The San Diego County Office of Education (SDCOE) created guides to “microaggressions” and race that push the core tenets of Critical Race Theory (CRT).
One guide was titled “Ask Me Anything About … Race and Racism.” The slideshow guide endorsed many of the core beliefs of CRT, including a belief in systemic and institutional racism as well as the belief that racism isn’t just prejudice on the basis of race, but a system that requires one to hold “institutional power.”
For example, one portion of the guide claims that racism requires “racial prejudice,” “unfounded beliefs,” “irrational fear,” and “institutional power.” It goes on to claim that “racism is a system of advantage based on race that involves systems and institutions, not just individual mindsets and actions.”
Another section cites four different types of racism, including “structural racism,” which is defined as “the overarching system of racial bias across institutions and society” that “give privileges to white people resulting in disadvantages to people of color.” There is also “institutional racism,” which includes “race-based policies and practices that give unfair advantages to whites over people of color.”
The slideshow goes on to claim that “our socially-recognized races are not biological categories” but instead were “must be understood as a classification system that emerged from, and in support of, European colonialism, oppression, and discrimination.
“It thus does not have its roots in biological reality, but in policies of discrimination,” the presentation adds. The guide also includes resources for student activities, which include conversations on mass incarceration, white privilege, and police violence.
“Ask Me Anything About … Bias and Microaggressions” was the title of another presentation from the SDCOE. It claims that “implicit biases are pervasive: everyone has them” and that “implicit biases are formed over a lifetime as a result of exposure to direct and indirect messages.”
The presentation went on to tell teachers that they communicate their bias through curriculum, verbal exchanges, their syllabus, their curriculum, and even their “classroom design.”
Meanwhile, one slide asked “What happens when our biases go unchecked?” The following slide featured a graphic from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) that showed a pyramid with ascending tiers. The base level of the pyramid begins at “biased attitudes,” before moving on to “acts of bias,” “discrimination,” “bias motivated violence,” and finally, “genocide.”
Next, the presentation defined racial microaggressions, which are said to be “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color.”
Both slideshow guides list Ebonee Weathers, San Diego Unified School District’s executive director of equity and belonging, at the bottom, and she is marked as the owner on both Google Documents. Meanwhile, on Twitter Weathers showed off a box of “Diversity and Inclusion prompt cards” for students in 3rd through 5th grade.
Weathers was listed multiple times in a formal complaint for racial discrimination from Californians for Equal Rights Foundation (CFER).
The organization highlighted one teacher training session called “Critical Self Awareness: An Intro into Anti-Racist Pedagogy,” saying that “Dr. Dulcinea Hearn and Ms. Ebonee Weathers also conducted a teacher training session as a part of SDUSD’s “Culturally Responsive Sustaining Practices & Ethnic Studies,” going on to explain that it was a “mandatory training class targeting all SDUSD teachers and was given at various times.”
In addition, the complaint also cited a mandatory teacher training about “white privilege,” where teachers were told to “expect to experience discomfort” and were warned that failure to embrace the curriculum signaled “white fragility.”
Spencer Lindquist is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach out at slindquist@breitbart.com.
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