Reading, Writing, and Racism at a Seattle High School

When I was in Junior High, the bane of my existence was my English teacher. No one could put the fear of God into us like her. No one was as demanding, as fearsome, or as well-loved. She drilled us mercilessly in grammar every day and had a zero-tolerance policy regarding lazy students, particularly when it came to the written word. 

She also made us read Faulkner, Shakespeare, Milton, Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and Charles Dickens, to name just a few. Woe to any student who used slang in her class. That could earn someone a pen to the side of the head with the remonstrance, "In this classroom, we speak the King's English." And she was black. My reason for mentioning this is about to become clear. 

At Lincoln High School in Seattle, students in an English class were recently taught that the love of reading and writing is an indicator of white supremacy. That is hardly surprising since we are talking about Seattle, and in the 21st century, most things are indicators of white supremacy. Just ask the president or any member of his cabinet or any member of the media. Jason Rantz at KTTH reports that as part of the school's "Black Lives Matter at School Week," students were given a handout that listed the nine characteristics of white supremacy. 

Rantz provides a copy of the handout, which asks students to match a term to the characteristics. Those include: "The belief that there is one right way to do things. Connected to the belief in an objective, 'perfect' that is both attainable and desirable for everyone." 

Another indicator is the tendency of "white supremacy culture" to make people afraid. Another problem is "honoring only what is written" and doing so by a "narrow standard" full of "misinformation and lies." This can lead to the "erasure" of other methods of communication. Other potential pitfalls include the entitlement to decide what is and is not racist and the risk of the individual and collective defense of racism.

Those are not all of the characteristics, but you get the picture. 

A father brought the handout to Rantz's attention. He wanted to remain anonymous, and in Seattle, one can hardly blame him. But he told Rantz that the effort was setting up students for failure. And he is right.

Obviously, this is the standard approach to indoctrination, powered by the idea that anything that is not specifically anti-white is, by default, white supremacist in nature. We've heard that song before, and it is one of the Left's Greatest Hits. The continued infusion of racial conflict into a student's education is just one problem, albeit a large one. 

Equating reading to racism robs minority students of a skill that they need to navigate their lives while also enriching them. Finally, we have the issue that educators want to control what students read. If you control information, you control minds. Students reading "unapproved" books might develop "unapproved" ideas. And there is the implicit bias that students are unable to analyze books or ideas to separate the wheat from the chaff. 

My seventh-and-eighth-grade English teacher would have been apoplectic at such an idea. She wanted all of her students, black, white, and brown, to learn as much as they could from whatever source. She would have been horrified that someone was advising students not to read or write. She understood that not all ideas were comfortable or affirming and might even be offensive, but she would have found censoring books and dumbing down students even more offensive.