Parents across the nation have woken up to the agenda that is trying to take over their schools. Will lawmakers listen — or shut them down?
Parents across the nation have woken up to the agenda that is trying to take over their schools. Will lawmakers listen — or shut them down?
Washington, D.C. — “Put down your camera,” Representative Sheila Jackson Lee admonished me from her seat on the dais in the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, literally looking down at me as I sat as a witness during a hearing of the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties.
I had started filming because the Democratic lawmaker was using the last five minutes of a hearing on discrimination and civil rights to rebuke me and another witness, Devon Westhill, president and general counsel at the Center for Equal Opportunity. Westhill was born to a Vietnamese-immigrant mother and a black American father, a complex biography similar to my own: born in India to a Muslim family and raised in West Virginia. But we were in Jackson’s crosshairs for daring to lay bare the racism being promoted today in the name of the divisive ideologies of “critical race theory” and “anti-racism.” I wanted to juxtapose her denials of the dangers — in fact, the very existence — of critical race theory in our public schools with the evidence that I’d brought to the hearing room.
For two days before I walked through the doors of Room 2141 in the House Rayburn Office Building — home to the House Judiciary Committee — last Tuesday, I wanted to either vomit or crawl into bed. The Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties invited me to speak at a hearing on “Discrimination and the Civil Rights of the Muslim, Arab and South Asian Americans Communities.” And I was nervous about whether I would be able to speak adequately on behalf of all those who needed a voice at this hearing.
I knew that I had to represent thousands upon thousands of parents and children whose voices are being ignored at their local school boards, where illiberal progressives have been imposing a new kind of racism on our kids. I knew that I needed to represent thousands upon thousands of parents who were accused of “domestic terrorism” by the National Association of School Boards and now live with the threat of investigation by the U.S. Justice Department and FBI. (Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee are still refusing to hold U.S. attorney general Merrick Garland responsible for his role in putting a target on the backs of parents.) And I knew that I needed to represent thousands upon thousands of Asian children who are being discriminated against in the name of “equity.” That’s a noble-sounding word, yet one that corrupts the notion of equality under the law by imposing a racial-spoils system favored by social-justice warriors. It is the wedge word of the new racism.
Last Tuesday morning, with Westhill beside me, I took my seat in Rayburn to testify. When it was my turn to speak, I testified about a historic decision, issued on Friday, February 25, by U.S. federal Judge Claude Hilton about a new discriminatory admissions policy at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County, Va. In a scathing ruling, he concluded that Fairfax County Public Schools had created a “system” of discrimination against Asian children with the new admissions policy instituted in December 2020, with racial engineering a clear goal.
“This is systemic discrimination,” I said. One week after Judge Hilton issued his decision, FCPS filed a motion to win a stay on it, pending appeal. It is just a delay tactic for the inevitable.
At hearings like the one where I testified, the political party with the majority of representatives gets more witnesses; right now, that means the Democrats. They hosted a panel of four Democrats, including Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar, on a first panel of lawmakers. Then, the Democrats had six citizen witnesses on a second panel, and the Republicans got to invite only two. When it came time for questions, the Democratic lawmakers ignored us. Republican lawmakers Mike Johnson of Louisiana and Jim Jordan of Ohio at least asked us a few.
Towards the end of the hearing, Representative Jackson Lee took over as chair. She then got her five minutes. To my shock, she began with a dig at Devon and me. She then went on to try to school us about issues of racial discrimination against blacks in America, as if somehow I, as a brown immigrant from India, didn’t care about or were woefully ignorant of this. In fact, two of my political heroes are the Reverend Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. And it was my ancestors who took the example of the colonials in the U.S. to rid my ancestral land of white supremacy and British rule. It was my father who climbed a banyan tree as a boy to support Mahatma Gandhi in his march of nonviolence — a concept that Dr. King embraced to bring civil rights to America. My grandfather was a defense attorney for the Indian citizens who dared to challenge the British, most often losing before British judges, as young men were sentenced to their deaths.
So, I know about historical, systemic racism. I know discrimination. And I know the violence that can happen not only to the body but the soul when discrimination and racism get free rein. I also know what this looks like today. I have witnessed the effect of these prejudices on the many young children, left confused, dismissed, and caricatured by woke teachers, administrators, and school boards. They are told that, because of their skin color, they are inherently evil; that, because of their skin color, they are inherently privileged and must atone for that “sin.” Worse, the same people who peddle these woke lies also tell black children that, rather than having a seat at the American table, they are eternally oppressed — victims purely at the whim of their white oppressors.
Jackson Lee then began a tiresome, ignorant, ill-informed, out-of-touch, and theoretical lecture about critical race theory. It proved that she lives in a bubble. She showed no interest in the evidence I offered, nor did she demonstrate any curiosity about Judge Hilton’s ruling in the case we just won. It was the usual litany of lies and denial. Of course, critical race theory isn’t taught! Of course, it’s a racist dog whistle of white Republican conservatives! I wondered if she’d read the news. Not long before my testimony, San Francisco, the most progressive city in America, had recalled three progressive school-board members, in part because they had spent a huge amount of resources and energy promoting woke-racist nonsense instead of tending to their fundamental duty of reopening schools and educating our children.
I knew that I wouldn’t get any more time to speak. So, I stood up a book called Not My Idea, with the pages facing her that showed one of the most ridiculous and cruel ideas of critical race theory: “Whiteness is a bad deal,” with a picture of a contract and the image of the devil beside it. This book is being taught to children as young as kindergarten in dozens of U.S. public schools.
I filmed the pages as Jackson Lee insisted that critical race theory is harmless. I filmed a copy of the “Oppression Matrix,” an educational reference tool that divides people into “oppressed” and “oppressors” and is used in schools across the country. I filmed a copy of the “Privilege Bingo” card given to children in Fairfax County, Va., schools. In that lesson, all white kids — and even the “Military Kid” — are “privileged” and can only assuage that privilege by obeisance to woke-racist dogma.
The rampant indoctrination of children, of which these materials are only a few examples, is the result of a concerted effort by an industry that we call the woke-industrial complex. At Parents Defending Education, where I work as vice president of strategy and investigations, we have documented hundreds of cases of racism and discrimination in the name of critical race theory since our launch a year ago. Knowing, with this experience, that Jackson Lee was simply wrong, I filmed my evidence juxtaposed with Jackson Lee’s denials.
That is when Jackson Lee scolded me: “Put down your camera.” Now, I’ve been walking the halls of Congress since I was 19 in summer 1984, when I was an intern at States News Service. I have shadowed lobbyists from the biking industry, pro-Israel groups, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and countless others. I know my rights. So I refused to put my camera down. “It’s free speech,” I said. A staffer whispered in Jackson Lee’s ear. She backed down, but not before lecturing me again that I was the aggressor because I had not observed her admonition and wasn’t being “polite.” She would “let” me film. I continued because I knew I had the right. I didn’t need permission.
I knew that I wasn’t going to get any time at the microphone, so this video was my only way to speak to the world about the hypocrisy of denials in the face of evidence of racism and discrimination on behalf of critical race theory. My speech was nonverbal, but it was speech.
And then something unexpected happened. Representative Johnson, noting that Jackson Lee had gone over her time limit, gave me what was left of his allotted speaking time. I used it to share our year-long investigation into the effort at racialized indoctrination of our school children — an indoctrination that at its heart is about shaming and bullying in the corrupt name of social justice. I said it had to end.
Racism is evil, in all forms. I told Jackson Lee, looking her in the eye, that we cannot replace an old hierarchy of human value with a new one. America’s fight to abolish Jim Crow and outlaw the perniciousness of racism cannot be replaced by an effort to establish a new form of racism, however it is dressed up in high-sounding progressive language like “anti-racism” and “equity.” We must protect the integrity of humanity, which means valuing every human being and every child regardless of race, color, or creed.
Afterwards, Jackson Lee came down from the dais and told me that she believes in parent rights as a grandmother. I took her to the pages of Not My Idea, where I showed her the contract with the devil, and I said we can’t expose children to this shaming. We have to meet in the middle. She gave me a fist bump: “To mama bears.” I left her with a copy of Not My Idea, the oppression matrix, and the privilege bingo card. I have reached out to her staff to schedule a meeting so we can meet in the middle.
I’m waiting for a meeting time.