Hands Off, Don't Teach
By JB Clark
As parents of all colors protest at school board meetings against Critical Race Theory (CRT), another player comes to national attention, Bettina L. Love, who is a professor of education at University of Georgia and co-founder of Abolitionist Teaching Network (ATN). The content of ATN is the usual stew of radical Black education concepts, which inadvertently sends the message that Black youth are incapable of learning, at least not through the practices that have educated countless students over centuries.
The list of learning fundamentals that are Black-resistant because they are inherently racist include non-Ebonics English, math, reading, grades, test scores, respect for authority, rudimentary attention span, and minimal self-control. These failings, Black educators say, are the fault of unfair expectations from schools that were set up to teach white children. They demand change, which is described as “dismantling Whiteness.”
Now comes Professor Love to add her flourish to the burgeoning Black education hokum. Recently, Love targeted white teachers, claiming they are harming Black children through their conscious or unconscious racism, and must submit to therapy aka deprogramming. They are, says Love “…spirit murdering Black and Brown students.” To ensure compliance, Love would have activist residents installed in schools -- which sounds like Corn Pop as a Hall Monitor.
The audacity of Professor Love is breathtaking---and hermetically sealed from reality. To speak of spirit murdering by teachers while rampant street murdering by Black youth goes unacknowledged, is hypocrisy of the lowest order. To demand special handling for Black students in schools while communities of color are incapable of controlling their feral youth, displays a delusion mindset. In fact, all the Black education folderol is a massive distraction from the plain truth: they cannot solve their own problems-- unless they were to apply the Eurocentric template of success. And, they would rather self-destruct than do that.
Thus, in every decade, our country has been treated to meme-ish anti-Whiteness alternatives that were going to lift up Black people: Black is Beautiful, Black Pride, Back to Africa, Black Panther neighborhood activism, Afrocentric curriculum, and the current, most pernicious incarnation, Woke-ism. With the cooperation of well-meaning whites, who were “down with the struggle,” trillions of dollars have been spent on the up lift, yet hardcore urban problems have only gotten worse. Nevertheless, Black leadership insists upon doing the same thing (refuting successful white solutions) over and over with slightly different labels and expecting a different result.
The effect on education is stark when looking back to 1954 when Brown v. Board of Education deemed separate but equal was unlawful and desegregation of schools began. Fast forward to 2021 when American education, weakened by bullying Blacks and craven whites, is on the verge of allowing Black separatism in the name of equity into what remains of Eurocentric curriculum, which will quickly devour what’s left of a formerly well-functioning system.
The inversion since 1954 in remarkable. Where Black students were thought to benefit from side-by-side education with white students, even as they had to be delivered by buses, now white students apparently will benefit from the presence of Black students, who are taught to consider their schoolmates as oppressors and secret supremacists.
The variety of previous curriculums will quickly devolve to slavery era, Jim Crow, Civil Rights, BLM grievances, the dubious richness of Black culture, and the other self-centered and limited topics that absorb so-called radical Black intellectuals. Anything white and challenging will have to go. Bring on the Hip Hop.
The handwriting is on the blackboard. Left unchecked, Black educators will follow a familiar pattern that we’ve seen in sports, entertainment, and government, wherein they require representation, then demand greater power, and finally, despite no record of success, they will dictate changes to practices that were working just fine.
If Professor Love and her ilk have their way, Black students, empowered by an agenda which excuses their failures, will continue to disrupt classrooms, intimidate white students, threaten teachers, trash the premises, and wreck the learning process. The message to white teachers, who continue to spirit murder by trying to impart knowledge, will be “Hands off, don’t teach.”
Parents need to change their focus from getting CRT out of schools, and concentrate on getting their children out of public schools. The corruption to education wrought by political correctness, age-inappropriate sex education titillation, the gay agenda, the dumbing-down of academic standards, the implementation of Equity, and now Professor Love’s vision, is unfixable and irreversible. The school integration experiment has failed. The unlimited potential of white minds is hampered by forced schooling with Blacks. The intellectual growth of our society has been stunted by acquiescence to excuse-making attached to education degrees. The knowledge murdering must stop.
J.B. Clark is a former newspaper columnist and teacher dropout with an interest in race relations