||| FROM PAIGE MCCORMICK |||
I believe Orcas Island School District (OISD) is at a crossroads of critical race theory (CRT). “Our Nation was built upon a foundation of systemic racism. This system was designed to benefit wealthy, white property owners.” This OISD statement opens as a refrain of faith on the webpage announcing the OISD Equity Committee—to be staffed with certain employees—“transforming our current practices at a systemic level.”
Please keep critical race theory out of our schools. If you’re thinking of exploring CRT, please continue research on paper first. Maybe you could publish which Orcas teaching outcomes you believe will be improved by CRT, and why. I love this school. We go way back.
We know that teacher candidates are generally very good people with traits and talents in common with social service and activism. Teacher training has included critical theory (including social justice, race and identity theory, and intersectionality) for some time in the postmodern era. Now, a new passion for applying CRT has arisen to examine education, educators, students, curriculum, and outcomes through a bold lexicon of race and identity.
CRT is an ideology of power—a philosophy and political theory, with the self-stated goal of dismantling “foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”
So were the latter principles above based on experimental philosophy and theory. Using those with great difficulty and unholy compromise, revolutionaries managed to found a republic, and we have been putting it to the test daily—good and bad, fits and starts, at great human expense and redress of all kinds. Thanks to a liberal stability in those previously experimental principles, we rightly continue to criticize freely even the presumption of the founding! The impassioned, illiberal rejection of rationalism could mean a mortal rift in the experiment.
The bravest discourse of caution toward the untested assumptions of critical race theory comes largely from the liberal heterodoxy—diverse intellectuals, scientists, and historians.
Until recently, racism had become a vulgar anomaly to our legal and moral framework. Real dangers threaten all of us: illegitimate policing, the press and media, the duopoly stranglehold, other failing government, power, economic, health, and education policy. We have better opportunities to improve our country than to reinvent racism as “ordinary, normal, and embedded in society.”
Please keep critical race theory out of our schools. Thank you.
Speaking of OISD. It’s time to open the school and get back to normal. After Christmas break, let’s do it. The kids are suffering.
Lots to learn on this. Kids are way ahead of us on race, gender, identity… I appreciate the schools and the county searching for ways to broaden understanding. A few threads that helped me deepen my own understanding:
– our local Woman in the Woods productions, particularly the work of Paul Rucker
– reading up on “the middle passage,”
– NY Times excellent 1619 Project (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html)
Excellent analysis and conclusions, Paige. Well done.
Extraordinarily incisive Ms. McCormick, thank you!
If I may offer some observations from a century past:
“Give me your four year olds, and in a generation I will build a socialist state.” ~ Vladimir Lenin
“Give us the child for eight years and it will be a Bolshevik forever.” ~ Vladimir Lenin
“Give me just one generation of youth, and I’ll transform the whole world.” ~ Vladimir Lenin
Education is the key, may I suggest a book club for island youngsters to learn the history of our republic for comparative purposes. And in the process learn to critique “authority” figures. Just a random thought.
Hmmm… Why is it that when I read this open letter, it hits me intuitively as hate speech cloaked in finest foppery? One doesn’t need to be an intellectual to read between the lines. You use a lot of big words and concepts, while denying that our country was founded on genocide and slavery, that our empire of colonization was held up by systemic racism, and that it still is.
You say, in your closing argument, “Until recently, racism had become a vulgar anomaly to our legal and moral framework. ” Please define your timeline for “recent.” You lost me at ‘anomaly.’ Do you see what you just did there? You completely negated history, co-opted the Black Lives and Indigenous movements to, “all lives matter” – and invalidated their own very different experiences than we white privileged people have always enjoyed – even we poor whites.
So… where are you coming from?
To not see that systemic racism is woven into everything, especially destruction of the earth, is to miss the crux of the issue of Race and White Supremacy; is to miss our chance to begin cleaning the rot out of its core, and finally begin to heal the damage in earnest.
As for Mr. Peterson’s Lenin/Communism innuendos, he also co-opts the discussion about Race into that bogeyman under the bed, “communism.” Why wouldn’t he credit the school for wanting to have our true history taught – perhaps even by the very people qualified to teach it – Indigenous and Black people?
I hope the school forms the Equity Committee as an active, action-oriented group working to arm our children with Critical Thinking skills and the truth about our White Supremacy history and ongoing systemic racism – so that we can finally head in a new direction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_race_theory
does a pretty good job of explaining the philosophy behind CRT – very different from Paige Mc Cormick’s examples, in that she leaves out why CRT rejects liberalism, affirmative action, ETC – in that they don’ think these things go far enough for colonized peoples, and that these things were only given because they benefitted the elite as well as minorities and marginalized people. Any encyclopedia would also flesh this out. It’s important to understand context.
Hi Paige,
I’ve compiling documentation on Critical Theory indoctrination incidents in OISD. So far I’ve collected over 30 pages of notes on relevant incidents. I’d like to get the full text of the original Equity Confession that was previously published on the OISD website home page. Could you post that here so that I can record it?