But this is nice: after spending almost every word since the 2016 election joining the relentless media attack on Donald Trump and the democratic process that elected him, The Atlantic is back to applying some critical thinking to the dangers of the Left.
In the magazine now, Conor Freidersdorf tells us that the only parent in Evanston, Illinois who would go on the record as opposing critical race theory indoctrination in the schools was a black mother and school-board candidate, who, unlike the others, was self-employed. His recent article on the curriculum in Evanston featured quotes from “parents who favor diversity, racial equality, and inclusiveness but object to lessons that they believe cross a line into indoctrination” but all the parents he interviewed “would be quoted only anonymously, out of fear that they would be harassed online or even lose their jobs.” Now he has found Ndona Muboyayi, who as a candidate for the school board in District 65 opposes the Black Lives Matter-spawned message her own children are getting, and says she speak out openly because she is an independent consultant and won’t “cancel” herself.
Hmmmm. That sounds familiar somehow…
Writes blogger Amy Alkon, who flagged the article: “This is a sign of how sick and toxically infested with the racist race profiteering of [Ibram X] Kendi and the like our society has become.”
Indeed it is.
Here is Muboyayi
…and here is some of her commentary from her interview with Freidersdorf:
I gave my children and my husband, who grew up in the Democratic Republic of Congo, this idea that [Evanston] would be a place of both Black unity and people working together across color lines. But when we got here in 2018, within the first year, my children were being taught about white supremacy and white privilege and that all white people were rich and racist. My son and daughter came home like, What is this?
My children have always been so proud of who they are. Then all of a sudden they started to question themselves because of what they were taught after arriving here. My son has wanted to be a lawyer since he was 11. Then one day he came home and told me, “But Mommy, there are these systems put in place that prevent Black people from accomplishing anything.” That’s what they’re teaching Black kids: that all of this time for the past 400 years, this is what [white people have] done to you and your people. The narrative is, “You can’t get ahead.”
Of course I want my children to know about slavery and Jim Crow. But I want it to be balanced out with the rest of the truth. They’re not taught about Black people who accomplished things in spite of white supremacy; or about the Black people today who got ahead, built things, achieved things; and those who had opportunities that their ancestors fought for.
One day my daughter told me she was taught that all white people are privileged and part of a system of white supremacy. My son said the same thing. So I reached out to my daughter’s teacher to find out what exactly was being taught. It was pretty much like she said: that all white people were part of this system of white supremacy, and that all white people, because of the color of their skin, had privilege…I’m not saying systemic racism doesn’t exist, but class exists too, and I don’t believe that all white people have privilege. That white person who’s living in the Appalachian Mountains, who has no means or prospect of changing their situation—do they, too, have privilege? Compared to me and my kids?
…[W]hen you start labeling people in a negative manner based on their race or ethnic group, this leads to division and destruction, not finding common ground and positive solutions….If I were white…I’d be angry if I learned my child was being labeled a racist or a white supremacist or the fruit of white supremacy.
The rising totalitarian Left assumes that the anger will be irrelevant because the mob’s intimidation, censorship, demonization and marginalization will be sufficient to overcome it.
I think the Left is wrong. I certainly hope they are. Ultimately it will come down to how much their opposition cares about liberty and preserving the Republic, and, as Ben Franklin implied, whether it has the courage and character to keep it.
Ethics Alarms 
Those poor people. They came all the way from the Congo to the Land of Opportunity only to be told that nothing they do will matter because of the color of their skin. I hope they reject it and, with a mother like that, they have a good chance of doing so. I hope the Muboyayis serve as a shining light in that community by making it clear that they are not being held down by white supremacy.
This narrative is poisonous and so incredibly divisive. Who thought that it was a good idea to build up black children by tearing down white children? How dare they tell a young black teenager that he or she cannot succeed in life and are destined for decades of poverty and oppression!
I just watched the Oscar-nominated live action films last night. Included among the films that featured Israelis treating Palestinians like blacks in the Jim Crow South and another one about a man who calls the police when he finds his stolen bicycle only to be made to feel guilty when the police learn the possessor of the stolen property is an illegal immigrant who is taken away is an absolutely toxic film about race relations in the U.S.
Courtesy spoiler alert here.
In the film, a young professional black man in New York City wakes up after night with a woman only to go outside and, following a very brief, very minor, completely within-the-law run in with a white citizen, is set upon by a racist cop who gets him in a chokehold and, you guessed it, ignores pleas of “I can’t breathe” while his victim dies. What follows is a morbid “Groundhog Day” parody as, every day, the man wakes up in the woman’s bed, goes outside and is murdered in one fashion or another by this cop. At no point does this man do anything illegal nor are the police called on him for any reason.
Trying to change what he says, what he does, what he wears and, even engaging the cop in friendly chatter, doesn’t prevent his death. In the worst scenario, the man finally convinces the cop – by predicting what people around them are going to do – that they are both stuck in the same sequence of events and that the best thing to do would be for the cop to drive him home. On the way, the man makes sure the cop knows how white people are born on third base while black people aren’t even allowed on the field, etc, but they seem ready to part grudgingly okay with each other and even shake hands. Until the cop tells him how pretty his words sounded and how they all try try to fake being nice to gain sympathy, then shoots the guy…in the back…for no reason.
The young man remains in the never-ending loop, but ends the film determined that, someday, he’s going to get home alive.
The film ends with a long list of black victims of police violence. You know the names. Some of them are highlighted at the end with minimalist, context-less descriptions of what caused their deaths – Tamir Rice was “playing in a park”, Breonna Taylor was “sleeping in her bed” and George Floyd “was shopping” – that you would find on a standard Facebook meme.
It made me angry. I’m still angry about it.
This is the crap that gets nominated for awards. These are the narratives that your children and grandchildren are being handed every day. Their science, their math, their literature, their recess is built around the propaganda of critical race theory in the same way that German children learned to calculate based on how many bombs one had left or how many Jews hadn’t been shot. The same way that Soviet children learned the history of their country once all the unpersons had been deleted and events had been contextualized in the right way. The same way Winston Smith couldn’t tell when the helicopter had actually been invented or knew what the King had actually been or had done.
Unfortunately, this is the logical progression of what was allowed to happen last year. The message of the movement and the government party that supported the movement was “This is where everything forks. Either you are with the movement or you are against it. If you are against it, If you are against it, we’re coming after you. You don’t get to dispute the movement, you don’t get to question the movement, and you don’t get to say you don’t want to be involved with the movement.”
Congratulations, BLM. Because of you we are come full circle. Martin Luther King said, “I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” We’ve now arrived at a point where not only are people judged by the color of their skin and not the content of their character, but the color of their skin is presumed to DEFINE the content of their character, and unchangeably so. No matter how much white people may sympathize, may try to be supportive, may claim to “get it,” it is just never enough. In the end, they are all racists. Some of them are good at hiding it, some of them don’t know it, some of them, but all of them have benefited from racism. Just as a googleplex (ten to the power of ten to the power of 100, enough zeroes to fill the known universe) is precisely as far from infinity as the number one, the most conscious white ally is precisely as racist as the craziest Klansman or the most violent Proud Boy.
There just isn’t any way out. If you are white, you bear the sins and unearned benefits of 402 years of slavery and 529 years of colonialism. maybe even 606 if we calculate Western colonialism to have started with the Portuguese attack on Ceuta. That’s just too great a sin to be forgiven. Just like every sin adds to Christ’s suffering on the cross, every time you get into a school a black student couldn’t get into, every time you get a loan a black person would have been turned down for, every time a cop gives you the benefit of the doubt he wouldn’t give to a black person, it adds to the suffering of black and brown people everywhere.
The thing is, unlike in Christianity, there is no baptism that can wash off this sin, no acceptance of faith that can make you saved, and no amount of good works that can counterbalance it. However, if you keep quiet, do as you are told, and ask no questions, we might leave you be in this life. We might let you keep your job, we might let you keep your pension, and we might just leave you in relative peace. Occasionally, however, we’ll still check up on you to make sure you’re not slipping and we’ll still occasionally remind you who’s got the power with a brick or a Molotov cocktail through your window or a mob march through your neighborhood. If we see you haven’t been donating enough to approved causes (we suggest a minimum of 10% of gross, not net, income, and it would be appreciated if you donate “off the top” before you pay your monthly expenses), or we hear you said something that deviated from the party line, or if we see a Betsy Ross flag or any thin blue line stuff, well, then there will have to be consequences. Even if you don’t care if those consequences fall on you, do you want them to fall on your family? That would really be too bad. That’s what we thought.
This sounds crazy. In fact it sounds worse than crazy. It sounds like the same attitude that every tyrannical, racist regime has had toward the minorities in its midst. It’s the same attitude the Russians had toward the Cossacks and Poles. It’s the same attitude the Ottomans had toward the Armenians and ethnic Greeks. It’s the same attitude the Nazis had toward everyone who wasn’t an Aryan, but especially toward the Jews. It also leads to the same kind of actions: indoctrination of students, the silencing of dissident voices, punitive action against those out of favor just because, and so on. Yesterday it was the Russian cavalry skylarking through a Cossack village or two to burn a house here, beat up a few locals there, and so on, the Turkish police arresting an Armenian writer or Greek priest who said one wrong thing too many, or the Sturmabteilung entering an opposition newspaper’s office and trashing the printing presses. Today it’s Black Lives Matter burning down a business center, the deep state branding those who speak out for the right as white supremacists and potential terrorists, and Big Tech deplatforming anyone who objects to progressive cant. If this comparison bothers you, it should.
These stories keep piling up, one after another, in a never ending pile of evidence that the totalitarian thugs intentional persecution of anything outside their ideological hive mind has won the battle of the minds in the United States.
The trend is self evident.
The totalitarian social justice warriors have already won the ideological war and our society and culture is heading straight towards tyrannical totalitarian rule in the “near” future. In the minds of totalitarians, only those that think like them deserve individual rights.
Strong Leaders Are Needed To Inspire Nationwide Grass Roots Movements To Support The Constitution & Confront Totalitarianism.
We need people like Ndona Muboyayi, Jack Marshall, Alan Dershowitz, Jonathan Turley, etc. that are willing to stand against these totalitarian thugs. People like these are earning a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
“Who thought that it was a good idea to build up black children by tearing down white children?”
The same people who think tearing down statues is a good idea and that it’s okay to build up the Native Americans’ heritage while at the same time trashing the Italians’ heritage.
Asked and Answered!
IMO, the talented Ms. Ndona Muboyayi is an Ethics Hero for not only lending her voice to sanity but FLIPPING OFF Lefty to boot!
My kid, who was in first grade at the time, brought home a weekly reader. It talked about MLK and Rosa Parks and the civil rights movement for black history month. He said he “felt sorry” for them. That was in 2017. I don’t think it’s improved. His dream that year? For everyone to be kind. We can do better.