“CALIFORNIA WANTS TO TEACH YOUR KIDS THAT CAPITALISM IS RACIST”: Bill Evers has an essay in the WSJ about the California Department of Education’s new “Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum.” Yes, it’s bad, but I’m sure you figured that:
Begin with economics. Capitalism is described as a “form of power and oppression,” alongside “patriarchy,” “racism,” “white supremacy” and “ableism.” Capitalism and capitalists appear as villains several times in the document.
On politics, the model curriculum is similarly left-wing. One proposed course promises to explore the African-American experience “from the precolonial ancestral roots in Africa to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and enslaved people’s uprisings in the antebellum South, to the elements of Hip Hop and African cultural retentions.”
Teachers are encouraged to cite the biographies of “potentially significant figures” such as Angela Davis, Frantz Fanon and Bobby Seale. Convicted cop-killers Mumia Abu-Jamal and Assata Shakur are also on the list. Students are taught that the life of George Jackson matters “now more than ever.” Jackson, while in prison, became “a revolutionary warrior for Black liberation and prison reform.” The Latino section’s people of significance include Puerto Rican nationalists Oscar López Rivera, a member of a paramilitary group that carried out more than 130 bomb attacks, and Lolita Lebrón, who was convicted of attempted murder in a group assault that wounded five congressmen.
Housing policy gets the treatment. The curriculum describes subprime loans as an attack on home buyers with low incomes rather than a misguided attempt by the government to help such home buyers. Politicians—Republicans and Democrats—imposed lower underwriting standards on the home-loan industry. Republicans billed it as a way to expand the middle class, while Democrats crowed that it would aid the poor.
A friend of mine wrote this morning calling Bill “a brave man.” But he didn’t mean Bill was brave to write the op-ed. He meant that only a brave man could plow through the thousand pages of material Bill had to read in order to write his op-ed. “Reading it all would be a fate worse than death,” wrote my friend.
The Republic won’t survive too much of this kind of stuff, you know. Yes, there’s a lot of ruin in a nation. But it’s not infinite. I may be a Cassandra. But never lose sight of the fact that Cassandra was right.