Black Excellence Is Not White Supremacy

Don't let woke dogma revive Reconstruction-era racism

Education

BLACK EXCELLENCE IS NOT WHITE SUPREMACY

Don't let woke dogma revive Reconstruction-era racism

 Dmitri Shufutinsky

The woke dogma of modern times tells us that “being on time,” “hard work,” “objective, rational linear thinking,” and “a quantitative emphasis” (that is, math) are white supremacist. This is uncannily similar to the Reconstruction-era racism that forbade African Americans to get an education.

Learning about, being inspired by, or manifesting black excellence is being undermined by the ideological bubble that envelopes our youth. Black excellence has been redefined as “white supremacy.” Recently, the terminology “anti-racist teaching” has become normalized in social discourse. Given the ongoing epidemic of police brutality and mass incarceration as well as other instances of anti-black racism, this may sound like a logical and necessary response. However, the anti-racism movement in fact masks leftist racism beneath good intentions. The not-so-soft bigotry of low expectations permeates the anti-racism movement and threatens to make black Americans a permanent underclass.

In his 2021 book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, Columbia University linguistics professor John McWhorter refers to “the Elect,” a group of far-left academic and cultural elites that claim to know how best to combat racism. In fact, these people often behave in patronizing ways. They praise Ta-Nehisi Coates, a man who denigrated the fallen heroes in uniform of 9/11, reflecting their belief that a black man needn’t be expected to be capable of compassion or sensitivity. They unquestioningly accept The 1619 Project, edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones, as history despite its falsehoods and Hannah-Jones’s rejection of the norm of “objectivity” that has always been the basis of the legitimacy of historical research. They change the national slogan of the KIPP Charter School system, “Work Hard, Be Nice,” because such virtues “center whiteness and meritocracy.” These actions are acceptable to the Elect “progressives” because they believe hard work, kindness, and merit are neither aspirational nor achievable for black people.

McWhorter is not the only one to note this dangerous trend. Wall Street Journal columnist Jason L. Riley’s book, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make it Harder for Blacks to Succeed, informs its readers about the history of the Ku Klux Klan and the racist infiltration of many of the country’s unions in the early twentieth century. Not even a century later some unions continue to push policies that are harmful to black Americans.

Public school teachers’ unions are a particularly egregious example of this. In 2009, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and School Chancellor Joel Klein announced they would close two poorly performing Harlem public schools and replace them with charters in an effort to boost the educational outcomes of Harlem’s black and brown students. However, Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers, filed a lawsuit to block this action and keep children in these failing schools. During the pandemic, teachers’ unions fought to keep schools closed in the name of fighting racism. The result: math and reading scores for black and brown children have plummeted, erasing decades of progress. One must ask whether the primary concern of Weingarten and the teachers’ unions was the well-being of children or their own interests.

A book by journalist Luke Rosiak, Race to the Bottom: Uncovering the Secret Forces Destroying  American Public Schools, highlights the deep corruption in our K-12 system. This corruption is particularly damaging when it comes to the “woke” ideology of low expectations for minorities. Take the “anti-racist” concepts and practices recommended to school boards and school administrators by Glenn Singleton’s Pacific Education Group. Singleton (himself a black man who, as Rosiak details, grew up in “privilege”) reinforces the stereotypes that black people are incapable of reasoning and learning. Instead, he claims that emphasis on “the scientific method” is a sign of whiteness and “objective, rational thinking” is white supremacy. Similarly, for Singleton, emphasizing “written communication over other forms” is “a hallmark of whiteness.”

Singleton’s ideas about black “otherness” have reach. In 2007, California’s State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Jack T. O’Connell, a white man, opined that black children “learn at church that it’s good to clap, speak loudly and be a bit raucous” and that these behaviors “get them in trouble” in school. When this perspective, which was intended to be benevolent, was met with outrage, O’Connell attributed it to Singleton, who continues to consult for school boards throughout the country.

While it is important to remember and honor the trauma that black people have endured, it is even more important to celebrate our achievements. We ought to be teaching our youth about the heroism and achievements of the likes of Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, the Harlem Hellfighters, and Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Instead, the “equity” crowd on our school boards (many of whom are not themselves black) might say that an Astrophysicist like Dr. Tyson has surrendered to white supremacy because of his advocacy for objectivity and the scientific method. They might question whether the Harlem Hellfighters’ patriotism was authentically “black.” If they are using the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, devised in California, their list of the most important black Americans might conspicuously omit civil rights heroes Martin Luther King, Jr. and Congressman John Lewis, as well as great figures like Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Thurgood Marshall, while including murderers of police officers such as Assata Shakur and Mumia Abu-Jamal, Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale, and Communist Party presidential candidate Angela Davis.

It is time for us to ask ourselves: How different are “woke” teachers who believe that black children just shouldn’t be expected to become as literate as white children from the slave masters who wouldn’t allow us to read? Are teachers who think black achievement is limited to killing cops and Marxist militancy that much different from the racial Darwinists who believed us to be inferior savages due to our darker skin? How is it “woke” or “equitable” to believe that misbehaving in classrooms or low academic achievement is inherently black and therefore acceptable? The answer is simple: It isn’t. It’s just racism.

Equity’s imperialist colonization of the classroom and the black American population threatens to set back decades of progress our community has made. It has allowed, normalized, and encouraged bad behavior and academic failure among black youth. Aaron Benner, a former teacher in St. Paul, Minnesota, writes that when his school adopted practices recommended by Glenn Singleton’s Pacific Education Group (at a cost to taxpayers of $3 million), the results were dramatic:

On a daily basis, I saw students cussing at their teachers, running out of class, yelling and screaming in the halls, and fighting. If I had a dollar for every time my class was interrupted by a student running into my room and yelling, I’d be a rich man. It was obvious to me that these behaviors were affecting learning, so when I saw the abysmal test scores this summer, I was not surprised. Out of 375 students, only 14.3 percent were proficient in Reading, 9.6 percent in Math and 9.3 percent in Science. These test scores are not acceptable in any way, shape or form. 

These sorts of “reforms” will have an impact for decades to come. Equity imperialism has re-labeled black excellence as white supremacy. The equity mission has hoodwinked too many progressives, using “black and brown bodies” such as Glenn Singleton, who display an embarrassing degree of internalized racism, as spokespeople.

It is time for us, as young black Americans of the twenty-first century, to say the buck stops here. We cannot return to Reconstruction-era racism in the guise of wokeness. Allowing the equity/anti-racist movement to colonize the black mind will be the degradation of our people and tantamount to their re-enslavement. It will betray the memory of our ancestors. Now is the time to fight back. Embrace hard work, science, literacy, good behavior, kindness, and virtue.

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Dmitri Shufutinsky is a freelance journalist with the Jewish News Syndicate and a junior research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism Policy. He graduated with a BA in International Studies in 2017 and an MA in International Peace & Conflict Resolution in 2019 from Arcadia University. Dmitri moved to Kibbutz Erez, Israel through the Garin Tzabar program in 2019 and served as a lone soldier in the Israel Defense Forces for two years. He has been published in White Rose Magazine, The Times of San Diego, The Florida Star, The Times of Israel, and The Jerusalem Post, among other newspapers. Dmitri also has written for think-tanks such as the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies and the Palm Beach Center for Democracy & Policy Research. He lives in Hadera, Israel.