by Dick Hall-Sizemore
One school allots time in its schedule for students “to engage in critical conversations around topics of race, antiracism, social justice, and inclusion.” Its student handbook endeavors to train a “lens toward fairness, equity, inclusion.” Diversity training is required for all faculty and staff. Summer reading included: Stamped: Racism, Antiracism and You by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi and White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo.
In its discussion on “building an antiracist community,” the school notes that “discomfort helps us to stretch and grow. Learning how to engage in difficult conversations, to listen respectfully, and to consider multiple perspectives are vital to building a strong educational community and preparing our students for future academic, community, and professional engagement and leadership.”
Another school has expressed its commitment to DEI. During the summer, faculty were asked to read How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi and Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The latter work was also assigned to students during the year.
A third school has an extensive exhibit entitled Endowment of Tears, Hope for Reconciliation. In discussing the “pivotal role of slavery” it focuses on “enslaved persons of the same age as students.” It points out that those youngsters, if they had not been slaves, could have benefited from the education provided by the school. The exhibit declares, “We stand in their debt” and asks “how best to seek reconciliation with the memory of the enslaved and with their descendants.”
These sound like activities that have been decried on this blog. It may have been this sort of thing that Glenn Youngkin was talking about in his campaign when he warned that critical race theory “has moved into our schools” and later said he wanted to root it out. Some thought that these were the types of activities that the Governor had in mind when he made prohibiting “inherently divisive concepts” a goal and set up a tip line, encouraging parents to report such activities.
But I am not concerned. The three schools described are the ones that the Governor sent his children to: National Cathedral School, St. Albans School, and Georgetown Preparatory School. He was even on the governing board of one of them from 2015-2018. Certainly, the Governor would not be associated with, nor send his children to, schools that espoused critical race theory or inherently divisive concepts.
