A Response to The "7-Day Anti-Racism Challenge" being offered to Newton Public Schools elementary school kids

It's wrong. More to come.

I went on Nextdoor and posted my objection to the Principal of my kids’ elementary school in Newton, MA, endorsing the “7-Day Anti-Racism Challenge” posted by Brandeis’s Heller school. I called it "100% ideological, ahistorical and immoral” and said “[t]his has no place in our schools.” I later referred to “lies” and another poster asked for examples before saying I was “unable” to provide examples. I created this substack because my response is too long for Nextdoor.

Here it is:

First of all, this "7-Day Anti-Racism Challenge" is inappropriate for elementary school kids under any circumstances; it appears to have been developed by or for Brandeis with some consultants who do corporate work. 6-11 year-old kids don’t have the facts (as discussed below) to contest assertions or the experience to evaluate the logic or implications of what they are being told and reach their own conclusions. This is one reason I consider this transparent indoctrination – the organizers don’t want kids reaching their own conclusions, but instead want them to just accept what they are told uncritically.

The introduction page to the challenge includes the following:

• Race is a social construct with real world consequences.

• The concept of race was invented by Europeans in the 14th-16th centuries.

The European intellectualization of race as embedding meaningful content about individuals of a race is historically relevant. Europeans relied on intellectualized racism to rationalize terrible violence against and oppression of non-Europeans, including slavery, even while developing the philosophy that culminated, for Americans, in the idea that all men are created equal. 19th C. German philosophy and its intellectualized racism led directly to the Holocaust.

Nevertheless, race as a social construct and the idea that “race was invented” are deceptive at best. Race is - you will never mistake a native Nordic for a native Sudanese - and "race" is the imperfect word used to denominate groups. The intellectualization of race as embedding members' inherent value or attributes is an invention.

As noted more below, inter-racial violence was the default everywhere until not long ago, with no connection to Whiteness, European philosophy, or intellectualized racism. Otherizing is very much the historical norm.

This blurring sets the tone. Saying that race is a social construct invented by Europeans implies that all of the consequences of the existence of race falls on Europeans. The subtle misrepresentation of these words obscures reality and creates a false moral obligation for all the worlds ills, even as it denies the reader the tools to understand and address reality.

Day 1 of the Challenge is centered around a video in which a comedian rehashes how White people are uniquely evil and therefore fair game. That rehash is replete with falsehoods, half-truths and sleight of hand:

1) Empire and colonies are as old as history. In no particular order and just to name a few, China, Japan, Mongolia, Rome, Persia, Mali, Egypt, the Byzantines, the Ottomans all held widespread empires and extracted resources including slaves from foreign lands directly or indirectly. Some appointed a local puppet and some appointed one of their own to rule the subjected people. Some installed their own bureaucracies and laws, and others allowed subjects to go on before so long as they paid tribute. In many instances where conquest did not lead to empire, it is because the defeated people were annihilated either by being put to the sword or enslaved (see 2) and the land taken over by the conquerors. The Ottomans colonized Europe into the 15th C. and were still in Europe and trying to conquer the West until defeated at the gates of Vienna in the late 17th C. Arguably even up until WWI the Ottomans were an Empire and still sought to conquer Europe. Islam first spread into India through trading centers similar to and centuries before Europeans set them up in Africa.

So, the truth is that European colonialism was very much an iterative development of the long-standing norm in international affairs. The key differences were in scope, not in kind. Employing the technologies developed during and after the Renaissance to the historical norm of asserting power over and exploiting weaker neighbors led to asserting power over and exploiting weaker peoples that weren’t neighbors.

It is also worth noting that 20th C. concepts of decolonialization and self-determination are themselves European developments. Only in the West in the late 19th and into the 20th C. did military powers even ask themselves whether it was right to maintain rule over foreign peoples by force of arms. Before that, ethical considerations of colonial domination didn’t exist.

2) The idea that slavery is a Western institution or is uniquely Western is a lie. Slavery was ubiquitous all over the world, for all time, until the 19th Century. Slaves were conquered, bought and/or sold, in one form or another, everywhere. The word “slave” derives from “Slav” a relic of another age when Germaniv tribes would raid and capture Slavs, then sell them into slavery across the Mediterranean in North Africa. When the British asked the Ottoman Sultan about prohibiting slavery in the 1840s, he mocked them, because slavery was legitimate and perpetual. The Ottomans only formally abolished slavery in the 1920s and it was legal in Mauritania until the 1980s. Slavery continues as a practical matter in many places; not in Europe.

The triangle trade and slavery in the Americas were qualitatively and quantitatively different than other forms of slavery. The systematic brutal treatment of slaves in the colonies was absolutely different and more terrible than other forms of slavery. Many Western-hemisphere countries are made up today almost entirely of slaves’ descendants and subsequent immigrants. Portugal was the biggest participant, with modern Brazil receiving the most slaves.

3) The idea that people are leaving Asia, Africa and South America to come to the West because European colonialism "ruined" them is absurd. Treating colonial policies and the consequences of decolonialization as monolithic is itself ill-informed, as the circumstances vary widely. India and Pakistan differ significantly from each other despite common history. French and Belgian colonialism were notoriously brutal and their former colonies have fared the poorest. Generally, the former colonies that maintained some semblance of Western institutions have served their people best.

In addition, the thought experiment in which colonialism never happened does not somehow lead to the rest of the world being a paradise. To the contrary, the desire to immigrate to the West is strong even in places that were never colonized, or not for any meaningful time (eg the former Ottoman areas put under mandates post WWI), and weakest in areas that have adopted Western-style rule of law, representative government, and free markets. It is impossible to say what former colonies would look like today had colonialism never occurred.

There is also a strong element of soft-bigotry paternalism here. Most of Central and South America were decolonized in the 19th Century, although the British and Dutch colonies (mostly Caribbean islands) generally only became independent starting in the 1960s. There is no correlation between the date of independence and the current wellbeing of the former colonies; if anything, the correlation is inverse – the earlier the colony became independent, the less stable and developed it is today. For the former colonies that have been independent for two centuries, the colonial era is irrelevant to current circumstances, other than in the generic sense that all history is causative. Haiti and Mexico were among the first countries to decolonize; each has a unique history that has led to their current, divergent situations.

If two centuries is not sufficient time to shake off the impact of colonialism, how long are we talking about before we say that former colonies are capable of being judged on their own decisions?

4) The idea that minorities can't be racist is wrong and pernicious. This rests on a redefinition of the word "racist” to capture its emotional power and redirect it toward for a new purpose. Non-whites didn’t like being called out for racist acts, so contrived a rationalization under which only Whites can be racist. This construct is also falsifiable - if a party is racist in power, their losing power doesn't make them not racist. Apartheid leaders in South Africa didn’t become un-racist when Apartheid ended.

The idea that racism requires power is also not useful. Power in what sense and how do you measure it? Jim Crow was the state wielding power to repress Blacks – that is obviously racist. Affirmative action is the state wielding power to reduce the percentage of Whites in certain areas. Is that racist? In both instances the state power is being used to differentiate access to benefits by race. Or what about this discussion right now? The schools, wielding the power and budget of the state, are telling White kids they have a unique moral obligation, based on their race, to fix things that happened decades or centuries before they were born. Is that racist?

What about one-on-one dynamics? Say a six-foot man targets and attacks a young girl based on her race. The power dynamic is self-explanatory. Is this construct saying that this incident can only be racist if the attacker is White, and the victim isn’t? That’s ridiculous.

The term “reverse racist” itself is misleading, though. It implies that there is a baseline “racist” and anything other than that baseline is something other than racist. Racist incidents are racist, regardless of perpetrator and victim.

If you prefer the term “bigot” to “reverse racist,” so be it. I find this deceptive redefinition of words as proof positive that the new application is false. Finally, the fad for using “White” and “Whiteness” as synonyms for “bad things,” this embrace of mocking White people, and telling White kids they were born with original sin is bigoted or racist. Pick your poison.

5) I don't believe in the popular idea that our society today embeds exclusionary criteria that repress minorities. To the contrary, I see our history as reflecting progress, and the abandonment of the conceptualization that led to this progress as a major setback. A Black President would have been ridiculous in 1960 and happened in 2008. That's 48 years; in historical terms the blink of an eye. Yet somehow by 2016 America was irredeemable racist and now must be torn down. It's ridiculous.

6) Now that many readers are good and mad, it goes without saying that European history is littered with horrific crimes. The triangle trade was different. Chattel slavery was different. Jim Crow was as close as you can get to Apartheid without actually getting there. The need to root out any remaining laws, rules, norms, customs, etc. that continue to treat Black people or other minorities as lesser or to impose additional hurdles on them is real and legitimate. The need to educate kids on the history of the world and our country, with all the merits and demerits of each, is essential, and any education without context will teach the wrong lessons.

Telling Black kids that the United States is constructed to keep them down, that they cannot succeed in America, and that White Americans do not want them to succeed is false and bad for those kids. Telling White kids that they were born with original sin and have some moral obligation to atone for things that happened in the past is wrong. Ascribing all problems in the world to Whiteness or White people (eg body shaming) and implying that geopolitics and war are a product of this evil Whiteness is reductionist and ridiculous. For both groups it is cruel, unfair and damaging; in another context it would be considered abusive to both.

Coming full circle back to rational thinking – lessons or workshops underpinned by such twisting and obscuring of the truth not only don’t contribute to a meaningful understanding of the world as it is and what can or should be done to improve it, they prevent participants from understanding and incorporating reality. By installing a false construct, this make it more difficult to develop an understanding of the world that comports with reality and enables prediction of how people and the world will respond to actual events. Any construct that rests on deception and disregard of counterexamples has failed, yet NPS is still pushing this on elementary school kids without context.

Hence, lies, half-truths, and sleight of hand which have no place in public schools.

I will add, I think students should be furious at being used like this. There has been a decision by adults charged with educating kids to pick instead to treat kids as tools for their own political agendas. It is despicable.