A New York City elementary school recently had students complete a coloring book teaching them the communist principles and agenda of Black Lives Matter (BLM).
According to The Free Press, Brooklyn’s PS 321 “supplied students with the coloring book, What We Believe, as part of a lesson for Black History Month. The book uses drawings and worksheets to promote the 13 tenets of the Black Lives Matter movement.”
Given that BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors admitted that BLM’s leaders are “trained Marxists,” it should hardly come as a surprise that their movement’s principles are of the far-left variety, invoking the collective rather than the individual — one is actually called “Collective Value” — and attempting to dismantle Western and Christian norms.
“Diversity,” “Restorative Justice,” “Globalism,” and “Intergenerational,” the last of which explicitly calls for a “communal network free of ageism,” are among the standard-issue progressive talking points taught by What We Believe. Then there’s “Empathy,” defined as “engaging comrades with the intent to learn about and connect with their contexts.”
The Free Press reported:
One parent of a PS 321 fourth grader, whose grandparents fled Communist China before moving to the U.S., said she and her husband were “shocked” that the book used the word comrade — and that it appeared to promote political propaganda.
“Using the word comrades comes from Communist times,” said the parent, whose 10-year-old daughter attends the school, also known as William Penn. “They are using words that I don’t think are appropriate for elementary school.”
She said she first discovered the coloring book on Tuesday, February 13, when a snow day forced her daughter to learn from home.
“This is classwork, not homework,” the parent said. “If it weren’t for the snow, we wouldn’t have known.”
Some of the BLM principles related to families are already well on their way to being realized among black Americans — and many non-black Americans. “Black Families” calls for “dismantl[ing] patriarchal practices.” “Black Women” is about eliminating “male-centeredness,” among other things. And “Black Villages” seeks to “[disrupt] the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another.” (Considering the amount of black-on-black violence occurring in these “villages,” their collective care may be in doubt.)
Brandy Shufutinksy, the director of education at the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values and a black woman, told The Free Press she was “offended” that the coloring book “demonizes the nuclear family.”
“They frame it as some form of white supremacy,” she said. “There are a number of people beside myself who are deeply offended by the idea that black Americans should not strive for something that was denied to our ancestors for so long.”
Another PS 321 parent, whose family escaped the Soviet Union when she was a teenager, told the website the language used in What We Believe reminds her “of the songs we were made to sing as elementary school children. ‘Dismantling’ and ‘comrade’ and everything — it really reminds me of the word salad that was a part of those songs.” In fact, she added, communism and BLM are the “same salad, different dressing.”
Of course, being a 21st-century movement, BLM also supports perversions that even Karl Marx couldn’t have imagined. Three of its principles in What We Believe concern LGBT matters. “Collective Value” calls for “valuing all Black lives, regardless of actual or perceived sexual identity, gender identity, [or] gender expression.” Then there are the tenets of being “Queer Affirming” and “Transgender Affirming,” the latter of which seeks to “dismantle cis-gender privilege.”
The lesson on being “Transgender Affirming” had students “read the book When Aidan Became a Brother about a girl who transitions to a boy, and then answer questions on a worksheet like, ‘How do you feel when someone tells you what you can or can’t do based on your gender?’” wrote The Free Press.
The mother of the fourth grader was upset that the coloring book presents such far-left ideas “as fact” when, in reality, “it’s not like every black person believes in these principles.”
Shufutinksy concurred, saying, “There is nothing in these principles that talks about honoring greats in black American history. There is nothing in here that is actual scholarship. It doesn’t speak to education. It speaks to ideology.”
But teaching black history was never the point. According to The Free Press:
The educational materials used by PS 321 are created by Black Lives Matter at School, an organization founded in 2016 by a group of Seattle teachers to educate students from pre-K to 12th grade about BLM’s ideology. In 2018, Black Lives Matter at School launched a national Week of Action in February to teach “lessons on structural racism, Black history, intersectional Black identities, and anti-racist movements.” According to the group’s website, the curriculum is now taught at a total of 50 schools across 21 states and six countries.
Indeed, students at PS 321 learned little about black history, even of the politically correct variety. The fourth grader’s mother told The Free Press that, “after the Week of Action, her daughter still had never heard of civil rights hero Rosa Parks and didn’t know what Martin Luther King Jr. had achieved to make him famous.”
Those students do, however, now know how to overthrow the patriarchy, destroy the nuclear family, and change genders — actions that, if unchecked, will decimate what remains of Western civilization and usher in the dystopia of communist revolution.
