Anti-hate reeducation at a Maskachusetts public school

I won’t put this one in quote style because the italics will make it harder to read…

Prior to the April break I wrote to let you know that I was concerned about hateful language that had been found in a bathroom and that we would be following up with an outside speaker. Today Mr. Mark Liddell came to talk with our students. Mr. Liddell is the High School Coordinator for the METCO program [busing children, based on skin color, from City of Boston schools to suburban districts, thus relieving the foreign owners of downtown real estate from having to pay for these kids’ education] in the Wayland Public Schools. Mr. Liddell has done at least six presentations with our parent groups through the generosity of the Lincoln METCO Parent Board who has brought him as a speaker over the last two years around many topics of race and history.

We spent an hour together first with 5th and 6th grade and then with 7th and 8th grade talking about language, historical context, and how we should respond when we hear hate speech. As Mr. Liddell is a high school teacher, there were pieces of his talk that might have felt difficult for some students to understand. There were other parts that were uncomfortable to sit through as they showed unfortunate pieces of our history. Students were given the opportunity to stay with Mr. Liddell and teachers at school to continue to talk and ask questions after the assembly.

This afternoon the faculty will further conversations on how to talk with our students as issues continue to surface. Mr. Liddell ended his time with our students sharing the following pledge:

15 thoughts on “Anti-hate reeducation at a Maskachusetts public school

  1. From “I respect myself and others, because we matter”, I’d deduce: “All Lives Matter”

    Which, as we know, is alt-right hate speech!

  2. Is it ok to use slurs and hate speech against people using slurs and hate speech?

  3. Gosh, I’m an aggrieved old white man, losing my liberties at every turn, I have more money than I know what to do with, and I haven’t lost any liberty whatsoever — but Fox News / right-wing Facebook has convinced me I have.

    So, “Dr” Phil, which of the five items on this sign are you against? All five?

    Do you think we should use hate speech here? We should like it when others are mistreated?

    I’m not sure what you are advocating for.

    The Left = let’s be cool to each other. We will not tolerate the intolerant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
    The Right = you will not impinge on my freedom to be mean, rude, and just an overall idiot.

    Here’s an exercise for you: you choose 10 Democrat congressmen, I choose 10 Republican congressmen. We track them to see what kind of inane, moronic things each says. Let’s compare notes in a week. What are your predicted results?

    • Mike: That’s a great question about which of the five articles of anti-hate catechism are problematic.

      Article 1 is plainly wrong. Anyone who was dedicated to keeping everyone safe would stay home, not participate in daily mass gatherings to spread deadly SARS-CoV-2 variants.

      Article 2 is hate speech, as Anon points out above. “We” don’t matter unless “We” is Black. (To paraphrase Dave Chappelle, “one we or many wes?”) You wouldn’t fail to punch a Nazi who said “All Lives Matter”, right?

      Article 3 is intolerable. When others are being mistreated you’re supposed to take action, not merely develop an internal “dislike” that you don’t share with anyone else.

      Article 4 is wrong. If there are white people in the school (which there are) and they ever speak about Persons of Color (which they do), slurs are being uttered. See https://www.kqed.org/news/11825805/people-will-insist-that-they-are-not-racist-robin-diangelo-on-white-fragility-and-the-way-forward (“all white people are complicit with racism. … It’s not possible to be exempt from it.”)

      Article 5 is wrong for the same reason as Article 4. It is a bunch of white people refusing to admit that they are racist. How are they going to improve if they won’t take the first step by admitting that they have a problem?

    • Mike lives in the past (perhaps 1990-2000), when the left was still cool, had many credible intellectuals and supported civil rights.

      Today’s Left:

      Let’s create a stifling Neo-Victorian atmosphere with thousands of social rules that change daily.

      Let’s create millions of academic jobs for our low IQ members whose only contribution is to memorize the rules and enforce them (the rules only apply to our clique, we can be as rude as desired).

      Let’s misquote Popper (who wrote the “paradox” in 1945 as a response to real Nazis).

      Let’s inflate the stock market for our 1% clientele.

      Let’s increase the size of the industrial reserve army by immigration for our 1% clientele.

      Let’s inflate house prices for out 1% clientele and for friends from abroad.

      Let’s use 50 of our friends in “intelligence” to lie to the American public about the Hunter Biden laptop.

      Let’s provide a new home for formerly “conservative” neocons who will send the children of poor people into the next war.

      Mike needs to read Animal Farm.

    • I like the idea Mike had! “We track them to see what kind of inane, moronic things each says.” Because you know, those elected are elected to say things, not to do them. Horrible Orange Man is horrible cause he said things!

    • I didn’t respond to Mike’s idea about members of Congress. As Anon implies, it is unclear what the relevance is of mere statements by politicians. I guess Joe Biden & Co. might have gotten us into a war with Russia by making statements about Ukraine joining NATO, but that’s the executive branch. As far as legislators are concerned, I’m more interested in what they do rather than what they say.

      The biggest problem with Mike’s idea is that I don’t know the names of 10 Republican congressmen! The second problem is defining “moronic”. It was scientifically false “misinformation” when Marjorie Taylor Greene said that she knew people who’d been injected with liquids that are marketed as “COVID-19 vaccines” and then came down with COVID-19. This resulted in her being suspended from Twitter. So I am sure we can all agree that was an “inane, moronic” statement. (See

      https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/10/technology/twitter-suspends-marjorie-taylor-greene.html

      ) But now that a huge number of folks who attended the White House Correspondents Dinner “which required same-day testing and vaccination” are suffering from COVID-19 (see https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/03/media/jonathan-karl-positive-covid-white-house-correspondents-dinner/index.html ) would we still say that Ms. Greene is a “moron”?

  4. @ Mike “I haven’t lost any liberty whatsoever”

    Well, I guess you never had any, being born with a slave mind. Hear what your owners tell you, believe that whatever you are told is right, do as you are told. If you always do that you never get punished and so you never get to discover that you are owned chattel.

    So, yes, I believe that you haven’t lost any liberty whatsoever. To lose something one had to have it first.

    “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free” – Goethe

    • If liberty is just a self perceived concept then why keep whining about it so much?

    • averros: It is interesting that there are Americans who think that they haven’t lost any liberty. We now know that a resident of the U.S. cannot leave his/her/zir/their house without permission from his/her/zir/their state governor, permission that can be revoked at any time. He/she/ze/they must wear a mask, or a double mask, or an N95 mask, any time that public health authorities dictate. Depending on the type of business, it may or may not be legal to work and operate. Americans pay taxes, partly in order to be liberated from having to take care of K-12 children all day every day. But we now see that is a liberty that can be revoked any time. We used to have the liberty of keeping medical records confidential, if desired. No longer. We used to have the liberty of returning to the U.S. without medical testing being required. No longer. At least in Maskachusetts, the liberty of inviting people over to one’s house was revoked and now exists from week to week at the governor’s discretion. There are probably some other liberties that I’ve forgotten about!

  5. Ya’ll are missing the obvious. The trannifying/grooming children movement needed to get rid of and stay rid of all traces of ‘bullying.’ Or as bullying could more accurately be called ‘Positive social norm peer pressure that reduces the chances of children making a horrible surgical decision.’
    Bullying is pro civilization and anti-degeneracy that is why there has been a war against bullying for decades, to clear the way for what we have now.

  6. Why not just fine their parents for every infraction of hate speech? Everyone knows that the best way to control people’s thoughts and behaviors (especially in a town as wealthy as Wayland) isn’t with words and forced marching orders, it’s *money.*

    Start at $500 for the first offense and work up until the parent/caregiver/childing person is forced to home school.

    • 1) This would be considered cruel and unusual punishment by the liberals.
      2) The liberals will offset the fine by handing out free $$.

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