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Worst Aspects Of CRT-Based “Liberated Ethnic Studies” Flourishing In Washington State Teacher Trainings

Worst Aspects Of CRT-Based “Liberated Ethnic Studies” Flourishing In Washington State Teacher Trainings

Who teaches the teachers? In Washington State, putrid CRT-based training treats Jews as unworthy.

California’s public bruhaha over ethnic studies may have lulled some into believing that what happens with ethnic studies, happens openly. That’s far from the case. In fact, anti-Semitic versions of ethnic studies are being force-fed to teachers, who can be expected to pass it along to schoolchildren.

Unlike California, Washington state’s Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction approved an ethnic studies framework rather than a specific curriculum. As blogger Emily Alhadeff explained, “Without a curriculum, educators who wish to engage with ethnic studies will need to seek out their own professional development, resources, and materials. Earlier this year, it was revealed that the State Board of Education contracted with WAESN [Washington Ethnic Studies Now] for professional development. WAESN is open and ready for business.” Daily Wire elaborated on this: “In March 2021… the Washington State Board of Education voted unanimously to require its own members and staff to take eighteen hours of training from the nonprofit Washington Ethnic Studies Now (WAESN).”

Alhadeff also noted, “WAESN is honest about its vision to take Critical Race Theory mainstream, which counters many claims that CRT is an obscure legal tool that never sees the light of the school day.”

Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium (LESMCC) is pursuing a similar strategy to that of WAESN. According to allegations in a pending federal lawsuit, LESMCC is working in coordination with United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA). UTLA is an LA teachers’ union and affiliate of the National Education Association.

LESMCC is the group behind the 2019 model curriculum that California rejected for anti-Semitism. Since that rejection, LESMCC has marketed its version of ethnic studies privately to school districts.

According to the federal lawsuit, LESMCC is also working with the LA teachers’ union behind the scenes to “educate” teachers about ethnic studies, in an effort reportedly designed to dodge the state’s sunshine law. The lawsuit alleges that LESMCC is trying to insert anti-Semitic material into LA’s public school curriculum.

In Washington state, revelations about the alleged anti-Semitic prejudice of WAESN’s executive director raised some controversy, but not enough to halt the state’s involvement with the organization. Per Daily Wire:

Prior to [a November 2] meeting, the [Washington State Board of Education (WSBE)] sought to quell a firestorm by issuing a statement that said that ethnic studies “is not… the idea that any race is superior to another; about blaming or making students feel guilty about their race or identity; [or] indoctrination.”

… But WAESN and its executive director, Tracy Castro-Gill, have recently been lashing out against Jews who have complained about their treatment in the curriculum and claiming that they have too much power with the school superintendent.

In an October 20 blog post on “Jewishness and Ethnic Studies,” Castro-Gill mulled “Jewish complicity with whiteness” and downplayed the oppression faced by Jews, saying, “Racially motivated hate crimes increased in 2020 while religious hate crimes decreased.” The blog post was one of several on the topic, with an earlier installment saying, “Why do some white Jews, in particular, insist that their experiences with oppression and genocide are somehow unique? There are far more examples of genocide among people of the global majority than white Jews.”

In another entry in WAESN’s series on “Jewishness and Ethnic Studies,” Castro-Gill wrote, “White Jewish people insisting on being included in a curriculum that has never been about them reeks of white privilege.” She noted that the Washington state development is reminiscent of what happened in California, in which Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a radical plan following an outcry by Jewish groups, ultimately signing a slightly watered-down version.

… [According to Castro-Gill:] The thing is, ethnic studies, historically, has never been about Jewish Studies. The focus has always been on racially minoritized groups.”

As Alhadeff explained, for Castro-Gill, Jews are an ethnicity rather than a race, Therefore, in her view, they shouldn’t be taking up too much space in the ethnic studies conversation.

Given that perspective, it’s puzzling exactly why Castro-Gill is so determined to include the Palestinians within ethnic studies. But, she is. She has openly expressed her “view of Israel as a settler-colonial state, and my support of Palestinian Studies in ethnic studies programs.”

Speakers at a May 2022 WAESN program enthusiastically endorsed inclusion of Palestinian studies as essential to ethnic studies. Anita Fernández, Ph.D., executive director of Xicanx Institute for Teaching and Organizing, identified Arab-American studies and “Palestine” as among the “core tenets” of a “decolonizing ethnic studies curriculum.” David Stovall, Ph.D., also advised listeners to be open about “why we’re including Palestine, indigenous nations,” as well as about the fact that ethnic studies teaches Critical Race Theory.

Let’s parse that:

  1. Anti-Semitism shouldn’t be part of “ethnic” studies because Jews are an ethnicity, not a race. Maybe they should call it “racial” studies?
  2. Jews are really “white” or “complicit[] with whiteness.”
  3. Palestinians should, nay, must be part of anti-“Zionist” ethnic studies because they are not just an ethnicity, but an indigenous one, and have suffered colonization.
  4. Is Castro-Gill saying Jews aren’t indigenous and haven’t been colonized?!

None of this makes sense in light of historical reality.

It makes some sense given the left’s obsessive focus on anti-Westernism. Colonization becomes something the West, defined as white people, is always doing, but that non-white people can never do – even though history is replete with such examples, including the Arab colonization of Israel.

It also makes sense given the left’s racist belief in collective guilt and a caste system. In it, all people defined as white in the current day are deemed collectively guilty of colonizing activities by some ancestors of some of them. People defined as non-white are never guilty of colonizing, even though some ancestors of a number of them were, in fact, colonizers.

Finally, it makes sense as the latest manifestation of anti-Semitism. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks put it, society defines Jews as whatever is most hateful to it. In the Middle Ages, Jews were hated for their religion. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Jews were hated for their race and branded sub-human. Today, Jews are hated for their nation-state and branded as human-rights-abusing racists.

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Comments

The left, and socialists in particular, need their scapegoats.

MLK Jr. would drop dead if he could see how his message and sacrifice have been kicked to the curb in the name of St. George Floyd, CRT, BLM and every other crackpot, dangerous and insidious scheme that the racists of the left are foisting on the U.S.

But racists gotta racist, and Democrats have a well oiled racism machine in action.

    CoolCzech in reply to Dimsdale. | November 21, 2022 at 8:18 am

    Am I the only one that sees a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs to offer solid non-Woke educational opportunities to kids more interested in learning than indoctrination?

    MLK, Jr.: “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking anti-Semitism.”

      What a boomer comment. Clueless MLK talking points. MLK was trained by a Jewish Marxist. He didn’t care about White people. Stop thinking any CRT proponents do, they don’t.

    ConradCA in reply to Dimsdale. | November 22, 2022 at 5:44 pm

    The cure for this crap is to require ever government entity to follow MLK’s dream that people be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Any government entity or employee who violates this will be fired.

I wonder if Jabba Castro-Gill noticed that she(?) is lily white?

The Gentle Grizzly | November 21, 2022 at 7:54 am

“Why do some white Jews, in particular, insist that their experiences with oppression and genocide are somehow unique? There are far more examples of genocide among people of the global majority than white Jews.”

Actually, I can’t disagree with this. Stalin starving out central Asia. Pol Pot.

    The Gentle Grizzly in reply to The Gentle Grizzly. | November 21, 2022 at 7:56 am

    Going further (had trouble posting this morning…) I speak as a taxpayer, not a parent when asking why I am paying for this sort of thing? I am willing to pay to have the children learn composition of declarative sentences, penmanship, the ability to add up a column of figures, know about how our constitutional republic (not “our democracy”) works, some shop, and some home ec,

    Wry weird statement Bear, yes, there have been examples of other groups that suffered horribly, but none so repeatedly for thousands of years as the Jewish people.

    I think of Egypt and the hundreds of years Jews were slaves, generations born and died knowing no other life,

    Run out of so many countries ,blamed for all the ills of the time

    And then we have Germany….,

      The Gentle Grizzly in reply to gonzotx. | November 21, 2022 at 8:23 am

      Very true, all of what you say, Gonz.

      Note: I was raised pretend-Jewish. Another term is “Reform,” or, “Democrats with holidays”.

      It is likely just me, but I swiftly woke up to the fact many Jews will not admit: we are not the only ones to be slaughtered wholesale. Yes, for us it has been a constant thing, but, we have no ,monopoly on suffering.

        I think that what is different about the Holocaust is the highly organized and sophisticated bureaucracy that was put in place, which was justified by a comprehensive racist/nationalist/socialist (and incorrect) philosophy. It’s sickening, organized, professional nature and its near success are factors.

        They do seem to be the “go to” group though…

    You don’t think the Holocaust was unique?

    First off the fact that Symon Pitlura tried to do the same thing during the Russian Civil War does explicitly show that anti-Semitism is unique. The Ukrainian Nationalist faction of the Russian Civil War are not otherwise interchangeable with the Nazis.

    Second what other first world power at the time was ordering total elimination of a group?

    In Poland you find 1000 building sweeps by the SS to find Jews.

    Any idea how much logistics that needs to have the armed manpower to thoroughly search 1000 buildings at the same time? Germany was at war with Russia; the front line was demanding everything constantly; yet Germany had the resources for genocide?

    By the way if anything the Holocaust education is underdone because it doesn’t include 30 million Russians, 1/4 Poles and millions of Greeks.

    Even just limited to Jews killing over 90% of a group in an attempt to exterminate all of them…..well it isn’t even just that.

    Who did it?

    Who was the leading avant garde of western intellect? Technology and engineering? Germany had the best of everything.

    It had an economy so great that Kaiser Wilhelm II told German nationalists who wanted war something along the lines of “shut up and wait a few decades the German economy will do what you want to do with bullets”,

    If you had been allowed into a German University in 1930 you could count yourself lucky.

    Would you consider yourself at the worlds best opportunity to become a doctor if you got to study in Rwanda the day before the Tutsi genocide?

    By the way what the hell is the global majority?

    Because the Holocaust IS unique.

      It was unique until the Jews would be wiped out and then the Slavs would be next. They did a pretty good start on the Slavs. The Jews were the best target as history had proven…but…the Nazi (Prog?) ideology is to eliminate any unclean group. The words “cleanse” and “purge” have been brought back. The Holocaust murdered 6 million Jews and 5 1/2 or so non-Jews. It was just the start…. tyhe Jews got the brunt of it but the war ended the 1000 year plan.

    Mao murdered hundreds of millions with ethnic prejudice. His successors hundred of millions more with State’s Choice. The communists engage in practical and actual slavery in modern times.

    That said, the reason those lives don’t matter (“Some, Select [Black] Lives Matter”), is because of Diversity dogma (i.e. Pro-Choice ethical religion) adopted by Progressive sects that exercise liberal license to deny individual dignity, individual conscience, and intrinsic value.

I usually don’t go there, but….

Castro-Gill, someone married that?

This is amti Semitism ;pl;ain and sim;ple and the American Jewish estab;lishment is silent

    The Gentle Grizzly in reply to Steven Brizel. | November 21, 2022 at 9:55 am

    The ADL and others are too busy kissing BLM behind and doing “outreach” to the LGBQXGLDFEIEIO to spend time on mere Jewish issues.

This is how anyone should respond to demands of land guilt”
De Tocqueville in Democracy in America wrote in relevant part:
“Although the vast country just described was inhabited by numerous tribes of native peoples, one can justly say that at the time of its discovery it was still no more than a wilderness. The Indians occupied it but did not possess it. It is through agriculture that man takes possession of the soil, and the first inhabitants of North America lived by hunting. Their implacable prejudices, their unbridled passions, their vices, and, perhaps most of all, their savage virtues marked them out for inevitable destruction. The ruin of these tribes began the day that Europeans landed on their shores. It has continued ever since and is even now being carried through to completion. Providence placed these people among the riches of the New World but made their enjoyment brief. They were there, in a sense, only in anticipation. These coasts, so well suited to trade and industry, these rivers so deep, this inexhaustible Mississippi valley, this whole continent, in fact, seemed but an empty cradle awaiting the birth of a great nation. Here civilized men would attempt to build society on new foundations. Applying for the first time theories either previously unknown or deemed inapplicable, they would stage for the world a spectacle for which nothing in the history of the past had prepared it.”

    UnCivilServant in reply to Steven Brizel. | November 21, 2022 at 9:30 am

    So what about land unfit for the plow? Do the Borax miners in Death Valley have a claim?

    retiredcantbefired in reply to Steven Brizel. | November 21, 2022 at 6:00 pm

    Some Native American tribes were growing crops in what’s now the United States, before Europeans arrived. They were not all hunting and gathering.

    It’s hard to take any of the CRT / “antiracist” / woke / intersectionalist claims regarding Native Americans seriously. If their proponents really believed that they are occupying land that had been stolen from Native Americans, they would be making some effort to return the land to members of the tribe that had most recently occupied it. (Never mind how that tribe might have taken it from another tribe, etc.)

    Anyone been seen returning any land?

    henrybowman in reply to Steven Brizel. | November 21, 2022 at 6:22 pm

    “Providence placed these people among the riches of the New World but made their enjoyment brief.”

    Not all that brief. They were here for much longer than we have been here. And the exterminations new tribes committed against old tribes (like the Anasazi) again and again is both qualitatively and quantitatively worse than anything we ever did.

The anti-semitism of CRT ideology is an inevitable and immovable part of it. You can’t have CRT without anti-Semitism because Jews are successful, very few of us are Ethiopian, and the Jewish state (Israel) is like the diaspora being successful within their nations a very successful country in the world.

Sorry but there is no such thing as CRT without anti-Semitism. Even if you try your best you won’t be able to adopt race essentialism without anti-Semitism.

Every time I see stories like this the scene of the scam phone call from a pretend civil rights group to a committee chair in the movie The Distinguished Gentleman pops into my head.

All this maneuvering and posturing to squabble about this or that groups claim to priority position in the diversity Olympics. It’s all a sham and a grift. I don’t care about your group. Honestly, I don’t really care about individual strangers. I worry about the folks I interact with.

This sorting by claims of grievance is a grift.

There’s a left over flag and a nifty anthem that fits their ideology…. a little tarnished by history but coming back into vogue. I am certain new lyrics can be found but keep the title…. Die Fahne Hoch

Ever notice how there is an uptick in random attacks on groups in disfavor with the left? As we see here, the Jews, but don’t forget that Asians were attacked for a while.

White guys, be they Jews, hispanic or whatever, seem to catch hell for everything though.

    yeah until it’s irrefutable that the violence is coming from a color that doesn’t fit their narrative, then the story goes away. It got really awkward for them to hide the race of all the attackers on asians in Seattle.

Jews are the baby in the clinic: life deemed unworthy of life, Mengele mandates revisited, and Diversity, Inequity, and Exclusion (DIE) doctrine prosecuted under a secular religious (“ethical”) regime.

Straight, white, christian, conservative, males are the “new Jew.” Apparently, with very little awareness or attention on my part, I am somehow responsible for everything bad in everyone else’s lives. But then, I guess for some people, it is easier to blame someone else rather than actually doing something constructive to improve their own situation. I’d like to listen to their problems, but some of us have to go to work.

    CommoChief in reply to MajorWood. | November 21, 2022 at 4:45 pm

    Add a southern accent or just birth and a working class background to the list and that is definitely the easiest group to actively discriminate against.

    That results in a group who no one will defend. They can be and are still the butt of jokes; if you can tell jokes about a group v not tell jokes it illustrates who holds the power of social currency. Tell a joke about a red neck no worries, tell the same joke but substitute another group and see what happens.

    Then observe college admissions and employers hiring or promotions decisions. When the EEOC comes to call they ain’t showing up to ask about the decreased numbers hired/promoted of cis, white, males with blue color backgrounds and a rural/southern accent relative to the population.

      DSHornet in reply to CommoChief. | November 22, 2022 at 8:27 am

      Yep, been there. And when you mention that fact to people from other parts of the country they look at you with a “you can’t mean me” expression. Yes, I mean you.

      I’ve told this story before but I’ll repeat it. I recall being among a group of fellow AF guys when one of them actually said, “Y’know, we know you’re from Alabama but you sound really intelligent.” A half second later he realized what he said. Through gritted teeth I replied, “It’s okay. I’m used to it.” Actually it wasn’t okay but I was used to it.
      .

another bloated, butt-ugly bigot who couldn’t get laid on a troop train

Weird question: Do Jewish people consider themselves white? I don’t think I could visually identify Jewish people.

“As Alhadeff explained, for Castro-Gill, Jews are an ethnicity rather than a race.”
Can’t wait to see THAT interview on The View.

The left can never forgive Israel for leaving the kibbutz.

The Wa state elected super- Reyktdal (pronounced close to rectal) is a pile of woke garbage. You really want to see a joke- go read his stuff, especially the pandemic literature. Without much of a veil he basically says schools are there to protect LGBTQ+ kids from their homophobic bigoted and abusive parents.

Groom much????

As for the pandemic money the schools got… it all went to resource counselors for blacks and LGBTQ+ interests.

If your school opts out of any of this stuff they pull massive amounts of funding. I suspect that was the REAL reason behind the lawsuit for schools being underfunded- was it took power away from the local voters to fund / not fund their local schools via levies and local taxes in put it in the hands of the state. So now the governor can withhold money if the schools don’t toe the line.

If memory serves -they pulled this on several school districts during the pandemic if they didn’t get on board with the mask stuff. Enumclaw school district had several high schoolers who refused to mask up. The school was actually fairly accomodating in giving them their own space, but the state hammered them into line by threatening to pull money. I believe they did the same with Mead too.

BTW- they are doing the same with the police… currently officer involved shootings are investigated by a neighboring Sheriffs office, but Ferguson is working to pull that to the state’s authority…. This is so he can be more successful at lynching cops if the suspect is the wrong color.

The final paragraph needs one more sentence included – today Jews are also branded as White, and hated for it.

Hitler would be rolling in his grave at the Left’s claims, or perhaps not, they both hate the same people even if they apply mutually exclusive reasoning.