make their presence felt, in order “to let them know that we were watching.”
His encounter with the occupation changed him forever. “Even though Israel was a central part of everything we did in school,” he recalls, “we never really discussed the Palestinians. It was presented to us that Israel was basically an empty wasteland when the Jews arrived. ‘There were some Arabs there,’ they said, but there was no organized people; they had really treated the land poorly. Yeah, there are Palestinians, [but] they just want to kill us all…” Furthermore, “It was always presented to us that the Arabs only know terrorism.”
His role as an occupier made him see things rather differently. He witnessed IDF soldiers needlessly abusing captives, who were blindfolded and handcuffed, thrown to the ground, kicked and beaten. He despairs that he “didn’t even speak up,” something he is visibly still struggling with. And, he says, “that’s just one of many stories that I have from my time in the West Bank. It took many years to really come to terms with my part in it. Only after I got out of the army did I begin to realize that the stuff that I did [from] day to day, just working in checkpoints, patrolling villages—that in itself was immoral.”
After great difficulty, Eitan has begun to publicly speak out about his experiences, though he notes that it took a long time, and that on his first attempt, he was not able to make it through without crying excessively. Since then, he has gotten better, and continues to pursue this necessary work.
Israelism’s second protagonist is Simone Zimmerman. Zimmerman’s grandfather settled in Israel; he and his immediate family were some of her only relatives to escape the Holocaust. Zimmerman herself was raised in a staunchly pro-Israel household, attending Hebrew school from kindergarten through high school. While in high school she lived in Israel for a period as part of an exchange program, which was just one of many visits.
These organized stays in Israel routinely involved her and her friends dressing up in Israeli army uniforms and pretending to be in the IDF. She participated in Jewish youth groups and summer camps which, like Eitan, immersed her in a steady diet of pro-Israel propaganda. Summing up her childhood experience, Zimmerman explains that “Israel was just treated like a core part of being a Jew. So, you did prayers, and you did Israel.”
Like Eitan, she was familiar with AIPAC: “AIPAC is just the thing that you do. Like, going to the AIPAC conference is just sort of seen as a community event.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, almost ten percent of her high school graduating class ended up joining the Israeli army, and many of her summer camp and youth group friends did as well. This is the power of effective propaganda instilled from a young age, Zimmerman observes. “The indoctrination is so severe, it’s almost hard to have a conversation about it. It’s heartbreaking.”
Israelism contains footage of this indoctrination in action inside Hebrew schools.
Scenes of teachers excitedly asking classes of young children, “do you want to go to Israel too?” and the children screaming back, “YEAH!!!” are reminiscent of the similarly nauseating kinds of religious indoctrination made famous in an earlier era by films like Jesus Camp.
Some of these scenes can be glimpsed in the trailer for the film. Older students are seen reading copies of Alan Dershowitz’s book The Case for Israel, which was famously exposed as a fraud by Norman Finkelstein years ago. Zimmerman herself gets to look at some of her old worksheets and art projects from her elementary school days, all of which in some way revolved around the Israeli state.
Other than enlisting in the IDF, Zimmerman had been told that the other major way to be “a good supporter of the Jewish people” was to become an “Israel advocate.” Choosing the latter path, Zimmerman became involved with Hillel, the largest Jewish campus organization in the world, when she began attending the University of California at Berkeley. Hillel, too, worked very hard to instill pro-Israel beliefs in her. She describes being trained in how to rebut “the ‘lies’ that other people [were] saying” about Israel.
The film explores the nature of Hillel’s work fostering pro-Israel activism at college campuses across the country. Tom Barkan, a former IDF soldier and “Israel fellow” at the University of Connecticut’s Hillel chapter, says, “name a university in America, we probably have a person there.” Barkan’s mission is to turn Jewish college students into either Israel advocates or military recruits. While he warns eager students that joining the IDF will not be easy, he wistfully tells them that it will be “the most meaningful experience that you ever go through.”
Former Jewish day school teacher Jacqui Schulefand works with Barkan in her role as Director of Engagement and Programs at UConn’s Hillel branch. Her love for the State of Israel is inseparable from her identity as a Jewish person, which she proudly explains. “Can you separate Israel and Judaism? I don’t know—I can’t. You know, some people I think can. To me, it’s the same. Yeah, you can’t separate it. Israel is Judaism and Judaism is Israel. And that is who I am, and that is my identity. And I think every single thing that I experienced along my life has melded into that, like there was never, you know, a divide for me.”
Schulefand describes joining the Israeli armed forces as “the greatest gift you can give,” and notes that “we actually have had quite a few of our former students join the IDF—amazing!” But her demeanor sours when she is asked about criticisms of the country. In a tone combining incomprehension with a hint of disgust, she laments that “somehow, ‘pro-Palestinian’ has become ‘pro-social justice.’”
It was this sort of pro-Israel advocacy network that organized Simone Zimmerman and other students to oppose what they perceived to be “anti-Semitic” activities such as student government legislation favoring the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israeli occupation, and other measures critical of Israel.
To prepare for such confrontations, she was handed talking points that told her what to say—accuse critics of being anti-Semitic, of having a double standard, of making Jewish students feel unsafe, etc. Describing her feelings about BDS and the Palestinian cause at the time, Zimmerman says that “I just knew that it was this bad thing that I had to fight.” She remembers literally reading off the cards when it came time for her to make the case for Israel.
However, such work inevitably brought her into contact with people who challenged her views. She encountered terms like apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and illegal occupation. “I thought I knew so much about Israel, but I didn’t really know what anybody was talking about when they were talking about all these things,” she said.
Growing up, she was barely taught anything about Palestinians, much like Eitan: “The idea that there were native inhabitants who lived there [when settlers began to arrive] was not even part of my frame of reference.”[1] To the extent that her upbringing provided her with any conception of what a Palestinian was, it was that a Palestinian was someone “who kills Jews, or wants to kill Jews.” But now she was dealing with actual Palestinian students and their non-Palestinian allies, who told her things she found alarming.
Zimmerman went back to Hillel, embarrassed that she and the other pro-Israel advocates were not doing a good job refuting the information they had been confronted with. When Zimmerman asked what the proper responses were to specific criticisms directed at Israel—other than shouting “double standard” or “anti-Semitic”—no one provided her with any. “That was really disturbing for me,” she says. She was flabbergasted that “there are these people called Palestinians who think that Israel wields all this power over their lives and don’t have rights, don’t have water. What is this? How do I respond to it?” “How is it that I am the best the Jewish community has to offer—I’ve been to all the trainings, all the summer camps—and I don’t know what the settlements are, or what the occupation is?”
This anguish led Zimmerman to see the occupation for herself, the summer after her freshman year. This was her first time “crossing the line” into the West Bank. The film movingly details her experiences there. She listened to Palestinian families describe routine instances of being beaten by the IDF, and the harsh realities of life under military rule.
She befriends Sami Awad, Executive Director of the Holy Land Trust, who works to give Americans tours of the territory. An American citizen born in the U.S., Awad describes encounters with American kids who have joined the IDF, people “who just moved here to be part of an army to play cowboys and Indians.” He remarks on the absurdity that “Somebody…comes here from New York or from Chicago, and [claims] that this land is theirs.”
Awad’s family was originally from Jerusalem. His grandfather was shot by an Israeli sniper in 1948, and the rest of his family were evicted by Israeli forces soon after during the Nakba. They have never been allowed to return, and have lived under occupation ever since. Nevertheless, Awad is an extraordinarily empathetic person, having made a career out of trying to teach Westerners what life is like in the West Bank, in the hopes that they will use what they learn to effect positive change. He recounts visiting Auschwitz, and says that the experience gave him an insight into “inherited trauma” and how it shapes the conflict today. In the film he comes across as optimistic:
“I really believe that there is an emerging awakening within the American Jewish community…From American Jews, coming here, and listening to us, and hearing us, and seeing our humanity, and understanding that we are not just out sitting in bunkers, planning the next attack against Israelis, that we do have a desire to live in peace, and to have our freedom, and to walk in our streets, and to eat in our restaurants, and like we – I mean it’s crazy that I have to say this, that we are real human beings that just want to survive and live, like all other people in this world.”
Zimmerman also meets Baha Hilo, an English speaker who works as a tour guide with To Be There, another group that helps people understand the reality that Israel imposes on the West Bank. His family was expelled from Jaffa in 1948 during the Nakba. They were forced to settle in Bethlehem, sadly believing that they would eventually be able to return to their homes.
Hilo discusses his frustration that Israelis get to live under civil law, whereas Palestinians like him must live under the humiliating military law of the occupation: “When an American goes to the West Bank, he has more rights there than I have had my entire life!” The film takes care to note that Americans play a major role in such realities: “Of the roughly 450,000 [illegal] Israeli settlers living in the occupied West Bank, 60,000 are American Jews.” Some readers may recall the famous viral video of an Israeli named Yakub unashamedly stealing Palestinian homes while conveying a breathtaking sense of entitlement.
Hilo laments that, “From the day you are born, you live day in and day out without experiencing a day of freedom.” His astonishment at the audacity of Israelis, particularly those who are also Americans, mirrors Awad’s: “What makes an 18-year-old American kid who was given [a] ten days’ trip for free in Palestine, what makes him want to come in and sacrifice his life? Why would a foreigner think it’s ok to have superior rights to the rights of the indigenous population? Because somebody told them it’s [their] home.”
While happy to make such friends, Zimmerman nonetheless says of her time there, “I don’t think I realized the extent to which what I would come to see on the ground would really shock me and horrify me.” This experience often changes people. The filmmaker Rebecca Pierce is interviewed on her own visits to the West Bank, and her reaction is in line with Zimmerman’s. Pierce had always been opposed to using the word “apartheid,” but once she saw the reality of the situation, she changed her mind immediately.
The protagonist of With God on Our Side (a 2010 documentary critical of Christian Zionism), a young man named Christopher, had a similar reaction, specifically at the behavior he witnessed from the Israeli settlers. Each year a group of them converges on the Arab section of Old Jerusalem to celebrate Israel’s capture of East Jerusalem in 1967. Christopher witnessed the festivities, which featured a massive crowd of settlers wrapped in Israeli flags, shouting “death to Arabs” repeatedly as they danced through the streets.
A large group identified an Arab journalist, surrounded him, began chanting at him and flipping him off, to the point where the police had to be called. Christopher was visibly shocked at all this, glumly remarking that he “felt ashamed to be there.” This same celebration is also seen in Israelism, and the Israeli chants are as deranged as ever: “An Arab is a son of a bitch! A Jew is a precious soul!” “Death to the leftists!”
Zimmerman’s experiences led her to become a co-founder of the If Not Now movement, a grassroots Jewish organization which works to end U.S. support for Israel. They have engaged in activism targeting the ADL (more on them in a moment), AIPAC, the headquarters of Birthright Israel, and other organizations which directly contribute to the perpetuation of Israel’s occupation. “We decided to bring the crisis of American Jewish support for Israel to the doorsteps of Jewish institutions to force that conversation in public,” Zimmerman says.
Israelism contains powerful scenes of younger Jewish people engaging in this work. Many come from similar backgrounds as Eitan and Simone. Consider Avner Gvaryahu. Born and raised in Israel, Gvaryahu also joined the IDF. His combat experience ultimately turned him against the occupation. His whole life in Israel, he had never been inside a Palestinian home, but was now being tasked with “barg[ing] into one in the middle of the night.”
By the end of his service, he had routinely taken over Palestinian homes and used them as military facilities. No warrants were needed, and no notice was ever given to the families who were living there. He reflects back “with shame” on how violently he often acted toward the residents in such situations. Gvaryahu is now the Executive Director of Breaking the Silence, an organization of IDF veterans committed to peace.
“There are a lot of Jewish young people who see a Jewish establishment that is racist, that is nationalistic,” Zimmerman explains. Jeremy Ben-Ami, the President of J Street, agrees. “They’re really, really angry about the way they were educated, and the way they were indoctrinated about these issues, and justifiably so.”
While such courageous individuals often receive quite a bit of hatred from their own community (Zimmerman says, “The word I used to hear a lot was ‘self-hating Jew.’ Like, the only way a Jewish person could possibly care about the humanity of Palestinians is if you hate yourself”), their numbers are growing, and one hopes that this will continue. Israelism was released a few months before the terrorist attacks of October 7th and Israel’s genocidal response, events which make the film timely and important.
Since October 7th, we have seen many of the tactics and talking points used to justify Israel’s crimes that the film depicts return with a vengeance. Chief among them is the by-now ubiquitous claim that calling out Israeli atrocities is somehow anti-Semitic.
Zimmerman is anguished that “so many of the purported leaders of our community have been trying to equate the idea of Palestinian rights itself with anti-Semitism.”
This applies to no one more than Abraham “Abe” Foxman, who until his recent retirement was the long-time head of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an organization masquerading as a civil rights group but which is really a pro-Israeli government outfit which has long sought to redefine anti-Semitism to include “criticisms of Israel.”
These efforts have borne fruit—“The Trump administration issued an executive order adopting” this definition of anti-Semitism “for the purposes of enforcing federal civil rights law,” Michelle Goldberg notes in The New York Times. Foxman says in the film that “it hurts me for a Jewish kid to stand up there and say ‘justice for the Palestinians,’ and not [say] ‘justice for Israelis’; it troubles me, hurts me, bothers me. It means we failed. We failed in educating, in explaining, et cetera.” Many Israel supporters seem to share Foxman’s horror that Jewish people sometimes care about the well-being of people other than themselves.
Israelism explores this deliberate conflation of anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism. Sarah Anne Minkin, of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, is deeply bothered that “The way we talk about anti-Semitism isn’t about protecting Jews, it’s about protecting Israel. How dangerous is that, at this moment with the rise of anti-Semitism?”
Indeed, the film contains footage of the infamous Unite the Right rally featuring hordes of white supremacists marching through Charlottesville, Virginia, with torches, screaming “Jews. Will not. Replace us!” over and over, as well as news footage of the aftermath of the Tree of Life Synagogue mass shooting.
One of the chief tasks of Israeli propagandists has been to conflate such acts with anti-Zionist sentiment. Genuine anti-Semitism of the Charlottesville variety is (obviously) a product of the far right—recall that President Donald Trump famously referred to “very fine people on both sides” of that incident, an unmistakable wink and nod to such fascist groups.
People who comprise such groups, the type who paint swastikas on Jewish homes, are not the same as peace activists marching to end the Israeli occupation. This should not be difficult to understand. But the Israel PR machine has done a marvelous job confusing otherwise intelligent people on this issue.
Also quoted in the film is Ted Cruz, who like Trump is a regular speaker at AIPAC events, and who like many Republicans pitches his political rhetoric to appeal to the very reactionaries who espouse genuinely anti-Semitic sentiments. This does not stop him from having the audacity to refer to criticisms of Israel as anti-Semitic, shamelessly insisting that “the left has a long history of anti-Semitism.”
The American right wing has been hard at work lately, trying to convince gullible people that the rise of actual anti-Semitic incidents is the result of critics of Israel. The New York Times’s Michelle Goldberg reports that “Chris Rufo, the right-wing activist who whipped up nationwide campaigns against critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, told me he’s part of a group at the conservative Manhattan Institute workshopping new policy proposals targeting what it sees as campus antisemitism.”
Such efforts apparently convince many liberal-leaning people to agree with UConn Hillel’s Jacqui Schulefand, who as noted above believes that “Israel is Judaism and Judaism is Israel.”
If you believe this, it is understandable how you might come to see criticizing a government’s policies, or the political ideology (Zionism) undergirding them, as anti-Semitic. I do not often profess gratitude for President Biden (indeed, I am really hoping the “Genocide Joe” label sticks), but it was nice to see him publicly state that “You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist. And I’m a Zionist.” This pronouncement clarifies something that the Israel Lobby likes to obscure—that Zionism is a political ideology, like “conservatism,” “socialism” or “libertarianism.”
As such, critiquing it is not racist or anti-Semitic, even if the criticism is inaccurate.
It is always important to consider the ways in which assumptions held uncritically can lead one astray, especially assumptions ingrained from a young age, before people possess the capacity to sufficiently question what they are being told. Israelism is a powerful, thought-provoking film that does this spectacularly. And it does so for a topic that does not get as much attention as it should. Discussions of Christian propaganda are fairly common (again, think of Jesus Camp, or even With God on Our Side), as are denunciations of the kind of Islamic fundamentalist propaganda that comes out of places like Saudi Arabia.
It is almost too easy to go after the Mormons or the Scientologists. But the indoctrination taking place in many Jewish schools gets comparatively little attention. I have written previously of my admiration for people, like Naomi Klein, who frankly discuss the troubling fact that Israeli PR defined much of their early schooling. It is important to have an entire film devoted to the subject. People might not like what they see, but they need to see it.
Israelism is streaming here until January 31st.
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So Ron "protect kids from the gays" DeSantis has just signed a law requiring all Florida students - from high-schoolers to children as young as kindergarten - to learn about the "evils of communism" and to receive instruction for how to resist "indoctrination" in higher education.
"A lot of these universities will tell them how great communism is," DeSantis said, with no citation of any this allegedly pro-communist college curricula. "So we are setting the proper foundation."
They also decided to make this a spectacle on the anniversary of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, which was a disastrously botched CIA-organized attempt by armed rebels to overthrow the Cuban government.
"Florida students currently can receive lessons on communism in high-school social studies courses or in a seventh-grade civics and government course. A high-school government class that has been required for graduation also includes 45 minutes of instruction on “Victims of Communism Day” which covers communist regimes through history." (source: USA Today)
Not sure how long it's going to remain, but it seems very....interesting that in the attached USA Today article, there included a viral video of a Cuban refugee (huh...interesting how DeSantis hasn't shipped him to Martha's Vineyard) going through a grocery store in the US and marveling at how full the shelves are; unlike communist Cuba with its shortages of essentials that is totally the fault of the communist government and not at all the product of decades of strict embargoes by the United States. An embargo that recently wouldn't allow life-saving medical equipment from landing on the island during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Obviously this is all culture war bullshit in a state with a collapsing insurance market, literacy that is the 8th worst in the nation, and had one of the largest increases of families with children and veterans experiencing homelessness in the nation last year. I'm sure spending millions of dollars on anti-communist museums is really what the struggling people both want and need in these difficult times.
#Ron DeSantis#Florida Schools#Florida Education#Indoctrination#Red Baiting#US History#Communism#Anti Communism#Republicans#Culture Wars
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So uh. in 2019 i had to write a paper on the Israel/Palestine conflict as someone taking a college class where we went to the area and were tourists for like 2 weeks. And i apparently remembered nothing of the paper for the last 5 years but upon the slightest research, even back then, after 7 years of private Christian schools and 2 years of college and indoctrination, that Israel fuckin sucks from day 1.
Honestly I remembered I had to research and write this but I didnt remember the content at all, especially given that my life started to unravel soon after this trip (being trans overseas during the actual trip/class, my friend killed herself, i was in a car accident that induced amnesia, PTSD, 2020, post college life, etc). I'm surprised that despite years of Christian school, still being a Christian now, and growing up seeing the Jews as misled proto-Christians, that I arrived at the same response as I did after October 7th 2023: Palestinians deserve to live where they were born, and Israel has no right to steal from them no matter what the Jews were fleeing from.
i dont wanna give out my email or document edit history by linking to my paper but heres a copy paste of my paper for that class, unedited to show where my head was at the time and how little research it took to arrive at this conclusion:
(my name)
(class name)
Dr. Roberts
6/15/19
My Thoughts on the Conflict
“A land without a people for a people without a land.” This statement which spurred on many European Jews who viewed Jewish assimilation into Europe as impossible because of anti-semitism was the same phrase that sparked anger and injustice in the hearts of Arab Palestinians living in said land. A people needed a land and were indeed without one, but another people already inhabited the desired land, so it was entirely incorrect for Jewish Zionists to look at Palestine and see it this way.
1897 was the start of the conflict, not ancient Bible times or the times of Muhammed or the time of the Crusades or even the time of Jesus; this isn’t a religious conflict at all, but a conflict of a need for land and a need to stay in the land in which one was born. It’s an important distinction to make because many write off the conflict to be about a squabble over holy sites, but indeed even to this day all people are allowed in Jerusalem and many Israelis and Palestinians are secular, not Jewish nor Muslim. They have no quarrel over the holy sites but instead land that they themselves or their parents owned, and from which they (mainly Palestinians) were forcibly evicted.
Many individuals took one of two views of how the Jews should seize the land of Palestine for their own. Labor Zionism, for example, encouraged Jews to move to the land, work on it, and make a home for themselves and others through their hard work. This seems to reflect the ideals of the American Dream; work hard until you make something of yourself and then the land will truly be yours, as will the country. The other view was called Political Zionism, which called for the militant seizing of the land of Palestine and removing natives from their own land, instead giving it to the Jews that sought to live there. Many readers know which one won out in the end: Political Zionism. With the aid of foreign countries and their military power, Zionists had an upper hand in seizing the land of Palestine. With its poor and non-centralized government in addition to its lack of cultural and national identity, foreign countries saw Palestine as invalid and not even a real nation. They even refused to acknowledge the people living in Palestine altogether, instead keeping up that previously mentioned notion of “A land without a people to a people without a land.”
The First World War greatly impacted the conflict, and foreign aid (to Zionism, not the Palestinians) increased dramatically, causing the tension between the Jews and Palestinians to become even more pronounced. Many countries refused to acknowledge Palestine as a state and instead sided with the Zionists who declared that this land should become the new state and home for the Jews.
The Second World War, marked by its anti-semitism and the slaughtering of a huge amount of European Jews, caused the fifth aliyah, which was a massive wave of immigration to Palestine. Previously, few Jews immigrated to the land because it was difficult to move to a land where there was no guarantee of economic success nor even sustainability, but World War II caused Jews to disregard economics and instead seek a land without prejudice or anti-semitism, often times fleeing for their lives because of the intensity of European hatred toward their people. Floods of Jews began to immigrate to Palestine until they comprised of about 30% of the population in the land. The self-sufficiency the Jewish community gained thanks to foreign organizations was also key to its survival in Palestine, as if they didn’t have enough support from most foreign countries.
Zionism didn’t have support from everyone, however. Orthodox Jews disagreed entirely with Zionism and declared it as a heresy, while others sought for an equal split of the Palestinian territory between Arabs and Jews. The Revisionist Zionism view, funded by Vladimir Jabotinsky, disliked how the Transjordan borders had “unfairly sliced off Palestine,” though indeed there was no recognized state of Palestine before the borders were established to include the Transjordan. Indeed, it likely wasn’t recognized because of its lack of leadership, unclear divisions between the Arab Palestinians themselves, and a weak government as a result of these divisions. However, this changed with the development of the Supreme Muslim Council (SMC), but it did cause some conflict between notable families. Hajj Amin used Islam to help unite the people of Palestine under the SMC, and soon the nation’s Arab neighbors began supporting Palestine.
The 1937 Peel Commission Report was a promise by Britain to provide “an independent Palestine.” The AHC, or Arab Higher Committee, agreed to this plan after the Arab Revolt. One of the first proposals was to give most of the land to Palestine and to give the northern region, including Tel Aviv and Jaffa, to the Jews, while Jerusalem and Bethlehem would remain under British control but shared by both peoples. Again, the division and the land distribution wasn’t Biblical but political and based on settlement patterns, not sites of religious significance. Delegates ultimately supported the idea of a Jewish state but rejected its plan to resettle hundreds of thousands of Arab families because of the hardship and strive it would inevitably cause. To rebel against this partition, many Arab peasants donned the black headband of the keffiyeh to declare their Palestinian identity and fought the British as best they could. This rebellion was destroyed in 1939 by the British who reportedly killed/exiled/injured 10% of the male population of Palestine. However, as tensions rose again and Britain lost control, it decided to hand over responsibility over Palestine to the UN. The UN passed Resolution 181 (II) in 1947 which proposed one Jewish and one Arab state, though unequally divided (55% Jewish vs 45% Arab) especially given the small Jewish population (33%). Thus, the conflict continued between the states and in Palestine itself with civil wars which decimated the country and dispersed the population. Soon, Israel was established, gaining 78% of Palestine and providing the Jewish people with a homeland once again.
When dispersed Palestinian Arabs attempted to return to their homes after the fighting and Israel’s “War of Independence,” they came back to destroyed villages because of Plan D, which allowed for the destruction of Arab towns to secure Israel. In 1948, Deir Yassin was attacked and over 100 Palestinains were killed. Days later, Arabs killed about 80 Jews in response. Conflicts continued over the next few decades but Israel and Jordan gained almost all of Palestinian territory, causing most Palestinians to be refugees or minorities in Israel or Jordan. They wanted to get back to their land, their homes, but in their absence Israel stole it from them and Jews moved in.
My opinion about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is as humanitarian as possible considering the situation. I think, in most ways, Israel has harmed Palestine and treated its people unfairly in an attempt to gain a land for the Jews. Had Israel and any of its foreign supporters respected the people already living in the land, and had they refrained from seizing it from them, Palestinians would have no conflict with Israel in the first place. It’s a lot like how Americans failed to see the Native Americans as human or a nation, so they stripped them from their land and claimed it as their own, ignoring their claims to their own homes that they had for centuries.
As a Christian, I’ve often felt a desire to side with the Jews because they are the ancestors to Christianity and God’s chosen people and indeed Jesus’ people, but now that I know more about the conflict and that this is hardly a religious issue at all, I’m more inclined to side with the Palestinians. The Jews were the minority in Europe, but they became the oppressors in Palestine as they felt entitled to a land that belonged to other people. Just because one doesn’t have land for themselves doesn’t mean they’re allowed to rip land from someone else; that just perpetuates the conflict and leaves yet another people group without a home. That’s not justice, that’s stealing, and just because the Jewish people were victims of stealing doesn’t make it suddenly acceptable for them to become thieves themselves. Because of a massive lack of international support, the deplorable actions against the Palestinian people went largely unnoticed, similar to how the Jews were treated in Europe and how Native Americans were treated in America; they were killed and moved into certain areas just for their heritage. This is obviously and objectively wrong in all situations. As a result, I think the state lines should have been made either equally or with the Palestinians as the larger portion, giving equal citizenship and opportunity to both Jews and Arabs living in either portion of land. Or, bigger countries could have given up less densely populated portions of land; Jordan didn’t need that much space for its citizens, so why did they get such a huge portion of land? Why couldn’t the Jews have moved into that region instead? So many places could have been designated as a Jewish state, so why pick an already populated portion of land? I think the Palestinians deserve the same rights as the Jews, just as all people deserve equal rights because no human is better than another. Neither should be given priority but both should be given the same space and land that their population, agriculture, and industry demands.
#acreepywholockian#acreepywholockian blogs#israel#palestine#college#palestinian genocide#i texted my wife the intro paragraph like yooo i was so based for this
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hi i just want to say i love love love ur blog and thank u for all the info on “rad feminism”. although i very much believe in / support / LOVE feminism (of course!!!!) i wasnt really aware of the term but i do hear it thrown around a lot so i’m shocked to hear that this type of “feminism” is discriminatory towards transgender people. feminism should be the complete OPPOSITE of that. calling urself a feminist and forcing ppl into boxes is CRAZY.
So, here's a post I reblogged today that looks at how radfems and TERFs are doing shit on tumblr to try and indoctrinate people, and I just want to share that because there's further good information about their tactics.
The history of radfems is 100% wrapped in gatekeeping and control tactics. Very short history: Radfems were birthed out of second wave feminism. Up until that point, feminism was something pursued in the public sector most often by women who had the means and time to focus fully on activism. So, upper middle-class white women. There were BIPOC women in every aspect of feminism from the beginning, but due to socioeconomic factors and just plain old racism, those women were rarely listened to outside their own sphere of influence.
In second wave, BIPOC women had finally gained some upward mobility economically and socially that opened the doors to do more in the wider world of the feminist movement. When they went to the white women in charge of the movement and said, "Hey, we have supported and worked for your concerns for decades. Here are things that are especially affecting BIPOC women, and we would greatly appreciate the reciprocation of everything we've put into the movement.
To which the upper middle-class white women who had the power in the movement basically said, "No, those things don't affect us, so we don't care."
Out of this schism came a lot of white women who couldn't believe other women were "betraying" them by putting the needs of their communities ahead of what white women wanted. And that was the birth of radical feminism, the idea that anyone who called themself "feminist" disagreeing with these women were the enemy and had to be silence and stopped.
Several decades later, third wave feminism was able to really start discussing intersectional feminism where even if your concerns aren't mine, they are valid because you are speaking from an experience and a community I don't have. But we are all striving for human rights, dignity, and respect, so fighting for the rights of one woman is fighting for rights for all of us. Third wave isn't (wasn't? I'm not sure if we've actually rolled into fourth wave at this point) perfect. White Feminism is still an issue. Getting people who say they believe in the rights of all women to realize that means women they find fundamentally terrible deserve the same human rights is a problem. People wanting to put Western Feminism Ideals onto other cultures like Japan and the Middle East is a problem.
Meanwhile, Radical Feminists have built a walled-off city where they can all yell about how they're the truest and purest feminists and anyone who disagrees with them is mentally ill, or hates women, or is an abuse apologist. Amongst many other claims.
The difference between Radfems and Feminists is that Radfems don't want to bring in anyone who doesn't absolutely agree with them on every point. Feminists want to open the doors and welcome anyone trying to genuinely help all women achieve human dignity. It's not a perfect system. As listed above, there are issues in the movement to this day that will likely persist until the universe ends, but at the core of it, Radfems want total agreement and loyalty, and Feminists are seeking to build a community where we understand one another and support one another even if my problem isn't your problem.
The most important thing to remember, I think, is this: The number of radfems is actually pretty small. They're just fucking loud. And I think the reason they've gotten so loud is that more and more people are realizing their goals aren't to educate or help but to shame and control, and so they're getting louder about how they're the real victims and MUST fight back against people who disagree with them, whether directly or not because they're trying to "save" the "real" feminists. They're not trying to save anyone except themselves and the rest of their cult, and to hell with the rest of us. But, there's more of us seeking real community and care than radfems, so I think we'll win in the end. We just have to remember that we're in this together, and that keeping the door open to new ideas and information is a very powerful tool.
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This is something that’s occurred to me before, but I just realized it’s only come up in writing projects I haven’t uh... actually finished, let alone posted:
Vulpes Inculta Lies To Your Goddamn Face.
When you amble into Nipton, you can ask the furry with the chainsaw what happened to the good people. To paraphrase, he answers, “What good people? Everyone here was evil to the core and I did the world a service.“
More relevantly, he goes on to say that none of the townsfolk, not a single person, not a one, does anything to stop the Legion. He says they all sat back and waited passively for their turn to die, in the hopes that they might be the lucky survivor.
Okay, pause for a sec.
Have you ever met a human being?
Humans are deeply spiteful and contrary - not everyone, mostly not all the time, but it is something that comes up again and again in history. Rebellions, slaves fighting back, oppressed classes protesting and fighting for basic rights. We aren’t perfect, but we are capable of of saying “fuck the status quo”.
Now, importantly, this is Nipton’s first (and last) official interaction with the Legion. It sounds like a spy or two were sent in before “Mr. Fox” came by to bait the trap, but this was an independent town that notoriously served its own interests alone, refusing to side with or against the NCR, Powder Gangers, nor presumably Legion.
This is not a population used to the way Legion does things, indoctrinated former tribals or those born into its world, these were free contractors.
When the fuck have humans ever said “oh you’re going to kill all but like 2 of us? guess I’ll sit by and wait my turn!“ *
Not to mention this is the Wasteland. Nipton is an established town and what little you look up doesn’t mention raiders, but you have to pass by raider groups both directly before and after entering it, not to mention the Radscorpions and other wildlife threats. There had to at least be a few people in town who knew how to fight, because the town was still there by the time the Legion arrived.
With me so far?
Two places stand out to me. First, one of the houses in Nipton was a pain and a half for my noob self and I ended up having never looted it, because it is abrim with traps. There’s a Mr. Gutsy, a cage full of Radscorpions, and who knows what else.
There is a dead Legionnaire in this house.
The second place is the mobile homes sort of outside the town, to the right of where you come in. In fact, you can check them out without triggering Vulpes’ conversation. There’s several dead townsfolk out here, one of whom is holding an energy weapon. There is also an ash pile. If you inspect that ash pile?
[ID: Screenshot from Fallout: New Vegas. It displays the contents of an ash pile, which are a Legion Recruit Armor and a Machete, a common weapon of the Legion. End ID.]
That is two places where you can find legitimate proof that someone, actively or passively, fought back against the fate of Nipton. You find no Legionnaire corpses in Town Hall if I recall, but they failed to clean up other locations, perhaps not even aware of their losses but I doubt it. Vulpes surely knows that the good people of Nipton fought back, even succeeding in killing his soldiers, and he lies directly to your face about it.
*Given what I’ve heard of the other Bethesda ““Fallouts”“ this might be a valid expectation in another game, but definitely not here.
EDIT: Made the asterisk more visible.
#elk text#fallout#fnv#fallout new vegas#long post tag#i got back on the game and got the screenshot so time to post this lol
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By Justin Mazzola
Huffington Post
Aug 20, 2022
Take a look at a photo of the 46 U.S. presidents. What do you notice?
When I’d ask my students this at the beginning of each school year, someone always said they look old. Another would point out that most of them aren’t smiling, and I’ll never forget the boy who said matter-of-factly that a lot of them are not handsome.
Students would also realize they’re all men, and, except for President Barack Obama, they’re all white. I’d then ask the natural follow-up questions: Why do you think that is and how do you think it’s affected our country? After discussing with a partner, they’d suggest that only white men were allowed to vote (previously true), while another would theorize the elected leaders made laws that favored white men (mostly true, specifically the wealthy). Like our presidents, almost every student in my class was white.
To be clear, this is not critical race theory, despite what many conservatives will have you believe. They argue that teaching kids about race sows segregation and shame, even if the history lesson involves events long before they were born. Some critics go so far as to claim we live in a colorblind society where racism no longer exists, citing Oprah and Obama as proof everyone has a fair shot at success. Many of those critics also have children who are likely to adopt their views, unless professional educators teach them to think for themselves.
I was one of those kids, a Xennial growing up lower-middle class in a small New Hampshire city with my parents and younger brother. In 1990, the state was 98% white. In my high school graduating class of 264, only three students were nonwhite. Needless to say, I was not exposed to meaningful discussions about race. Instead, my family was indoctrinated by Rush Limbaugh, whose radio show provided a soundtrack for our home. My Republican father criticized affirmative action because it gave minority groups an unfair advantage in a country where, he claimed, everyone has an equal opportunity “as long as they work hard.” My mother, a French immigrant, adopted his views by osmosis. I did too, and held on to them throughout my 20s, until one professor changed everything.
While obtaining my master’s degree in education in 2009, I was required to take a course called “Language, Power and Democracy.” The monthlong class explored white privilege and America’s ongoing racial divide, and was taught mostly through documentaries and discussions. Redlining and Reconstruction were just some of the topics covered. My belief that class outweighed race in determining opportunities began to erode. After a month of evidence-based lectures and thoughtful conversations with my racially diverse classmates, I began to see America’s institutional racism.
Upon graduating, I taught at an independent school in San Francisco for nearly a decade. Autonomy over the curriculum allowed me to incorporate current events and marginalized voices into developmentally appropriate fourth grade content. Drawing inspiration from my graduate course, as well as authors Howard Zinn and James Loewen, I provided various perspectives while teaching social studies.
Each October, my students reviewed what they learned in third grade about Christopher Columbus. Then I would read “Encounter” to provide them with a different point of view. The children’s book is told through the eyes of a young Taino boy recounting the Italian explorer’s arrival, and the ensuing enslavement and brutality he unleashed on the native people. My students were simultaneously fascinated and shocked, leading most to write essays about why Columbus Day should no longer be celebrated.
During our World War II unit, students questioned a U.S. propaganda video, then analyzed photos of Japanese Americans being forcibly removed from the West Coast and images from the camps where they were incarcerated. They asked how Japanese Americans could be imprisoned based on their ethnicity, and why German Americans were spared the same treatment. This is not critical race theory, but students certainly raised critical questions about race in American history.
Read more.
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omggg encounter of the most terrifying kind today ANDREW TATE STANS💀💀💀So i was waiting for my class today and all of a sudden i hear a cluster of middle schoolers huddling around a phone approaching a nearby classroom and one of them is going "she said she doesnt like andrew tate she said she doesnt like andrew tate im going to show her this" and hes playing that video of him being like "Guysss im not sexist i swear❤️ " and then it ends and he in the most deadpan voice ever like no one is laughing says "Andrew tate is a god she just hates him bc hes bringing back masculinity" and i lowkey stare at him bc ARE U FUCKING SERIOUSSSSS😭 and then he meets my eyes and his tone immediately drops and he was like Um i was just kidding. and at first im like YASS SCARY UPPERCLASSMAN STATUS ACHIEVED But then im like ummm BC i really dont want to talk to middle schoolers but also my class is about to start i wont have to entertain the conversation for long and this kid is likee lowkey being indoctrinated what am i looking at. so im like "um are you sure😭💀" and hes silent so im like who said he was bad and hes like her and points into this classroom where im asssuming his history teacher is and like shes great i have some friends that do some activism stuff with her so she def knows what shes talkoing about. so i was like "youre in..." and this girl is like seventh grade and im like "seventh grade maybe you should at least take the opinion of your teacher whos more educated into account" And then i thought that was that cuz im not going to argue with a 12 year old but he kept talking i literally forgot what he said i was fucking annoyed at myself for even engaging like WHEN DOES MY CLASS STARTTTTT. but i wass too deep into it atp and so i waslike also you can be masculine without being misogynistic like hes done some awful stuff he got kicked off of this tv show bc blabalablaa and i said something about that idr. and then he said soemthing else and atp i was like When does my class start and they were all like um you dont have class here and i was like yeah i know i have it in this other classroom and then i tried to open it and it was locked and i was like Oh. BC I DIDNT EVEN HAVE THE CLASS😭😭 So i wass like ummm awk hahaha bye!! and as i was leaving he shouted something else about how awesome andrew tate was or whatever and i was just like um you probably wont think that in a few years Pulling the upperclassman card🤓 and ya it wasnt rlly a big deal i think its the only time ive talked to a seventh grader in the past like three years But its lowkey freaky likeeeee these kids are literally spitting rhetoric💀💀 brah. Wat the hell
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Florida Wants Laws on Race, Gender to Influence Nationwide AP Class
The College Board announced Tuesday that it would be reworking its AP African American Studies course.
Florida's education department said it "expects" the College Board to change the course nationwide to reflect Florida's law.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis previously blocked the course from being offered for imposing "a political agenda."
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Florida is hoping its strict law regulating how race, gender, and sexuality are taught in school will soon be applied to students nationwide as the College Board revamps its African American studies class that the state vocally rejected.
The Florida Department of Education said Tuesday it expected the removal of so-called "critical race theory" and "queer studies" content from the College Board's updated AP African American Studies course.
"AP courses are standardized nationwide, and as a result of Florida's strong stance against identity politics and indoctrination, students across the country will consequentially have access to an historically accurate, unbiased course," Director of Communications for the Florida Department of Education Alex Lanfranconi said in a statement.
The course was previously blocked from being taught in Florida high schools by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
DeSantis said in a press conference Monday that the course imposed "a political agenda" with its content on queer theory and prison abolition.
"This is a course on black history—what's one of the lessons about? Queer theory. Now, who would say that an important part of black history is queer theory? That is somebody pushing an agenda on our kids," DeSantis said.
Florida's legislature passed regulations that limit how topics like queer identity, sexual orientation, and racism are mentioned in schools.
College Board did not respond to Insider's request for comment on whether or not the upcoming changes to the course were a direct result of DeSantis and Florida's public rejection of the class.
Lanfranconi said in a statement: "We look forward to reviewing the College Board's changes and expect the removal of content on Critical Race Theory, Black Queer Studies, Intersectionality, and other topics that violate our laws."
The AP African American Studies course will be offered nationwide and was previously piloted at 60 high schools.
The course's new framework will be released on February 1.
#florida#desantis#white supremacy#white lies#international students deprived of education in florida#Florida wants its strict race and gender law to influence how an AP class on Black history is taught nationwide#Black History Matters
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Writing Log #1: Purpose of Education
In the regards of Paulo Freire's critical pedagogy theory, I would agree that the purpose of higher education is to teach the individual to think critically and question everything for the purpose of building a more just world in the future. I believe higher education gives people the opportunity to examine history, theory, literature, and the present state of the world in order to build a better future for themselves and their communities with the skills they learn in the classroom. I also believe that people must understand themselves to understand the world, and that every teacher has the responsibility, "of educating students to become critical agents who actively question and negotiate the relationships between theory and practice, critical analysis and common sense, and learning and social change" (Giroux 717). To understand oneself and the world requires an education that values creative ideas and new solutions more than the indoctrination of classical concepts. There is a great importance of learning both theory and critique for the purpose of expanding one's knowledge and laying the foundation of informed decision making, yet the rift between preparing students for a test and allowing creativity in the form of intellectual disruption leads most students to accept the information at hand instead of challenging current ideals. The purpose of higher education is an opportunity for students to learn and grow as individuals, as well as the responsibility of educators to pass down the ways information has developed throughout time. Educators, apart from texts and media, are the holders of knowledge and how they relay the curriculum to their students impacts how they will view and interact with the world. It is crucial that education is used to help people learn how to inform themselves while also integrating ways to challenge the current system, so it may evolve into a system that serves the needs of every person through justice and social understanding. As Freire believed, "Critical pedagogy, unlike dominant modes of teaching, insists that one of the fundamental tasks of educators is to make sure that the future points the way to a more socially just world, a world in which the discourses of critique and possibility in conjunction with the values of reason, freedom, and equality function to alter, as part of a broader democratic project, the grounds upon which life is lived" (Giroux 717). Fostering a creative and question-encouraged environment in the classroom is a vital part of education because it allows people to learn about the past and the present while actively demanding for social change.
Higher education or even a liberal arts education cultivates a pedagogy that attempts to inspire self-reflection and critical thinking in students, but there is still need for institutional reform for the current pedagogy. Inequality of education in the form of expensive tuition rates that is inaccessible to every person, different curriculums based on location of an institution, curriculums designed specifically for convergent thinkers, and capitalistic foundations of the current pedagogy leading students into the workforce are some of the reasons for reform. "Teaching to the test and the corporatization of education become a way of ‘taming’ students and invoking modes of corporate governance in which public school teachers become deskilled and an increasing number of higher education faculty are reduced to part-time positions, constituting the new subaltern class of academic labor" (Giroux 715). Although American academic institutions attempt to teach critical thought through course materials, the basis of the current pedagogy is rooted in the capitalistic ideals of the country. As creator of the American school board and successful contributor to modern capitalistic ideals, John D. Rockefeller, once said, "I don't want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers." This mindset of the richest man in America has created a culture of valuing hard work over critical thought within the educational systems. His success in business has made him the face of the "American dream," but the reality of this coveted dream is that hard work does not always lead to social and financial success for every American.
There are many issues within the academic institution, but with the privilege of pursuing an education and obtaining a degree comes numerous benefits for the individual. In Brandon Busteed's interviews with numerous American educational leaders about "the ultimate outcome of an education," he finds an empowering answer from Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman: "It’s to change what you believe" (Busteed). Busteed goes on to describe that knowing something is emotionless, but to believe is to feel deep emotion. From this perspective, the purpose of higher education is the act of evolving one's beliefs overtime and with that comes the "transformative" act of self-determination. Education gives learners the opportunity to understand and impact the world with a critical lens that help transform the corrupt systems of power in place and for educators to "‘unveil opportunities for hope, no matter what the obstacles may be’ (Freire, 1994, p. 9)" (Giroux 719).
Works Cited
Busteed, Brandon. “A Nobel Laureate's Mind-Blowing Perspective on the Ultimate Outcome of an Education.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 23 Dec. 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/brandonbusteed/2019/12/23/a-nobel-laureates-mind-blowing-perspective-on-the-ultimate-outcome-of-an-education/?sh=f4aca2a6cd59.
Giroux, Henry A. “Rethinking Education as the Practice of Freedom: Paulo Freire and the Promise of Critical Pedagogy.” Policy Futures in Education, vol. 8, no. 6, 2010, pp. 715–721., https://doi.org/10.2304/pfie.2010.8.6.715.
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every time i learn more history i have a worse opinion of nation states, especially the one i live in
our government is terrible and does bad things for bad reasons every fucking day
we're not the worst
but that's a low bar
the only things we're really any good at are logistics and propaganda
which the world has learned, to its lasting sorrow, is all that's ever needed to bring misery, exploitation, and death to uncountable millions of people
(many of whom we called allies until they became inconvenient to continue to use as proxies)
for real for real the u.s. government does a world class job of lying to and indoctrinating its residents
and to the rest of the world
y'all complain about military funding in movies but holy shit the possibilities that come up with how deeply these movies penetrate societies the u.s. regards as hostile
god
i feel like a conspiracy theorist
i feel super crazy
whoo, okay, here's the thing
i know this isn't exactly a covert government project because, for one thing, our government is super bad at secret conspiracies
our covert actions mostly fail in their high concept objectives and fail to remain covert and often come back to bite us in the ass in ways that mildly inconvenience us
like
how we keep funding fascist dictatorships and death squads
for example! one mr saddam hussein, who we didn't sell weapons systems directly? but we did send over a shitload of chemical precursors for the gas weapons used in the iran-iraq war and iraq was able to buy astonishing quantities of french weapons
like the aérospaciale am-39 exocet air to surface missile, two of which were launched, by a modified commercial jet, procured from the same french corporation that supplied the iraq air force with mirage fighters, at uss stark, then on patrol as part of our economic blockade of iran
both missiles struck their target, killing thirty seven sailors and wounding twenty one more
iraq claimed to have executed the pilot who flew the mission and our government claimed to believe this, though it was not true
the one thing of note the reagan administration did was to relieve the captain, who apparently followed his standing orders and absolutely kept his badly damaged ship floating which is a really difficult and technically impressive thing to do! from command and ended his career
for not defending his ship
i'm amazed we continue to have a navy, really
anyway the u.s. government is a petty evil bitch so we weren't quite done yet
i'll cite wikipedia here for a reason: i am definitely mentally ill with a history of occasional delusion but this is not that
this is all available on wikipedia, it is in no way secret!
On 21 June 2011, an agreement was reached between the governments of the United States and Iraq regarding claims of United States citizens against the regime of Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi government established a fund of $400 million to compensate prisoners of war and hostages in the Persian Gulf War, and those killed or injured in the 1987 attack on Stark. The United States Department of State was to establish a mechanism to process applications for compensation.
it's so evil i want to pull the skin from my face
just just just fuckin look at the user of language here, look at the dates, holy fucking shit
is wikipedia run by the cia? i doubt it
but if the article didn't use such carefully bloodless language to describe how the greatest nation on earth straight mugged the people of iraq using things done by the dictatorship we so loudly claimed to have liberated them from as moral and legal justification
fffffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
if the article just said that it'd be flooded with edits from bootlickers
"an agreement was reached" my god*
amazing
and it doesn't take the government doing much more than funding media through partnerships with military and police
the incentives of capital do the rest
we aren't just telling the american people our armed forces, here and abroad, are good people, heroes even, we're telling everybody
and it's just capitalism as hegemonic paradigm! plus, you know, a ridiculously huge nuclear arsenal and a history as the only nation to use them against another nation state, that's always factored into the geopolitical calculus
you think china doesn't know what's up with our media? it's not great for their domestic political projects but the incentives and threats are enough that american movies play on chinese screens
such is the nature of capital and its most zealous manifestation, american empire
*specifically, the morrigan, for reasons i hope are obvious enough
#eat the rich#government is just bad#i genuinely don't know how to get to something less bad from here that doesn't involve the untimely deaths of billions of humans
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Aruna khilanani reviews
#Aruna khilanani reviews series#
It's interesting because from a CT perspective, how do we evaluate or problematize internalized oppression? Because "internalized oppression" is very much is popular and felt to be valid among liberals (e.g., elite, politically correct Democrats) as well as woke liberals, and conservatives reject it totally, whereas leftist critical theoretic might be more ambivalent about it as a concept (due to contentious debates about class reductionism). Until now, she has gained 656 followers on. She posts pictures and tweets under the username arunakhilanani. Khilanani came upfront and mentioned that the talk’s title was ‘white minds’ and Yale did not review it before she delivered. (E.g., assuming this is her formulation, then can we state where/how do the rest of her ideas go wrong? And obviously why Yale censored her talk, etc.) Read About Dr Aruna Khilnani Wikipedia Age, Husband. I would summarize her overall problem formulation as exactly that notion, the phenomena of internalized racism in an (post-)colonial American society. What you call "depraved racist", she does admit to in the interview as her "internalized oppression". Not going to go into whether it's because I'm also an Asian American with an academic background, so is that my racialized experience or just my classist indoctrination that I find myself agreeing with here, etc.! … All are welcome at the meetpoint.Not sure if you are actually asking me, or are simply expressing strong disagree with the interviewee, but while reading the piece I could empathize with her frustrations very well. In this generous collection of book reviews and literary essays, legendary Village Voice rock critic. ‘Conservative, Liberal, Old, Young, Blue, Black, CIS, Trans, Asian, Fat, Skinny, rural, urban, B-baller, international, ex-pat, Rapper, Queer, White, Muslim, Biker, Rocker, Lax player, Atheist, Trump Supporter, Darwinist, Trump Hater. ‘Whoever you are, and wherever you come from, our world is better because of you,’ she states on the site. The forensic psychiatrist and psychoanalyst’s lecture seem to contradict statements on her website where she invites people of all backgrounds to her office that she refers to as a a ‘meetpoint’ Unnamed and untitled like the privilege it protects.’
#Aruna khilanani reviews series#
The doctor has posted a series of TikToks in the last week claiming the school hasn’t included the name of the talk or that she delivered it.Ī caption on one of her TikTok’s reads: ‘My talk at Yale Child Study Center was just released internally. She is now arguing, however, that Yale is trying to suppress her by not releasing the footage of her talk publicly. Khilanani says it was only released internally after facing calls from some to release it. Khilanani graduated from the University of Illinois At Chicago College of Medicine in 2006. Search doctors, conditions, or procedures. It’s just like sort of not a good idea.’Īfter Khilanani delivered the talk, Yale only made it available to students and faculty with a warning that said it contained ‘profanity and imagery for violence’. See Reviews & Make an Appointment LIST YOUR PRACTICE Dentist Pharmacy Search. It’s like banging your head against a brick wall. Aruna Khilanani a Forensic Psychiatrist & Psychoanalyst, and author of the speech The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind discussed her recent speech at Yale on Black News Tonight.During the interview, she claimed Racism is something that is unconscious racism is everywhere and it is actually in everyone. Aruna Khilanani at the Yale School of Medicines Child Study Center. 35 reviews New York-Presbyterian Hospital. by a supervening law that subjected those activities to review by a censor. Aruna Khilanani reviews, contact info, practice history, affiliated hospitals & more. ‘We are asking a demented, violent predator who thinks that they are a saint or a superhero, to accept responsibility. Aruna Khilanani has a 1.5/5 rating from patients. We keep forgetting that directly talking about race is a waste of our breath,’ she said. ‘They feel that we should be thanking them for all that they have done for us. She also explains her claim that White people are psychopathic. She went on to say that white people feel they are being bullied when people of color bring up race and described it as a ‘psychological predicament’. Aruna Khilanani explains why she said there were no good apples among White people. Like I did the world a f**king favor,’ Khilanani said during the talk. ‘I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. Khilanani, who has previously taught at Cornell, Columbia and New York universities, made the stunning statements during her talk that was largely based on the psychology behind ‘whiteness’.
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