Equality is over

She Destroys Gender Ideology in 5 Min

Angels (by Mary Oliver)

You might see an angel anytime
and anywhere. Of course you have
to open your eyes to a kind of
second level, but it’s not really
hard. The whole business of
what’s reality and what isn’t has
never been solved and probably
never will be. So I don’t care to
be too definite about anything.
I have a lot of edges called Perhaps
and almost nothing you can call
Certainty. For myself, but not
for other people. That’s a place
you just can’t get into, not
entirely anyway, other people’s heads.

I’ll just leave you with this.
I don’t care how many angels can
dance on the head of a pin. It’s
enough to know that for some people
they exist, and that they dance.

 

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The Rally For British Culture

Humza Yousaf’s misogyny law is a threat to women (by Joan Smith)

 

It couldn’t be clearer, surely: misogyny is fear or hatred of women. The fact that it has been left out of legislation against hate crime, including Scotland’s new law which came into force this month, has been widely criticised. Why shouldn’t women be protected in the same way as all the other groups who can now complain about a new offence of “stirring up hatred”?

It seems obvious, until you realise that some of the most prominent people pushing for misogyny to become a hate crime have another agenda. Scotland’s First Minister, Humza Yousaf, let the cat out of the bag when he revealed yesterday the real intention behind the SNP’s proposal to bring in a standalone law on misogyny.

Yousaf claims that men can be victims of misogyny — and that they’re as or more likely to be targets than women. “Trans women will be protected as well, as they will often be the ones who suffer threats of rape or threats of disfigurement for example,” he said, offering no evidence for the assertion. This only confirms that the Scottish government’s capture by gender ideology remains unshaken by the publication of the Cass Report last week.

On the contrary, Yousaf doubled down, repeating one of the most cherished illusions of trans-identified males. “When a trans woman is walking down the street and a threat of rape is made against them, the man making the threat doesn’t know if they are a trans woman or a cis woman,” he claimed.

Very few men who have gone through male puberty are able to “pass” as women, a fact revealed by constant complaints from trans women about being “misgendered”. One of the first things we notice about another human being is their sex, and understandably so — because men are responsible for the vast majority of violence against women.

Now Scotland’s most powerful politician is telling us that trans women are indistinguishable from biological women. Not just that: he is arguing that a law against misogyny is needed to protect the very people who categorically cannot experience it. The novelist J.K. Rowling was quick to make the point, opening a new front in her ongoing war of words with the First Minister.

“Once again, Humza Yousaf makes his absolute contempt for women and their rights clear,” she declared on X. “Women were excluded from his nonsensical hate crime law, now he introduces a ‘misogyny law’ designed to also protect men.”

It’s even worse than that. A law against misogyny is a Trojan horse, as feminists have repeatedly warned. Trans women don’t need additional protection because they’re already covered by existing legislation. Yet politicians who call for misogyny to be made a hate crime, such as the Labour MP Stella Creasy, have always insisted that it would apply to trans-identified males.

It’s a backdoor way of getting the courts to recognise “gender identity”, creating another opportunity for men to be addressed as women in the criminal justice system. Misogyny is real and it affects every woman, but the law should not be misused to affirm men’s “inner feelings”. Do we really want to risk a ludicrous situation where a gender-critical woman finds herself in court, accused of misogyny by a man who claims to be a woman?

---

Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She has been Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board since 2013. Her book Homegrown: How Domestic Violence Turns Men Into Terrorists was published in 2019.

 Humza Yousaf's misogyny law is a threat to women - UnHerd

 

 

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗟𝗮𝘆𝗲𝗿𝘀 (by Stanley Kunitz)

 

I have walked through many lives,

some of them my own,

and I am not who I was,

though some principle of being

abides, from which I struggle

not to stray.

When I look behind,

as I am compelled to look

before I can gather strength

to proceed on my journey,

I see the milestones dwindling

toward the horizon

and the slow fires trailing

from the abandoned camp-sites,

over which scavenger angels

wheel on heavy wings.

 

Oh, I have made myself a tribe

out of my true affections,

and my tribe is scattered!

How shall the heart be reconciled

to its feast of losses?

 

In a rising wind

the manic dust of my friends,

those who fell along the way,

bitterly stings my face.

Yet I turn, I turn,

exulting somewhat,

with my will intact to go

wherever I need to go,

and every stone on the road

precious to me.

In my darkest night,

when the moon was covered

and I roamed through wreckage,

a nimbus-clouded voice

directed me:

"Live in the layers,

not on the litter."

 

Though I lack the art

to decipher it,

no doubt the next chapter

in my book of transformations

is already written.

I am not done with my changes.

 

(The Collected Poems, W. W. Norton, 2000)

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How to spot the next mania Each new panic follows the same playbook (by Lionel Shriver)

In the late Eighties and Nineties, the psychiatric profession became infatuated with “recovered memory”, which was conceived in the US but also captivated Europe, including Britain. Practitioners claimed that patients sexually abused as children would naturally repress any recollection of their suffering as too painful, but therapists could employ specialised techniques to retrieve these terrible experiences and so heal the patients’ trauma. As a profusion of books, articles and documentaries cultivated a larger cultural fascination, the recovered memory juggernaut resulted in countless adults “remembering” early childhood abuse, usually by parents. Patients would exhume recollections of having been subject to parental rape or oral sex when they were babies. Accusations followed. Families were torn apart.

In hindsight, it’s now accepted that the therapists were frequently implanting these “memories” in their suggestible patients. Recovered memory was a social mania — a.k.a. a moral panic, social contagion, mass formation psychosis, or mass hysteria. In the throes of the popular delirium, many people found this exercise in psychic archaeology wholly convincing (and no little titillating). For a few years, recovered memories were even accepted as factual testimony in American courts. Only from a distance does the sordid psychological dowsing look barmy.

For me, since roughly 2012, what has therefore been more disturbing than the content of any given hysteria is our continuing susceptibility to collective derangement, which can spread and take hold with alarming rapidity in a digital era. To examine the unnerving phenomenon of the communal fever, often destructive but rarely contested at its height, in my most recent novel Mania I invented my own. Suddenly everyone accepts that all humans are equally intelligent, and “cognitive discrimination” is “the last great civil rights fight”. In other words, there’s no such thing as stupid. Because that assertion is itself stupid, my concocted mania seems apt.

Within the astonishingly short time frame of 10 years, I count four real-life collective crazes: transgenderism, #MeToo, Covid lockdowns (which spawned sub-crazes over masks and vaccines), and Black Lives Matter. I also worry we’re already in the grip of social mania number five.

Take trans. Gender-identity disorder was not that long ago an extraordinarily rare psychiatric diagnosis largely constrained to men. Abruptly circa 2012 — on the heels of such a successful crusade for gay rights and even gay marriage that homosexuality became passé — a profusion of television documentaries hit our screens about little boys who wore dresses and played with dolls. Fast-forward to the present, and the renamed diagnosis has exploded by thousands of percent across the West and now pertains abundantly to girls. Teachers tell toddlers that they have to decide whether they’re a girl or a boy or something in-between. We’re subjecting children to powerful, life-altering experimental drugs and surgically removing healthy breasts and genitals, even at the cost of permanent sexual dysfunction and infertility. “Some people are born in the wrong body” has become a truism, which sounds to me as medically credible as phrenology or bloodletting.

The social mania displays a few consistent characteristics. First and foremost, it never seems like a social mania at the time. In the thick of a widespread preoccupation, its precepts simply seem like the truth. Trans women are women; get over it. Or: masculinity is toxic; virtually all women have been subject to sexual torment and male abuse of power; regarding any accusations they make, no matter how far-fetched or petty, women must be believed. Or: Covid-19 is so lethal, and such a threat to our endurance as a species, that we’ve no choice but to shut down our whole economies and abdicate our every civil liberty to contain the disease. Or: all Western countries are “systemically racist”; all white people are genetically racist; the police are all racist (even if they’re black) and should be defunded or abolished; the only remedy for “structural racism” is anti-meritocratic, over-compensatory racial quotas in hiring and education.

While the seeds of a mania have often been planted earlier, for most ordinary people it comes out of nowhere. Transgenderism rocketed to a cultural fetish over a matter of  months. After one fully fledged creep was exposed as a serial sex abuser, #MeToo spread on Twitter like potato blight. Literally overnight, citizenries in March 2020 took it for granted that their “liberal democracies” could justifiably deny them freedom of movement, assembly, association, press and even speech, while many became eager enforcers of the chaotic, despotic, and sometimes positively silly new regime. It took only a few days for George Floyd’s death to trigger huge protest marches all over the world. This hyperbolic response to a single undeserved killing in a one mid-sized American city was partially fed by the pent-up frustrations of whole populations under house arrest during Covid. But for Koreans to troop down the streets of Seoul chanting, “Black lives matter!” when the country has hardly any black people was insensible. Likewise, Britons chanting “Hands up, don’t shoot!” when their constabulary is unarmed. Moreover, all these recent examples illustrate how moral panics have become more international in scope than ever before.

Manias are fuelled by emotion. The cult of trans has capitalised on our yearning to seem enlightened and compassionate.  It has been presented as the logical next step after gay rights, the movement plays on our craving to feel ultra-contemporary. #MeToo both fed off and promulgated resentment, self-pity, and vengeance; in standing up to abuse of power, it tempted some women to abuse their own power to ruin men’s lives. Covid lockdowns stirred primitive terror of death and contagion, until we came to view other people as mere vectors of disease. BLM stimulated the nascent Christian proclivities for guilt, repentance, and penitence even in the secular, while offering black people opportunity to vent frustration, self-righteous fury, and even hatred. All manias thrive on our desire to be included by our own herd and on our anxiety about being exiled — or, if you will, about being UnHerded.

Because a proper mania brooks no dissent. In its grip, everyone believes the same thing, says the same thing, and even uses the same language. A quasi-religious fervour makes anyone outside the bubble of shared obsession seem heretical, dangerous, insane or outright evil. Opponents of lockdowns were granny killers; the unvaccinated were pariahs who shouldn’t be allowed to fly, eat out or obtain healthcare, while some argued “anti-vaxxers” should be imprisoned or put to death. Their rhetoric and affect often violent, transactivists tar critics as murderers; not long ago, writing a single discouraging word about the mutilation of children would end your career. (Self-protectively, I kept my own journalistic mouth shut for a good four years; most journalists are still prudently bumping along on the trans bandwagon.) Women who expressed reservations about the indiscriminate sweep of #MeToo were traitors to their sex. In 2020, even tweeting “All lives matter” got you sacked.

Manias are prone to grow increasingly extreme, accumulating evermore casualties before collapsing from their contradictions. Stalin’s show trials, Cambodia’s killing fields, Mao’s cultural revolution, obviously Nazism; the eugenics movement in the West (which we like to forget), the rage for lobotomies, and the paranoia about Satanism in day-care centres and the contagion of multiple personality disorder of the Nineties — all these misguided infatuations got worse before they imploded.

Hula hoops were harmless, but most manias are malign. The trans movement has warped primary school education, demented our culture with confusion over biological reality, condemned thousands of children to painful surgery and pharmaceutical side-effects, encroached on women’s privacy, and corrupted female sports. #MeToo contaminated relations between the sexes with such mistrust that it may have alone lowered the Western birth rate, while destroying the careers of countless men whose sins were at most venial. Covid lockdowns ravaged our economies, fuelled inflation, and exploded sovereign debt, while damaging the prospects of a generation of school children. BLM has exacerbated racial animosity, demonised meritocracy, and fostered a wasteful, parasitical managerial class of DEI enforcers whom it will be laborious to get shed of.

Yet both the priests and disciples of moral panics are driven by good intentions. They genuinely believe they are doing God’s work. Aggressively virtuous, “wokeness” is one big bundle of mania.

Some hysterias die an easier death than others. Although the fragile, whiny accuser of a US Supreme Court nominee was once heralded as awesomely “courageous”, Christine Blasey Ford’s recent memoir has drawn weary disdain. Ergo, #MeToo is over. Nevertheless, a social frenzy seldom subsides because its agitators announce they were addled, just as the masses of ordinary people caught up in the derangement seldom acknowledge having been led astray. Everyone simply moves on, only to become consumed by something else.

There’s rarely an identifiable point at which a mania is debunked (barring a world war or counterrevolution). Few will recant, much less apologise to the victims of their excesses. A funny amnesia sets in, as forgetfulness is more palatable than shame; the Chinese have simply erased the cultural revolution from their history books. Occasionally, when folks outside the dogmatic bubble prosecute, the cheerleaders of utter tosh are called to account. We did have Nuremburg, and the belated Pol Pot trials in Cambodia. By contrast, the UK’s farcical Covid inquiry is conducted by the same establishment it’s investigating. The subsequent report may criticise single politicians for not having locked down sooner, but it can’t conclude that the lockdowns were a cataclysmic mistake, lest practically everyone at the top be implicated.

Once manias die down, most people pretend they never believed these things to begin with. Having contracted Covid five or six times post-vaccination, multiply boosted mRNA fanatics aren’t prone to advertise their vicious denunciation of the unvaccinated only two or three years ago — any more than recovered memory patients are inclined to advertise that they destroyed their relationship with their parents over an erroneous psychiatric fad. We like to think that we’re “modern” (and what peoples in the present have ever fancied themselves otherwise?) and that we base our beliefs on fact. But we’re just as prey to mass delusions as we ever were.

Accordingly, how’s this for mania number five. It isn’t a mania; it’s just the truth: check. It’s suddenly all anyone in the media seems to talk about, and they use all the same language: check. It’s powered by emotion: check. It brooks no dissent, refuses to acknowledge there’s even a debate to be had, and doghouses all sceptics as evil “deniers” who will bring about the end of world: check. It’s malign, getting increasingly extreme, and is driven by the very best of intentions: check, check, check. I’m not about to get into the argument here, but the escalating hysteria over climate change — or the climate “emergency”, climate “crisis”, or climate “collapse” — displays all the markers, does it not?

---

Lionel Shriver is an author, journalist and columnist for The Spectator. Her new book, Mania, is published by the Borough Press.

How to spot the next mania - UnHerd

 

Climate The Movie

 

65% of young British Muslims oppose Israel’s right to exist (by Archie Earle)

 

Two-thirds of young British Muslims believe Israel should not exist as a Jewish homeland, according to a major new poll.

Based on a survey of 1000 British Muslims, an astonishing 65% of the religious group aged 18-24 said they did not believe Israel has a right to exist. Within the 45-54 demographic, the percentage of those who agree with the statement is almost half that, at 34%. Across all age groups, the proportion who agreed with the statement is 49%.

The J.L. Partners survey also found that 80% of respondents in both the 18-24 and 25-34 brackets believe that Israel is a racist endeavour, compared to 67% in the 55+ age category, suggesting younger British Muslims have far stronger views on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

These results come six months after Hamas’s 7 October attack, where public opinion has gradually hardened against Israel since. As early as February of this year, more Brits sympathised with Palestinians than with each side equally for the first time since the beginning of the war. As of March, 28% of Brits sympathise with Palestine more than Israel, whilst 27% sympathise equally with both sides and only 15% sympathise more with Israel.

According to the JLP poll, more than a third of respondents aged 18-34 said that they view Hamas positively, and over a quarter said they have a favourable view of jihad.

The JLP poll also asked respondents about attitudes toward various social issues including homosexuality, Christianity in public life and the influence of Jewish people in society. The findings show that 36% of Muslims in the 18-24 age group believe that Jews have too much power in the media and financial sectors, while 44% think Jews have excessive influence over government policy.

These findings arrive at a fraught moment in British Muslim relations. Nearly three years on from the Batley Grammar School incident, Dame Sara Khan published a report on the threats to social cohesion in British public life. It found that there was “a climate of fear” being created at some schools as community faith leaders had aggressively interfered in school teaching, while schools had not been given sufficient support to combat the problem.

The JLP data suggests that a substantial number of British Muslims may show similar hardline views. Of Britain’s young Muslims, 59% believe it would be very or somewhat desirable to make showing a picture of the Prophet Mohammed illegal, with 33% saying that implementing Sharia law in the UK would be desirable.

According to the 2021 census, Britain’s Muslim population currently stands at 3.9 million, making up roughly 6.5% of all UK citizens. This was up from a population of 2.7 million in 2011, when the Muslim population made up 5% of British citizens.

After three British aid workers were killed in an airstrike that hit a World Central Kitchen convoy, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has come under increasing pressure to take a tougher line on Israel. He responded to the deaths by calling on Benjamin Netanyahu to look for a humanitarian pause which will lead to a “long-term sustainable ceasefire”.

On Sunday, Netanyahu responded to calls for a ceasefire by suggesting that Israel was “one step away from victory”, and that no truce would be achieved until Hamas has released all hostages.

65% of young British Muslims oppose Israel's right to exist - UnHerd

 

 

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The Chinese students policing Britain’s universities Self-censoring academics live in terror (by Sam Dunning)

 

“Surreal.” This was how Professor Michelle Shipworth described her ordeal at University College London, after a Chinese student complained about an innocuous presentation slide on slavery in China. Instead of leaping to her defence, UCL accused her of being anti-Chinese and endangering its lucrative income from Chinese students. After she was banned from teaching her “provocative” energy and social sciences course, her case was taken up by the Free Speech Union, which presented documentary evidence of what they called “undue deference to the sensitivity of some Chinese students that is utterly incompatible with academic freedom”.

Shipworth is not the first to run into trouble. And that’s because the problem is more profound than many realise. Many universities need these students. Were their fees to disappear entirely from Britain, with no other income found to replace them, many institutions would go under within a year or two. Some universities will even accept Chinese students without proper qualifications or basic English-language skills, so great is their desire for the fees.

Sometimes, issues arise because many Chinese students have been moulded by the jingoistic politics of authoritarian China. Xi Jinping’s promises to deliver the “Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” and “Reunification of the Ancestor-land” make Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” mantra seem gentle by comparison. The emotion this inspires can move people to respond aggressively to perceived slights upon China’s character. Such displays of nationalism may be sincere, or they may be a means of improving one’s own reputation, fishing for a reward or promotion, or going viral on CCP-controlled social media. Universities should back academics in the face of pressure from these nationalists.

The problem, however, is more complicated than a bunch of young chauvinists making noise on UK campuses. As the charity I run, UK-China Transparency, has shown, the CCP has institutionalised its presence at British universities. Chinese Students and Scholars Associations (CSSAs) are present on roughly 100 British campuses. Most are formally registered as student societies under the authority of university student unions and typically describe themselves as “branches” of a central UK CSSA based at the Chinese embassy in London. This acts as an overseas office for an organisation controlled by the CCP’s United Front Work Department, which conducts influence operations abroad and was name-checked by MI5 in 2022. Most CSSAs publicly admit — though sometimes only in official documents published in Mandarin — that they are under the “guidance”, “control” or “leadership” of the embassy, which runs training programmes and networking events for CSSA leaders.

We also have Confucius Institutes on 30 campuses. These centres are typically organised as partnerships between one Chinese university, one British university and the Chinese government. Although nominally for language teaching, they have in fact been involved in a whole range of activities, from events in Parliament to teaching undergraduate courses. One teaches Chinese traditional medicine and offers massages to the general public, for a fee. UK-China Transparency has shown how staff from China teaching in British Institutes have to follow CCP “discipline” rules that would oblige them to inform on university members if requested. Rishi Sunak promised to ban them but, as former foreign secretary James Cleverly admitted in an interview, the decision was reversed because of fears about CCP retaliation.

And if that’s not “surreal” enough, consider the China Scholarship Council’s footprint in Britain. This Chinese government body gives stipends to hundreds of PhD scholars in the UK, selecting them on the basis of their political leanings as well as their academic merit. British universities then pay these scholars’ fees. Like CSSAs, scholarship recipients are formally obliged to accept “guidance and management” from Chinese diplomats in the UK — with penalties imposed on them and their families if they fail to do so or otherwise negatively impact China’s national security. As with Confucius Institutes and CSSAs, all these expectations are spelled out in official documents — in Mandarin.

Meanwhile, the CCP has active eyes and ears on British campuses in the form of party members, which includes, for example, many visiting academics. All CCP members have taken an admission oath, by which they vow to obey the CCP, uphold its “discipline” and guard CCP secrets. They agree to act on the CCP’s behalf, and face special sanctions and punishments if they fail to do so, along with rewards for good behaviour.

Although the subject receives periodic attention from politicians, this scandal has essentially been ignored for a decade or more. Britain is only now beginning to come to terms with the CCP’s presence on our campuses. Likened by one scholar to a “python in the chandelier”, the Party is always looming — even if it strikes only occasionally. And it is those students and academics with family in China who feel most keenly the CCP’s presence. Most simply self-censor, knowing that their university is not a “safe space” for free discussion. Better to keep schtum than say something about Tibet or democracy in China which is reported back, because the consequences can be dire.

A minority ignore the warning signs, and courageously persist past the first clear indication that they are being watched. Most often, these brave individuals are called by family members in China, who explain that they have been visited by the police forces. Family members pass on a clear message from the authorities: stop now and come home. If you don’t, then you will never see your family again and they too will be affected, in their careers, in their access to government support, in their community. These are the consequences for Chinese students and academics in our country if they defy the CCP and stand by it.

It is worth underlining how much speech the CCP forbids and how ridiculously broad its definition of “national security” is. In China, forbidden speech is treated as terrorism — and includes any discussion of Tibet, Taiwan, the Uyghurs, human rights, politics, corruption and religion that transgresses the party’s red lines. So restrictive is the speech environment in China that, during the anti-lockdown protests of 2023, people took to holding up blank pieces of paper as a sign of protest. Hundreds at least were arrested. Displaying “White Paper” remains a sign of protest. Given these sensitivities and the university sector’s dependence on Chinese money, one can see how difficult it might be to have a meaningful discussion about China’s history, politics, society or economy.

British academics beginning their careers know that if they put a foot wrong in this regard, they will find it difficult to go to China, let alone gain access to any interesting material or interesting sources. Last year, for instance, I and others working on a Channel 4 documentary about China exposed how Professor Steve Tsang, a leading British China expert, was censored by Nottingham University, which closed down his China studies centre because of CCP pressure. Elsewhere, Dr Jo Smith Finley of Newcastle University was sanctioned directly by the Chinese government for her work. One academic in New Zealand had her home and office broken into because of her research into CCP influence abroad. Even those who are not China specialists, such as Shipworth, may find that their teaching leads to “problems”. They need and deserve their universities’ support.

The strategic aim here isn’t hard to glean: over time, such interference has the potential to distort our knowledge of China itself, which is, of course, exactly what the CCP wants. This is also reflected in new restrictions on foreign access to corporate data, academic journals, and national statistics. Some sinologists tell me that this process started decades ago and that the well has already been poisoned. Only the courage of Shipworth, Tsang and whistleblowers like them can stop the creeping extension of CCP authority into our universities. Our academic freedom depends on it.

***

If you have been affected by any of the issues in this article, contact UK-China Transparency at info@ukctransparency.org

---

Sam Dunning is a writer and researcher who serves as director of UK-China Transparency, a volunteer-run charity that promotes education about ties between the UK and China.

The Chinese students policing Britain's universities - UnHerd

 

 

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Kids Get Schooled on Radical Politics (by Francesca Block)

Students at a public elementary school in Brooklyn are learning revolutionary theory from a Black Lives Matter coloring book.

 

Children at a Brooklyn public elementary school are being taught revolutionary politics and communist terms from a Black Lives Matter coloring book, The Free Press has learned. 

Last week, teachers at PS 321—the kindergarten through fifth grade school in Park Slope—supplied students with the coloring book, What We Believe, as part of a lesson for Black History Month. The book uses drawings and worksheets to promote the 13 tenets of the Black Lives Matter movement, under titles like “Queer Affirming,” “Transgender Affirming,” and “Restorative Justice.” Principle number 2, “Empathy,” is described as “engaging comrades with the intent to learn about and connect with their contexts.”

The coloring book also lists Black Lives Matter’s “national demands,” including “mandate black history & ethnic studies,” “hire more black teachers,” and “fund counselors not cops.”

One parent of a PS 321 fourth grader, whose grandparents fled Communist China before moving to the U.S., said she and her husband were “shocked” that the book used the word comrade—and that it appeared to promote political propaganda.

“Using the word comrades comes from Communist times,” said the parent, whose 10-year-old daughter attends the school, also known as William Penn. “They are using words that I don’t think are appropriate for elementary school.”

She said she first discovered the coloring book on Tuesday, February 13, when a snow day forced her daughter to learn from home.

“This is classwork, not homework,” the parent said. “If it weren’t for the snow, we wouldn’t have known.” 

Lessons in the coloring book tell children to reflect on Black Lives Matter’s 13 principles. Some of the exercises, parents said, appear innocuous; a page about “Restorative Justice,” for example, asks students: “Why is it important to offer to forgive someone?” But another, entitled “Transgender Affirming,” instructs students to read the book When Aidan Became a Brother about a girl who transitions to a boy, and then answer questions on a worksheet like, “How do you feel when someone tells you what you can or can’t do based on your gender?”

Another principle, “Black Villages,” is described as “disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement.” Another, called “Intergenerational,” encourages a “communal network free from ageism.” 

The coloring book encourages kids to learn the 13 principles of Black Lives Matter, including “Queer Affirming,” “Transgender Affirming,” and “Restorative Justice.”

Another public school parent whose family left the Soviet Union when she was a teenager said the language in the book reminds her “of the songs we were made to sing as elementary school children. ‘Dismantling’ and ‘comrade’ and everything—it really reminds me of the word salad that was a part of those songs.”

She compared the Black Lives Matter movement to communism, saying: “same salad, different dressing.” 

Brandy Shufutinksy, the director of education at the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values, who is black and holds a doctorate in international multicultural education, said she was “offended” that the curriculum “demonizes the nuclear family.” 

“They frame it as some form of white supremacy,” Shufutinksy said. “There are a number of people beside myself who are deeply offended by the idea that black Americans should not strive for something that was denied to our ancestors for so long.”

The educational materials used by PS 321 are created by Black Lives Matter at School, an organization founded in 2016 by a group of Seattle teachers to educate students from pre-K to 12th grade about BLM’s ideology. In 2018, Black Lives Matter at School launched a national Week of Action in February to teach “lessons on structural racism, Black history, intersectional Black identities, and anti-racist movements.” According to the group’s website, the curriculum is now taught at a total of 50 schools across 21 states and six countries.

When asked for comment from The Free Press, the NYC Department of Education said, “Anytime parents have a concern about resources used in school, we encourage them to share their concerns to the school principal or district superintendent.” The principal at PS 321 did not reply to an email seeking comment. Black Lives Matter at School did not respond to multiple emails asking for comment.

PS 321, also known as William Penn, educates children from kindergarten through fifth grade in Park Slope, Brooklyn. (Photo by David Grossman via Alamy Stock)

Several parents who spoke to The Free Press said they were upset that the coloring book failed to teach their children about black history.

One mother with two children at PS 321 said the coloring book doesn’t go “into enough detail and there is no mention of specific people. It just feels very vague.” 

The fourth-grade mother said her daughter’s teacher told her the coloring book was the only lesson planned for Black History Month, other than a schoolwide project to make a quilt honoring famous black figures. She added that, after the Week of Action, her daughter still had never heard of civil rights hero Rosa Parks and didn’t know what Martin Luther King Jr. had achieved to make him famous. 

Furthermore, she said, the coloring book presents controversial ideas “as fact.” But, “it’s not necessarily true. It’s not like every black person believes in these principles.” 

Shufutinsky agrees: “There is nothing in these principles that talks about honoring greats in black American history. There is nothing in here that is actual scholarship. It doesn’t speak to education. It speaks to ideology.” 

 

Kids Get Schooled on Radical Politics | The Free Press (thefp.com)