‘Progress!’ Said The Neo-Segregationists
I find it hard to understand how this is legal let alone healthy or productive. pic.twitter.com/ZTzqeoE31A
— Erika Sanzi (@esanzi) January 28, 2021
Brentwood is a fancy Los Angeles neighborhood. O.J. Simpson lived there. This is happening at the Brentwood School, a private, very expensive school in the neighborhood. As it is private, what they’re doing is probably legal. But it’s utterly fascinating to see how the cutting edge of progressivism is the rebirth of segregation.
Erika Sanzi writes on her Substack:
There is increasing evidence that what the now billion dollar industry of DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) has been hijacked by people whose goal is not to build community or increase understanding but to stoke division and bring us back to a time where people were judged and sorted by race. And creed. And sexual orientation. Known by people in the biz as affinity groups, this sorting based on immutable characteristics is not new in this country. But what is unfathomable is that people would want to return and replicate one of the greatest stains on our nation’s history—and pay gobs of money to do it.
A billion-dollar industry devoted to making us fear and loathe each other along racial lines. And it calls itslef progressive. More:
Anyone who has followed my work for any length of time knows that my heart has been in school choice for advocacy for a decade. I have always believed that parents, regardless of income or zip code, deserve the self determination that comes with having options. That children have all kinds of different needs and that no one school or school district can ever be a fit for all children.
But the more I see evidence of schools diving head first into gender theory, critical race theory and queer theory, the more urgent the issue of school choice becomes. No parent should be zoned to a school that shames and sorts children based on their immutable characteristics. Period.
Between schools that haven’t opened in ten months and curriculum that forces children to grapple with complex topics in a completely reductive way, parents need educational life-boats. I personally know people who want this in their children’s schools — great, they can have it (at least until lawsuits shut it down.) But parents who see this as not only inappropriate and harmful but also racist, sexist and bigoted need an escape hatch and access to it cannot be dependent on income.
Historians will look back on this period with complete bafflement. How was it that a nation fought its way out of the sin of racial segregation, only for the most progressive forces — the same ones who, in previous generations, fought to dismantle legal segregation and racial hatred — to champion re-segregation for the sake of progress.
This is madness. Who actually wants their children to grow up thinking of people primarily in terms of race, sexuality, and so forth? Why can’t people be, you know, people, with all the good and the bad qualities that each of us has, regardless of our race or other particulars? How did it end up with conservatives championing old-fashioned liberalism against identity politics?
I wonder what the old folks in my Southern hometown would say. When I was a little kid, I would overhear from time to time older white people, whose worldview was formed by segregation, condemn “integration,” and say it would be the downfall of our society. Their idea was that whites and blacks were so different that they could not possibly mix, and that the white race would be corrupted by contact with blacks. I went to school with black kids in our local public school, and I knew from experience that they were wrong. But that’s how they thought. I imagine that there are still some people alive back home who recall segregation, and who, whatever their position on it, have vivid memories of how hard American society had to fight — and still has to fight in many cases — to exorcise its legacy.
And now, we are all being told by our progressive betters that all of that was wrong, that King’s dream was foolish, that segregation was right after all.
These people are bullsh*t artists, and they are destroying America. We cannot let them. Fight them if you can, and flee them if you cannot.
Why is it so hard for the Republican Party to take this garbage on unambiguously? It is the most un-American claptrap ever.
The post ‘Progress!’ Said The Neo-Segregationists appeared first on The American Conservative.
Rod Dreher's Blog
- Rod Dreher's profile
- 503 followers
