Part of an i-Ready assignment for our third grader in the Palm Beach County Schools:
This is a description of a real-world endeavor that is also valorized by CBS:
“When we actually got into the classroom, the books were just mainly about white boys and dogs,” Dias said. … She started a book drive. The idea was simple, but ambitious – to collect 1,000 books about black girls. … The books began arriving and stacking up. By the time “CBS This Morning” visited, Marley had collected close to 1,300 books. Marley’s favorite among them is “Brown Girl Dreaming” by Jacqueline Woodson.
Woodson – who won both the prestigious Newbery Award and a National Book Award for “Brown Girl Dreaming” – knows the importance of identifying with characters in a book.
“Seeing a story on a page about a black child written by a black author not only legitimizes your own existence in the world, because you’re a part of something else. ‘Look, I’m here in this book,'” Woodson said.
Maybe one of today’s third graders will grow up to run a taxpayer-funded public library with books that are segregated according to the race and gender ID of the protagonist. #IHaveADream
You send your children to government-run schools, and yet you seem surprised at this?? I am astonished that you would subject your children to an education that is guaranteed to instill all the ills of society that you rightly ridicule daily (having done so for literally years)! Have you lost your mind? You appear to have the financial means to do the right thing for your children, so why aren’t you?
D&D: all over the U.S., private schools are able to indulge progressive passions to a far greater extent than public schools. A private school can engage in Harvard-style race discrimination in admissions. A private school can charge a different price based on the student’s skin color. A private school can teach Rainbow Flagism all morning and the 1609 Project all afternoon. Because the public schools are covered by the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, there is a limit to how far they can go into racism. In Florida, public schools must comply with additional restrictions, e.g., they can’t preach the Rainbow Flag Religion to kindergarteners and they can’t teach high schoolers that everything good about the U.S. is due to Black people while everything bad is due to the existence of white people. Public schools are still able to slip in some of the tenets of the Progressive Faith, but, again, to a lesser extent than a private school.
Here’s a typical private school in Maskachusetts, for example, that has the full range of progressive religion on display in a single page: https://www.thayer.org/about/deib
For middle school kids: “The LGBTQ+ student affinity group is a safe and affirming space for students that identify as members of the LGBTQ+ community to express themselves and share their experiences.” For high school: “Mi Gente/Latinx (Affinity)”
On https://www.thayer.org/about/deib/strategic-plan-for-racial-equity-and-justice they promise to hire and admit by skin color: “a more comprehensive approach requires that we do better to promote racial diversity among our students, staff, and leadership, particularly from the Black community where our numbers have remained relatively static. … review and adapt as needed its admissions criteria to ensure that implicit biases do not erroneously disqualify students for admissions. … Similarly, Thayer Academy will seek to secure broader racial representation among the Board of Trustees, the Academy’s administration, and its faculty and staff and will create benchmarks to measure that progress.”
Palm Beach County Schools wouldn’t be able to do any of the above and even a Maskachusetts public school would find it tough to advertise its race discrimination program.
Agreed that Thayer Academy sounds like an absolute shitshow with a toxic brew of racist and other leftist ideologies in which they marinate their students. I haven’t investigated all the top rated New England schools in detail, but have friends (or kids of friends) who have attended many of them; my takeaway from discussions with them is that they aren’t universally toxic and many are “better” than the awful government run schools. I am totally unfamiliar with private schools in Florida or other areas of the country that don’t embrace the toxic leftist ideologies to the same extent as in the Northeast. I just asked Grok to suggest private schools in Palm Beach that don’t embrace the toxic brew of leftism, racism, wokeism and one that it suggested investigating was The Benjamin School. A quick look at their website did surface any obvious toxic ideologies. Have you looked at it?
Benjamin School correction: A quick look at their website did NOT surface any obvious toxic ideologies. Have you looked at it?
D&D: The Benjamin School is great if your child is slightly above average academically. Just like in Maskachusetts, they keep all students on the same level academically. Florida public schools, on the other hand, are required by state law to provide gifted education for students who are well above grade level. So a student who is doing 7th grade math in public school might be reduced to boredom in 5th grade math at Benjamin.
Benjamin engages in race discrimination, in which students may pay different tuition prices depending on their skin color (see https://www.thebenjaminschool.org/support/the-annual-fund/bucfund-initiative ). A public school can’t do that.
https://thegreeneschool.com/ in West Palm Beach is great for kids who are academically ahead and they proudly follow the DEI religion. We toured the school and it is impressive academically if not acoustically (hard reflective surfaces on both floors and ceilings). The drama teacher displayed the sacred Rainbow Flag in her classroom.
https://www.weissschool.org/about/about-weiss-school is another school for the academically inclined. They say “Students learn to embrace the values of diversity, respect, self-discipline, leadership, and responsibility in order to become holistic members of society.” (not sure what would happen if a Taiwanese kid said “Taiwan isn’t diverse and are much better at a lot of things than Americans”)
The explicitly Christian schools are the only schools that follow the official U.S. state religion of progressivism/Rainbow Flagism to a lesser extent than the public schools.
The public schools did follow the DEI religion to a weak extent until recently, apparently, though our kids weren’t exposed to explicit messaging regarding it. https://www.wpbf.com/article/florida-palm-beach-county-school-board-votes-to-cut-diversity-programs/64569332 says “The Palm Beach County School Board voted to eliminate all programs in the district that contain DEI. … The district will no longer require efforts to provide racial, ethnic or gender diversity in the hiring process.”
The more exclusive the private school the easier it is to promote the progressive point of view. Suppose that a school has 100 percent kids from high-income households. There will be no direct evidence at that school that kids from low-income households tend to be academic underperformers and, therefore, their future low income may be a result of their poor intellectual abilities rather than discrimination. If students at an exclusive private school never have any direct contact with poor families they can accept uncritically any explanation about why poor Americans are poor.
Interesting discussion on Benjamin School and the others. The Benjamin link you posted clearly does have a reference to “DEI” and that is really disappointing. It appears you have done your homework on this in quite a bit of detail, so I have to say your decision on sending the kids to government-run schools may be the best of the worst, which is truly sad. I would have guessed there would be more than a few schools (particularly in Florida or other states) that haven’t become totally infected by leftism, racism, wokeism etc. Or, perhaps things may be on the cusp of shifting, given that there does seem to be a pretty widespread, and growing, rejection of these toxic ideologies. So perhaps better (or “reformed”) private schools will emerge.
D&D: I think it will be 30 years before Americans’ passion for racism (DEI) is gone, if indeed it ever goes away. Notice how universities didn’t fire anyone from their massive DEI programs. If forced to by a state or federal law, a university would say “we are eliminating our DEI office”. The “office” is gone, but all of the executives and peasants employed in that office are still on staff and still would say, if they believed in God, that they’re doing “God’s work”. Americans adopted Nouveau Racism in 1961 when JFK initiated “affirmative action”. Racism is, therefore, one of the foundations of American thought for people of every age. DEI is a newer term than “affirmative action” (hiring and admissions standards that vary according to applicant race), but it’s the same idea. There is, of course, a minority that adheres to a meritocratic philosophy, but that was also true in all of the years since 1961. And as government gets larger and more powerful it becomes ever more difficult to support meritocracy. When a person who is friends with a politician can get $millions (or more) funneled into his/her/zir/their nonprofit it becomes absurd to say that American society has any chance of becoming a meritocracy.
You make good points in terms of the durability of DEI and all the related toxic ideologies (leftism, racism, and broadly a hatred of the U.S., and Western Civilization generally, and on and on) that we see on full display at Harvard, MIT, Columbia etc. That said (and you obviously have a more negative outlook), I detect a change in the overall public perception of what has been going on for decades and which accelerated beginning with Obama. At this point, it may be just second derivative, and it certainly appears most positive in places like Florida and Texas, but even folks I talk with in the most toxic regions (California and Northeast) seem to concede that change is afoot. It’s not just the Trump phenomenon, but also I think a good bit of credit goes to Musk and X/Twitter, which have really helped give voice and mindshare to those who stand against all the toxic ideologies. They have really helped expose the leftist, racist frauds (and their “journalist” support group) for the death cult that they are.
The U.S. is being filled up with humans from the world’s most violent, dysfunctional, and economically unsuccessful societies. This is an inevitable result of any asylum-based immigration system and serves to maintain a high level of inequality, which then justifies a lot of multi-$billion programs that used to be called DEI and will now be called “belonging”.
The DEI program at just one school (U Michigan) enabled the righteous to pocket $250 million. See https://www.freep.com/story/news/education/2025/03/27/university-michigan-dei-office-closing/82690676007/#
(Note that nobody is fired!) People don’t give up $250 million voluntarily.
Agreed…my point is that as we sit here today, there are incrementally more people moving away from these toxic ideologies than just a few months ago. And, this may bode well for further progress.
D&D: I agree with you that the average voter is probably moving away from support for race discrimination. I just don’t think we should underestimate the ability of the people who profit from race discrimination to continue to profit! There seems to be a deep well of feeling among Americans that unequal outcomes must be due, at least in part, to some sort of unfair treatment that can be remedied by bureaucratic or government action. I know a lot of doctors who quit work because they married men whose income was sufficient to support them. If you look at press coverage about why female doctors don’t practice for as many years or hours as male doctors, though, the difference is ascribed to unfair treatment not to female doctors having found a meal ticket.
Now that I think about it, the situation with official race discrimination is similar to the situation with low-skill immigration. Americans say that they oppose both. But nobody is serious about enforcing the 14th Amendment and nobody ever talks about eliminating asylum as a way to become a U.S. resident/citizen. So Americans willingly cede the power to discriminate to a highly paid expert class and they willingly cede the power to decide US population size and composition to a combination of foreigners (the asylum-seekers) and the non-profits that profit from handling asylum cases.
Just to be clear, I am not a pollyanna (far from it) with respect to the leftist/racist/woke toxic brew having been vanquished following decades of this detritus wreaking havoc on the U.S. (and many other countries). You are correct that large financial incentives have been created to perpetuate these ideologies and they are difficult to destroy. That said, the following has happened in recent months (which leaves a bit of optimism):
1) the INFLOW of invaders into the U.S. has been throttled to trickle from what had been a flood.
2) the OUTFLOW of invaders is now actually positive…yes, too few, but at least the direction is posittive.
3) Hannah Dugan (the scumbag “judge” in Milwaukee) was not only arrested, but INDICTED by a grand jury. Can you imaging this occurring prior to January?
Everything you’re saying is true. But everything can be undone by the next Democrat president! Congress hasn’t passed any laws that prevent 8 billion humans from walking across the border and demanding asylum (it was possible under President Biden for anyone to walk across and then get into a 10-year asylum process so it can be possible under President AOC in 2029).
Also, I think we can tell that actual belief in DEI isn’t necessary for implementing a complex expensive DEI program. Look at all of the white executives in academia, industry, and nonprofits who say that DEI is their first priority and yet who won’t resign their lucrative position in favor of a person of color. So whatever has driven DEI we know that it isn’t a sincere belief in DEI’s benefits.
> […] a real-world endeavor that is also valorized by CBS
Not directly related, but highly recommended, it’s essentially Borat, but related to race instead of country:
“American Fiction”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Fiction_(film)
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0MbLCpYJPA
In the trailer, the lady standing at 0:23 is essentially the impersonification of “the valorization by CBS”, LOL!
Some dangerous children’s literature is Jack London’s The Road
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14658/14658-h/14658-h.htm
a particularly moving passage:
>The whipping began. The whipping of the first boy was as play compared with this one. In no time the blood was running down his thin little legs. He danced and squirmed and doubled up till it seemed almost that he was some grotesque marionette operated by strings. I say “seemed,” for his screaming gave the lie to the seeming and stamped it with reality. His shrieks were shrill and piercing; within them no hoarse notes, but only the thin sexlessness of the voice of a child. The time came when the boy could stand it no more. Reason fled, and he tried to run away. But now the man followed up, curbing his flight, herding him with blows back always into the open space.
>Then came interruption. I heard a wild smothered cry. The woman who sat in the wagon seat had got out and was running to interfere. She sprang between the man and boy.
>”You want some, eh?” said he with the whip. “All right, then.”
>He swung the whip upon her. Her skirts were long, so he did not try for her legs. He drove the lash for her face, which she shielded as best she could with her hands and forearms, drooping her head forward between her lean shoulders, and on the lean shoulders and arms receiving the blows. Heroic mother! She knew just what she was doing. The boy, still shrieking, was making his get-away to the wagons.
How much DEI is required in a homeschooling program in Florida?