By Jan Jekielek and Naveen Athrappully
Radical leftist ideologies have permeated deep into American campuses, and affected the nation’s educational standards as well as perverted decision-making at the highest levels of academia, said Kenny Xu.
President of Color Us United—an advocacy group standing against racist policies propagated in the name of equity—and author of the upcoming “School of Woke,” Xu spoke against the dangerous impacts of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) policies widely adopted by the nation’s universities and schools in a March 2 interview with Jan Jekielek on “American Thought Leaders.”
“We’ve spent three times as much money on public education in those past 30 years, adjusted for inflation. What have we been spending it on? We’ve been spending it on internalizing critical race theory principles in our school system. We’ve been spending it on teaching black kids that society is against them. We’ve been spending them on new diversity, equity, and inclusion administrators to teach queer theory and relationship-oriented pedagogy to teachers so that they can continue to derail these students,” Xu said.
“They are not pushing them in math or pushing them in science, but instead pushing a false racist narrative on them.”
In two public school districts—Loudoun County Public Schools and Santa Barbara Public Schools in California—Xu found that the institutions were implementing “anti-learning” policies.
“At Santa Barbara High School, if you check, born in Mexico, and you have an immigrant parent, a lot of these parents are illegal immigrants, if you check, born in Mexico, they put your kid through a so-called bilingual program where you’re not actually learning English anymore. They teach you 10 percent [in] English and 90 percent in Spanish,” Xu stated.
“They do this in the name of diversity and equity. ‘We want to make sure all our cultures are represented. We want to teach Spanish to people. Oh, Spanish, it’s great.’ But they’re dooming these kids to not being able to learn English for the rest of their lives because they want to facilitate a critical race theory narrative of multiculturalism.”
Sexual Predators Hiding Behind CRT
Individuals who espouse DEI and CRT ideologies are also protected from the consequences of engaging in predatory behavior with students, Xu stated.
“In Santa Barbara, in one of the investigations that I did, and this is so sad, there was a world history teacher who was an avowed Marxist, who also preyed on his students. I had an interview with one of these students. She told me about how the school system protected this man because this man was instrumental in Santa Barbara’s progressive CRT agenda.”
“He would attend all of the seminars and all of the parties with the liberal funders. He would get grant money for ethnic studies in Santa Barbara, which is CRT ideology. It’s a CRT history class. He was a black man in a town that was 1 percent black. He was the shining living hope of everything that progressives and Leftists wanted. There was only one problem—he was a predator.”
Xu pointed to nonprofit organizations as culprits of promoting such behaviors. For instance, some of the nonprofits in Santa Barbara and schools across America claim to use the “social-emotional learning model.” This basically involves getting students to touch each other and be emotionally vulnerable to adults in “inappropriate” ways. And these nonprofits “protect these predators.”
In the Loudoun County Public Schools, the superintendent Scott Ziegler did not take any action in a case involving a transgender sexual assault, Xu said.
“There was a gender-fluid person who sexually assaulted a child. Scott Ziegler, the superintendent, saw this and sat on it. He would not tell the public about this even when directly asked if there were confirmed cases of gender-fluid sexual assaults at his school. He would not confirm it, and he lied.”
“But when Republican Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia gubernatorial election, he brought his Attorney General to investigate that school system. They determined that Loudoun County Public Schools did sit on this case, and they had to fire him the next day. Scott Ziegler is no longer superintendent of Loudoun County Public Schools.”
Corrupting the Hippocratic Oath
Xu pointed out that medical schools in the United States were corrupting the Hippocratic Oath with DEI ideologies. Under a Hippocratic Oath, a doctor has to “make a statement that first, you do no harm. You treat everybody with dignity and respect equally.”
However, “the new Hippocratic Oath, an oath that was taken by students at the University of Minnesota Medical School, for example, said, ‘I commit to Black Lives Matter principles. I commit to treating certain groups more preferentially than others.’”
Such ideologies are already being implemented at the societal level, as Xu gave the example of the minority preference seen during the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines.
“The city of Oakland, during the 2021 rollout of the vaccine, said, ‘We’re going to start administering the vaccine first to underrepresented populations,’ and they meant black and Hispanic Americans. It’s a repudiation of, ‘Let’s treat people according to fair principles, not based on the color of their skin.’”
However, people have recently started to speak out against such discriminatory policies in many parts of the country.
William Jacobson, a law professor from Cornell University, developed a website to track educational institutions which propagate Marxist-based CRT ideologies. The website features a compilation of U.S. educational institutions by state and a report on which ones promote CRT.
CRT and DEI are facing a backlash as people have started waking up and reacting against indoctrination and politicization of institutions. The recent Supreme Court ruling against affirmation policies is a precursor to larger changes in society, which is expected to shake up not only admissions in colleges but also corporations and businesses that have been forced to abide by woke ideologies in everything from hiring to marketing.
