Progressive School Administrator or White Nationalist? It’s Hard to Tell Sometimes

Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland, one of the wealthiest systems in the nation, is overhauling its curriculum. One of its goals is to “develop interconnected and interdisciplinary learning experiences for students” that “strengthens students’ sense of racial, ethnic, and tribal identities, helps students understand and resist systems of oppression, and empowers students to see themselves as change agents.” (Hat tip, Josh Kraushaar.)

I no longer reside in Montgomery County, thanks be to God, but what if parents aren’t particularly interested in having their children identify primarily as members of a racial, ethnic, and tribal class? What if parents object to the corrosive, self-defeating notion that the immutable characteristics of their children either empower them or make them more susceptible to oppression? What if they don’t believe in collective guilt? What if they have different ideas about systems of oppression? What if want their kids to be educated, happy, productive members of diverse communities rather than irritating, didactic, busybody “agents of change”?

Though this certainly not a fresh observation, it striking how the authors of MoCo’s “Antracist System Audit” use virtually the same verbiage that pseudointellectual racists on the far right do to justify their worldview. Inez Stepman makes this point about Ibram Kendi’s “anti-racism” rhetoric, but it works in this case as well.

If the Montgomery County public-school system used the American Renaissance’s “What We Believe” language verbatim in its “Antracist System Audit” — sans “race realism” — would anyone notice?  I doubt it.