IT’S COME TO THIS: Twitter Debates Whether Anne Frank Had ‘White Privilege.’
This harkens back to another weird debate from a few years ago, when folks were going after Hellen Keller — who was both blind and deaf — for only have achieved such notoriety and success in her day due to her own “white privilege.” That was bad, this is much worse.
She was suspended, and ultimately apologized. As some have noted, convos like these devolve into a contest of suffering — with this new trend just being the latest iteration.
No, Anne Frank was not an oppressor … toss that thinking into the garbage, immediately.
This also seems to be in the same vein as what Whoopi Goldberg put forth on ‘The View’ this year … when she likened the Holocaust to one group of white people against another, and not wanting to conflate that with racial oppression experienced by African-Americans.
Not to mention this moment from 2014: MSNBC Host Touré Neblett Ascribes Holocaust Survival To ‘The Power of Whiteness.’
Flashbacks: I’m A Middle School Teacher And See How Critical Race Curriculum Is Creating Racial Hostility In School.
Missing from our curriculum during the 2020/ 21 school year was the diversity, perspective, truth, and rigor that previously were taught. Previously vetted books were removed from our classroom and sent to recycling. Gone was the diverse collection of American and World Literature: House On Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, James Baldwin Go Tell It On The Mountain, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, essays by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., poetry by Maya Angelou, Robert Frost, Anne Frank, Night, The Boy In The Striped Pajamas, Macbeth, Walt Whitman, The Salem Witch Trials, The Crucible , Holocaust studies, world genocide, world art, universal themes, universal characters and any book or short story from the literary cannon.
What saddened me most was that I would not be teaching the Holocaust any longer. The Holocaust unit included one of the following: either Anne Frank, The Boy In The Striped Pajamas, and depending on reading level, Elie Weisel’s Night When I asked the school reading coach where all the Holocaust books were, she said “we do not teach the Holocaust because kids can’t relate to the story.” What? Kids can’t relate to genocide, hate, discrimination, and prejudice? Yes children can relate to these universal themes, we all can. Children would never learn about the evils of hatred during the Second World War? Why? What was it about the truth and perspective that seemed to escape us during the 2020/21 school year? Exactly why was all this great literature removed from our curriculum?
Earlier: My road to cancellation — Stanford professor and CEO Joel Peterson’s take.
Soon, a Black Lives Matter advocate asked, of all things, whether I would stand for the American flag. To provide context for my decision, I shared a story. As a toddler, I’d seen my mother take a call from the Department of Defense announcing that her fighter-pilot brother had been killed. Honoring her grief, I’d chosen to stand for the flag under which my only uncle had offered the ultimate sacrifice. The student’s response was presented as an irrefutable argument; my choice was “racist.”
Furthermore, in this woke new world, my professional experience was no longer relevant because of the race and gender I’d been assigned at birth. Despite having created tens of thousands of jobs, promoted women and minorities, and coached scores of entrepreneurs, I was deemed an “oppressor” in the catechism of “wokeism.” Furthermore, the penance for being raised in a “systemically racist” society — founded on millennia of Greek, Roman and Judeo-Christian antecedents, no less — was submission, and, if resisted, cancellation.
The reason behind such tyranny came into focus for me when Condolezza Rice, former secretary of state and current director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford, told me she’d shared with her students that the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (9/11’s architect) had felt like “having Erwin Rommel under lock and key.” The blank looks on the faces of her very bright students revealed that they had never heard of WWII’s famous Desert Fox.
Until then, I’d traced the enmity to activists like Jackson and Hannah-Jones. Now, I could see that it also stemmed from students having swapped an education for indoctrination. Those enlisted as social justice warriors had avoided the lessons of history, missed out on refining skills that might have allowed them to judge assertions and denied themselves the insights required to make wise trade-offs.
As the Washington Post reported in 2018, “Holocaust study: Two-thirds of millennials don’t know what Auschwitz is.” Which allows the Corbynization of the Democratic Party to continue apace.