I’m penning my last Week in Viewpoints column on Friday instead of Saturday this time around because, mercifully, I am graduating tomorrow. That being the case, this will be my last day on the job as your Viewpoints editor. I know I’ve said it before, but thank you to all our readers that have supported The Pacer, especially during COVID and our difficult transition to online-only.
Nothing but hot-button issues this week, of one form or another. When is it better to poke eyes than right before you leave the room? Our first story comes from “Homeroom,” an education-themed response column at The Atlantic. Given the culture war struggling and recent raft of legislation regarding Critical Race Theory, my interest was peaked by their response to a reader’s: “I’m Concerned About Wokeness at My Child’s School.“
The reader, who has a fifth grader in an NYC private school, writes complaining that “the kids are reading all this new woke literature, and at the expense of the classics we all grew up on, like To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” And that, “Most of the teachers and parents I talk with just want school to be school—not some kind of Maoist social reeducation.”
Though the reader describes themselves as liberal, they don’t consider themselves on the CRT bandwagon and they are especially uncomfortable with school officials making her son, “feel bad just because he’s white. It’s not like he owned slaves. His great-great-great-grandparents were starving in Ireland during the time of slavery.”
It’s a reasonable complaint that has been proliferating recently on social media and is the pet project of a few of the small cadre of independent journalists. Nevertheless, Friereich and Platzer seem to imply that the troubled parent just doesn’t know what they are talking about.
For example, after acknowledging their reader’s concern, the Atlantic columnists frame the issue as “you are not alone in having a negative reaction to your kid’s school’s efforts to become more inclusive.”
I’m fairly certain that a New York liberal is not objecting to the school’s “being more inclusive,” they’re objecting to schools (that they pay out of pocket for) bringing in consultants to remake the curriculum around race, and do so in such a way that her (presumably Irish-American) son is made to embody the sins of ancestors that are literally not even his ancestors.
Friereich and Platzer continue:
This does not mean, as you imply, that they will forsake academic rigor. Rather, if done right, anti-racist curricula will be challenging and edifying, giving children a meaningful, relevant education—not making your child feel bad, as you fear, but giving him the tools and knowledge to navigate a complex world. Such an approach requires that anti-racism be more than a mere supplement to the school’s existing curriculum or a superficial buzzword, and rather integral to every aspect of the school—its courses, practice, and mission.
What is “anti-racism” but a persistent acknowledgement of racial disparities that are, according to the popular view, persistently and perniciously imposed on minorities by white people? So if “anti-racism” is “integral to every aspect” of school isn’t that tantamount to saying that there will not be a single minute when this white fifth grader is not intensely aware of his racially-inherited social guilt? And which, to be clear, he can do nothing meaningful about because he’s 10. I imagine being 10 and having authority figures tell you that your racial identity (which you don’t choose but is forced upon you by circumstances) is the source of nearly all social ills all the time could be psychologically harmful.
In short, Friereich and Platzer just whistle past the graveyard of elite education which is being colonized at rapid pace by an ideology whose basic tenants haven’t been placed under any real, public scrutiny. And contra The Atlantic, it’s not always just a mild and reasonable desire for a school to be “inclusive.” I would encourage them to read resources like the Equity Corner Blog on the website of the Clayton School District (in affluent Clayton, Missouri outside of St. Louis) where they might find such gems as “Implicit Bias = Soul Murder,” equivocating between the police shooting of Tamir Rice and perceived failures of the education system in minority “sense of belonging, discipline, test scores, lack of teachers of Color, lack of relationships, student voice, etc.” I want to side with Friereich and Platzer and say the new CRT curriculum that is sweeping the nation is a benign, even helpful, expression of the desire for racial reconciliation through education. However, the evidence put before my face leads me to believe otherwise.
To move on to something lighter, somewhat. In (what I believe) is a first for The Week in Viewpoints, we’ll be going multimodal. A recent Five-Thirty-Eight podcast poses the question “Is the Census Wrong?”
This intrigued me mainly because Census data only comes in every decade and it gives us a fascinating picture of the changes in our nation, but also because I spent a few months in 2020 as a temporary worker for the Census Bureau. My firsthand impression was that Tennessee was fairly undercounted. As the pundits from Five-Thirty-Eight say in the podcast, roughly 30% of households fail to respond to the Census, at which point workers are sent out to conduct interviews. In my experience, people were very rarely home and if they were home, fairly often they were belligerent and didn’t want to talk to people they perceived as government officials. (It’s a bit insulting to be a part-time Census worker and have people treat you like you’re a G-Man sniffing around their Branch Davidian compound, frankly).
The podcast touches on subjects like the undercounting of Latino populations (and why), the reapportionment of congressional seats and the coming fight over congressional redistricting in the states.
Finally, while it may not be hot in the news cycle, the topic of coral reef disappearance is both timely (given a changing climate) and a topic near and dear to my heart (no doubt from the unhealthy amount of nature documentaries that I watch). A story from the BBC chronicles a researcher, Lisa Carne, and her pioneering method of reseeding coral reefs off the coast of Belize. From Veronika Perkova of the BBC:
…restoring a reef is not as simple as it might seem, and involves trial and error, often learning as you go. When scientists first began to explore the idea of reef restoration, they thought that the larger the transplant, the higher the chance of survival. But in 2015 marine biologist David Vaughan discovered that the opposite can also be true – the smaller the piece, the faster it grows. This so-called “micro-fragmentation “enormously accelerated the restoration work.
Whereas in the past, Carne’s team would trim corals into roughly 10cm (4 inch) pieces, grow them up in a coral nursery until they reached around 30cm (12 inches) and then plant them out in the reef, this breakthrough allowed the team accelerate growth rates in the nursery for certain coral species, and bypass nursery time for others completely.
Carne worked with other researchers on coral genetics, diseases, bleaching and spawning to seek out the best way to restore the reef. In 2009, Illiana Baums, professor of molecular ecology at Penn State University, advised on the appropriate distance to plant different individuals of each coral species apart to encourage spawning (sexual reproduction – which boost’s the reefs genetic diversity and resilience). Successful spawning events were later documented between 2014 and 2016.
Carne, using this new method of coral seeding, was able to reconstruct the large barrier reef at Laughing Bird Caye, in a move that might be instructive for other coral reef reseeding efforts elsewhere.
In honor of this being the last week of my tenure, I’ll include a few more links to keep the more hungry readers tided over. Learn a bit about what it’s like to be a dog and, yes, they do love you back. Dive into the festival season of the lost North American metropolis of Cahokia. Or perhaps settle your burning curiosity about what actually happens to candles when lit.
For The Pacer, this has been the last Week in Viewpoints of the school year. Dare I say, stay opinionated.
