By Andrea Widburg April 17, 2021 American Thinker
For three days, I’ve had sitting on my virtual spindle a post that Bari Weiss, formerly of the New York Times, posted on her Substack page. It’s entitled “I Refuse to Stand by while My Students Are Indoctrinated.” The author isn’t Weiss but is, instead, Paul Rossi, a math teacher at Grace Church High School in Manhattan (annual tuition: $57,330). On Friday, Weiss added another open letter, this from Andrew Gutmann, a parent who had just pulled his daughter out of Brearley, another expensive private school (annual tuition: $54,000). Both are horrifying exposés of and attacks against the woke culture saturating these institutions.
Both letters are long and don’t yield easily to a brief summary. I’ll quote a few select paragraphs from each, but you must read them to get the full flavor of the Maoist madness at these institutions.
Paul Rossi, the teacher, writes that Grace Church is focused on “‘antiracism’ training and pedagogy that I believe is deeply harmful to [my students] and to any person who seeks to nurture the virtues of curiosity, empathy and understanding.”
Rossi perfectly describes the self-hatred, mental repression, cognitive dissonance, and pure racism this training inculcates into young minds:
My school, like so many others, induces students via shame and sophistry to identify primarily with their race before their individual identities are fully formed. Students are pressured to conform their opinions to those broadly associated with their race and gender and to minimize or dismiss individual experiences that don’t match those assumptions. The morally compromised status of “oppressor” is assigned to one group of students based on their immutable characteristics. In the meantime, dependency, resentment and moral superiority are cultivated in students considered “oppressed.”
Rossi describes how, during a segregated “whites only” student and faculty Zoom meeting, he spoke out, inspiring the students to speak out, too. This was a bad thing.
I was informed by the head of the high school that my philosophical challenges had caused “harm” to students, given that these topics were “life and death matters, about people’s flesh and blood and bone.” I was reprimanded for “acting like an independent agent of a set of principles or ideas or beliefs.” And I was told that by doing so, I failed to serve the “greater good and the higher truth.”
He further informed me that I had created “dissonance for vulnerable and unformed thinkers” and “neurological disturbance in students’ beings and systems.” The school’s director of studies added that my remarks could even constitute harassment.
Rossi was then denounced over the school announcement system. There’s more. Read it all, because it’s important.
The letter that Andrew Gutmann sent to fellow parents after he pulled his daughter out of Brearley is, if anything, even more horrifying:
It cannot be stated strongly enough that Brearley’s obsession with race must stop. It should be abundantly clear to any thinking parent that Brearley has completely lost its way. The administration and the Board of Trustees have displayed a cowardly and appalling lack of leadership by appeasing an anti-intellectual, illiberal mob, and then allowing the school to be captured by that same mob.
To give context to his scathing attack on the school, Gutmann describes actual systemic racism as things such as the real Jim Crow, Jewish genocide, and the Democrats’ decision in 1942 to lock up all their Japanese-American citizens. And then he’s off:
I object to a definition of systemic racism, apparently supported by Brearley, that any educational, professional, or societal outcome where Blacks are underrepresented is prima facie evidence of the aforementioned systemic racism, or of white supremacy and oppression.
[snip]
I object to the idea that Blacks are unable to succeed in this country without aid from government or from whites.
[snip]
I object to mandatory anti-racism training for parents, especially when presented by the rent-seeking charlatans of Pollyanna.
[snip]
I object to Brearley’s vacuous, inappropriate, and fanatical use of words such as “equity,” “diversity” and “inclusiveness.”
[snip]
l object to Brearley’s advocacy for groups and movements such as Black Lives Matter, a Marxist, anti family, heterophobic, anti-Asian and anti-Semitic organization that neither speaks for the majority of the Black community in this country, nor in any way, shape or form, represents their best interests.
As with Rossi’s letter, there’s more, much more, including all the material I snipped out. And as with Rossi’s letter, you must read the whole thing.
A couple of years ago, ensconced in a Senate chamber in which almost half of the senators and all the national media agreed with him, and lying about violating Senate rules, Sen. Cory Booker made the ridiculous claim that he was having his “I am Spartacus moment.”
In fact, what we’re seeing from Rossi and Gutmann, in the belly of the beast that is true-blue New York, should be the start of a true Spartacus moment. We must join together to defeat the racist Critical Race Theory and other maddened toxins oozing from leftists.