Unlike Las Vegas, what happens in California doesn’t stay in California. And since this includes toxic ideas, everyone should be concerned about the Golden State’s new Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC). For while the name sounds nice, it’s only a model for national destruction.
Originating with a 2016 bill signed by then-governor Jerry Brown, an ethnic studies course is now mandatory for all California high-school students after the state assembly gave final legislative approval to a relevant bill, AB331, in August. Introduced by Democrat assemblyman Jose Medina, the vote was 53-10 in favor, with only Republicans voting nay.
The alarm about the scheme was already sounded last September. “‘For those of us that grew up in Soviet bloc countries, the ESMC is like deja vu,’ said Vera Hartford, a California lawyer who was a political refugee from communist Czechoslovakia,” wrote the Jerusalem Post at the time. “Hartford is a member of the Alliance for Constructive Ethnic Studies (ACES), a grassroots group of parents, teachers, students and immigrants from all backgrounds, races, ethnicities and political affiliations, who have joined forces to lobby for a change to the proposed curriculum.”
“‘We are dumbfounded by a curriculum that consistently elevates Socialism, Marxism and Communism as the way students are encouraged to become socially responsible,’ Hartford said,” the paper continued.
Yet that’s putting it mildly, believe it or not, because ESMC is essentially the release of a Kraken of left-wing mind rape on impressionable students. Online magazine Tablet reported on this last week in a very informative article, pointing out that even the ESMC’s language is “bewildering.” Providing examples, it writes:
“Ethnic Studies is about people whose cultures, hxrstories [not a typo], and social positionalities are forever changing and evolving. Thus, Ethnic Studies also examines borders, borderlands, mixtures, hybridities, nepantlas, double consciousness, and reconfigured articulations.…” This was the telltale jargon of critical race theory, a radical doctrine that has swept through academic disciplines during the last few decades.
The new curriculum, which will eventually be promulgated throughout the California school system of 6 million children, would “critique empire and its relationship to white supremacy, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism … and other forms of power and oppression,” according to the proposal. It would “build new possibilities for post-imperial life that promotes collective narratives of transformative resistance.”
Capitalism was classified as a form of “power and oppression,” and although “classism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and transphobia” were also listed as forms of oppression, anti-Semitism was not. Jewish Americans were not even mentioned as a minority group.
Note that bizarre language manipulation is often a hallmark of evil movements.
Also telling is that an ESMC “list of 154 influential people of color did not include Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, or Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, though it included many violent revolutionaries,” Tablet further informs. “There was even a flattering description of Pol Pot, the communist leader of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, who was responsible for the murder of a quarter of the Cambodian population during the 1970s.”
Reacting to this, “Clarence Jones, former legal counsel and speechwriter for Martin Luther King Jr., in a letter he wrote to Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state’s Instructional Quality Commission, called the ESMC a ‘perversion of history’ for providing material that refers to non-violent Black leaders as ‘passive’ and ‘docile,’” Tablet also relates. Jones “decried the ‘glorification’ of violence and Black nationalism as ‘role models for the students.’”
There’s more in Tablet’s article, too (and it’s worth reading), but the above speaks for itself. But then there’s something less obvious. While some forces are fighting for the ESMC and some against it and all are arguing about what should constitute ethnic studies, a simple point is missed:
For the most part, we shouldn’t have “ethnic studies.”
A reason why was illustrated by something else in the Tablet essay. “A group of Asian Americans urged the state to develop a program that would ‘inspire ethnic pride in all students and inspire them to work together, rather than against one another,’ while Hindu, Korean, Armenian, and Sikh groups complained of being left out as did several Jewish groups,” the site wrote. “The California Legislative Jewish caucus published a letter saying the ESMC ‘effectively erases the American Jewish experience.’”
“Ethnic pride”? Whatever happened to American pride? The second half of the above can be translated as, “What about my group?! Me, me, me!” as everyone now jockeys for a piece of the identity-politics pie. That’s the way it is under a racial/ethnic spoils system: There are benefits to being labeled a “victim group” — i.e., preferred.
Additionally, if you want students to work together, you strive to develop among them and emphasize commonalities, not their ethnicity (“ethnic pride”).
This common sense was once commonly understood. Just consider, for example, the following now-famous statements made by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1907:
In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person’s becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American….
There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag…. We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language…and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.
Today, however, it’s not just that there’s so much focus on ethnic studies and the like that Americans no longer even know their own culture, heroes, and history; it’s that there’s so much focus on ethnic everything that Americans no longer even have common culture, heroes, and history. The result is that where we once were forging an American people, there are now just peoples living in America.
The ESMC will only exacerbate this phenomenon, too. For our educrats may not be too good at schooling kids in reading, writing, addition, or subtraction, but they sure do know how to teach division.
