I appeared on January 23, 2023, on Chicago’s Morning Answer, with Dan Proft and Amy Jacobson (no relation) a show I have been on many times and which I enjoy because the discussions are not squeezed into a 4-5 minute hit.
The topic of the discussion revolved around open racial discrimination by the Providence (RI) Public School District that has been challenged by Legal Insurrection Foundation:
The discussion got started by a discussion of Vanderbilt mathematics professor Luis Leyva who Calls College Math a ‘White, Cisheteropatriarchal Space’.
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PROFT (03:29):
On math Professor Leyva’s treatise on the new math, as it were, is not something you’re unaccustomed to in the Ivy League, or at least unaccustomed to hearing about.
WAJ (03:44):
No, unfortunately, there’s some sort of mania that has taken over academia where every issue, including math, revolves around race and revolves around the patriarchy. It’s almost like that saying, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So that’s their issue, and they’re going with it. It’s popular among their circles. The rest of the world pretty much thinks they’re insane. Math is hard. I’m sorry. Math is hard. As somebody who never made it past trigonometry in high school and who barely made it past that, math is hard. It’s hard for everybody. To blame that on whiteness or to blame that on the patriarchy or whatever is comical. It’s really sad that it’s taken over.
AMY JACOBSON (04:32):
Well, what do you think the students think, though? I mean, are they just brainwashed to believe all of this?
WAJ (04:39):
I think most students just keep their heads down, don’t say anything. They live in fear of a bad grade. They live in fear of being called mames on the internet. I’ve seen this in so many different contexts where students will approach me privately or by email and ask me to keep it quiet, expressing frustration with the culture on campuses, which is similar to what you’ve just described this math professor doing, but they say they’re afraid to say anything. And that’s why these surveys that have come out in the last three-four years consistently show that on college campuses, the significant majority of students are afraid to express their opinions for fear of that sort of retribution, including liberal students. You’d think it would be just conservative students, but it’s not, even the liberal students are so afraid of the radical race and radical gender ideology that’s taken over the campuses. They are afraid to express traditional liberal views on campus. So it’s a bad situation.
PROFT (05:44):
…. I would just like to challenge the quality of the scholarship by asking questions. So Professor, now, tell us more. I’m just trying to get my handle around this, get a handle on this….
WAJ (06:28):
I think that the typical explanation you’d get from these sort of people is that maybe the math itself, the actual calculations are not racist, but the approach. The emphasis on punctuality, the emphasis on hard work, all of these things, they lump into the category of whiteness. And we’ve seen this in many contexts, which of course is very insulting not to white people, but to people who are not white, right? To say that those sort of things are a reflection of whiteness, suggesting, I guess they are, that people who are not white don’t have those inherent qualities, which of course they do. So they usually will talk about the approaches to it and the way it’s taught and the way the classes and the departments are structured, but they won’t normally talk about the mathematical calculations themselves.
PROFT (07:21):
Something else that’s happened to all this over the last several years is the new segregation. We’ve seen this in Illinois, even at the high school level…. And, you at Legal Insurrection have taken up some of these same sorts of new segregation cases, in Rhode Island.
WAJ (08:06):
So the Providence, Rhode Island, School System, which is the biggest in Rhode Island, it’s the major city in Rhode Island, is a complete disaster. It actually had to be taken over by the State of Rhode Island. I might be slightly off on the percentages, but something like 10 to 12% of the students are at grade level in math and reading and other core subjects. So it is a complete disaster.
Yet what is the Providence School District Administration focused on? It’s focused on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. And one of the things they’re focused on, it’s hiring teachers of color, which is fine. Nobody’s saying you shouldn’t do that, but they have made it aracist sort of approach. So the Providence School District has a teacher loan forgiveness program. If you’re a new teacher hired into the system, you get up to $25,000 of your loan forgiven, but only if you’re non-white.
We have filed a complaint with the US Department of Education, which provides Providence with $200 million a year, that we’re waiting to hear. They also have, as part of that programming, they recently had an Educators of Color get together. Now, this is not something that was spontaneous by educators of color. This is actually a governmental event. This was the Providence School District organized an event, at a local event forum exclusively for educators of color. So we wrote to the event forum and said: Hey, I know you didn’t organize this, but you are subject to the public accommodations law, and you cannot allow them to hold a segregated event at your venue. And lo and behold, the next day, we got some news coverage on it, it’s no longer being held at that venue. They moved it elsewhere. And Providence says, oh, this was all a mistake. We didn’t mean to say that only teachers of color were allowed. Well, why did you say that at announcement? And why did your event form sign up that have list your race and ethnicity and white wasn’t one of them? Oh, that was just a mistake. But it got a lot of local coverage, and this is the stuff that we’re starting to do because they’re not even hiding it. This isn’t like a nod, nod, wink, wink. They are outright in the Providence Public School District, they are outright discriminating on the basis of race, and we’re going to continue to challenge them, but that’s just a microcosm of what is happening throughout the country.
AMY JACOBSON (10:25):
So is this the new normal then? I mean, this ever gonna go away?
WAJ (10:29):
People have to challenge it, and that’s one of the things we’re ramping up to do, Legal Insurrection Foundation. We’re ramping up to file lawsuits, file legal challenges against these practices because they’re illegal and somebody’s gotta do it. Now, it is so deeply ingrained in the system, it’s not gonna be one or two cases that’s going stop it, but there has to be a sustained effort to challenge these…. And it needs to be done thousands of times across the country because it’s happening tens of thousands of times across the country
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I saw a statistic recently, it sounds actually low to me, that there is $3.5 billion – with a “b” – spent on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programming in the country each year. I think it’s probably higher than that. If you look at the budgets of these 14,000 or 13,000 school districts across the country, I bet you it’s more than 3 billion. I bet you it’s some multiple of that. There is so much money because we follow these things. We have a website, as you know, called CriticalRace.org that documents what’s going on in education.
It’s gotta be in the tens of billions. There is so much money flowing towards pushing this stuff. I laugh, you know, or cry maybe is the better word, every time I hearSheldon Whitehouse and other people talk about “right wing dark money.” It is minimal compared to the left wing…. So this is a very deep problem, and people need to wake up to it. But how do you solve a problem? You have to start someplace. And I think challenging these things is the way to start, because they haven’t been challenged for over a decade, and they’re now widespread in the system.
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How did we get to this point? We got here over, 10, 20, 30 years. It didn’t just happen. And the principles of the American Civil Rights Movement have been completely abandoned. The notion that the goal of the American Civil Rights Movement is for blacks and other non-whites to fully participate in our system, and enjoy the benefits of the American system, that’s been largely achieved. The goal of the new radicalized movement is to tear down that system.
So I think that we are really in a place where, and and I’ve said this before, this is in many ways a threat to the survival of the country. They’re going to turn us into Yugoslavia, competing ethnicities and competing groups who are at war with each other. We’ve moved away from that. over the last 50, 60 years, we’ve moved away from that. They want to bring us back to that dark place of different ethnicities, different races, competing for supposedly limited resources and fighting with each other. And I don’t think we need to turn into the former Yugoslavia.
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