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The Nonconformists

Paul Rossi and Andrew Gutmann reveal the dangers of conforming to Critical Race Theory.

Paul Rossi used to work at Grace Church School in lower Manhattan as a math teacher to the citys privileged children. On the Upper East Side, a former investment banker named Andrew Gutmann used to walk his young daughter past the security guards dressed in red cardigan sweaters onto the elite grounds of Brearley School. Both Rossi and Gutmann had never crossed paths before they wrote their letters excoriating their schools embrace of Critical Race Theory, a rebellion that severed their ties with these schools. These two men seemed to have little in common based on outward appearances, yet the names of Rossi and Gutmann will be yoked for the time being and perhaps into the distant future because of their refusal to conform.

When the letters from these two men were featured on the Substack page, "Common Sense with Bari Weiss," the reaction was instantaneous and their names became known overnight to many Americans. In many ways, what they did was far from remarkable. They argued for a return to the principles of the Enlightenment that helped found America and for the rejection of Critical Race Theory that colored these very principles as white supremacist. What made the acts of Rossi and Gutmann remarkable was they took the step their fellow Americans feared. They wrote their letters to confront an ideological force that threatened their dissent with the charge of racism, the modern-day scarlet letter that can lead to unemployment and ostracization of varying sorts. Indeed, Rossi and Gutmann were branded as racist.

This battle began decades earlier. The academics behind Critical Race Theory had woodshedded their ideology for years, sharpening each branch of their belief system into buzzwords or mantras that could be introduced piecemeal into our brand-driven culture. "White Privilege" became the major flashpoint during the George Zimmerman trial. "Systemic racism" largely defined the town of Ferguson after Michael Brown was killed. It was not until the killing of George Floyd that Critical Race Theory, the mother ideology to all of these buzzwords, including antiracism, was mainstreamed into the American public.

What gave Critical Race Theory its vast power was that it offered Americans the moral absolution from the charge of racism in return for conforming to its tenets. It did not matter that this offer was illusory and self-serving.

During my interview with Rossi, he explained that the Critical Race Theory vision of America actually preserved the privileged WASP culture that sits on top of the American society and runs many of its elite schools. These American aristocrats had excluded blacks and Jews (like Gutmanns family) from their institutions for countless years; they sought to escape this mark of shame by embracing the woke spirit of Critical Race Theory.

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Rossi then explained how this benefited the WASP culture in two key ways. The admission of "we are all white and we all suffer from these biases" allowed these WASPs to erase class distinctions and appear to be "more of a common man" as they achieved a sense of solidarity with the Americans beneath them. At the same time, this move allowed the WASPs to feel morally superior to other Americans who refused to submit to this ideology, especially the poorer and "racist" whites.

Put another way, this embrace of Critical Race Theory preserved the supremacy of the WASP culture while doing little to nothing to make lasting and transformative change in the lives of the American underclass.

When one understands this, it is not surprising that the first major battles over Critical Race Theory began in the elite private schools in New York City. There was plenty of money and will to hire Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) companies to affect rapid change in the curriculum of these schools.

When Gutmanns daughter attended kindergarten five years ago, she was encouraged to express herself freely while painting her self-portrait. Today, kids in the same class are given flesh-colored crayons with the exclusive task of getting their skin color right.

The true power of this elite class parents, school officials, academics, DEI consultants lies their willingness to use one of white supremacys evils to advance their agenda: racial discrimination. One of the key tenets of Critical Race Theory maintains that it is morally permissible to racially discriminate against another race as long as it racially engineers blacks and other approved minorities upward.

In valuing racial engineering over development, these elites exposed Critical Race Theory not as a force for the good but as Americas latest racial ideology. And in the tradition of racial ideologies, Critical Race Theory has already produced racial absurdities, such as condemning the principles of Enlightenment as white supremacy while using the tools of white supremacy to racially engineer change.

When I interviewed Gutmann, he described how Brearley School wanted to impose Critical Race Theory not only into the classrooms but into the homes of the students as well. This overreach revealed that these elites knew that the strength of their racial ideology depended on their ability to force others to conform. They knew deep down that if enough folks began to question their use of race to advance their cause, their house of cards would fall.

These elites did not want the "compliance" type of conformity where individuals pay lip service to the ideology while leaving their private beliefs unchanged. Nor did they want the "identification" type of conformity where individuals embraced the behavior and beliefs of the ideology but only in the presence of the ideologues. What these elites wanted was the "internalization" type of conformity where the students and parents fully internalized the tenets of Critical Race Theory to the point of becoming true believers. They prized this level of conformity to the point that they saw no issue with ridding the school of a teacher as intelligent, insightful, and principled as Rossi.

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Both Rossi and Gutmann refused to conform to this ideology because they saw that the molding of minds into true believers came at the expense of educating well-rounded and independent individuals. There is perhaps nothing worse than hearing school children from Miami to Anchorage recite mindlessly the same ideological cliches over and over: "More work needs to be done," "We want to have difficult conversations," "Check your privilege," "Silence is violence"

Neither Rossi or Gutmann would object to education reforms to reflect Americas diverse peoples; what they refused to accept was the reduction of timeless and, in many cases, universal education principles down to skin color. They also objected to the elites reducing the complex and rich humanity of Americans down to an over-simplistic dichotomy: racist and antiracist. They knew that this produced a distorted sense of reality that benefited only the few on top. After all, what can the rest of Americans do with a racial ideology that demands conformity in how they think, how they speak, and how they view themselves without offering any real solutions to the larger problems in society?

So Rossi and Gutmann embraced the long cherished American tradition of nonconformity. After withstanding the initial howls of racism, mockery, condescension, and after being placed on leave (Rossi), and after losing friends and colleagues, Rossi and Gutmann stand stronger than ever, unbowed. They knew that the act of conforming cut themselves off from their true selves and the only way to reclaim the purest of freedoms was to become a nonconformist. In doing so, they reminded me of a quote by Eleanor Roosevelt: "When you adopt the standards and values of someone else you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your own surrender, less of a human being." This is perhaps the most significant lesson that Rossi and Gutmann imparted upon the youths in their world and the rest of America when they decided not to conform to those who use the tool of race in the name of "progress."

Continue reading here:
The Price of Conforming to Critical Race Theory - Fox News

Bellmead Family Dog Day

Bellmead Animal Control will have Family Dog Day from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday at Brame Park, between Oak Grove Drive and Hogan Lane.

The event will feature vendors, music, giveaways, lots of dogs and a microchip clinic.

Ladies Koinonia Reunion

Gods House of Prayer Church womens ministry will present Ladies Koinonia Reunion at noon Saturday at the McGregor Senior Center, 416 W. Second St.

For more information, call Patsy Reed at 254-339-4846.

NAACP justice series

Waco NAACP will present Who Let George Zimmerman Go? from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Monday.

The Zoom event is part of the groups criminal justice series. William Snowden, founder of The Juror Project, will explain the importance of showing up for jury duty, how some prosecutors try to eliminate jurors and the factors at play in removing diversity from juries.

The Zoom ID is 926 2800 0095. For more information, call 254-733-5261.

Community development class

First Baptist Woodway and Viento Fuerte churches will have a 10-hour class on Christian Community Development from 8:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. May 21 and May 22 at The Venue, 101 Ritchie Road.

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Waco-area news briefs: Community development training focus of 10-hour course - Waco Tribune-Herald

This had changed by the time Kaba left college and returned to New York City to work with survivors of domestic violence. She was befuddled that many of the women she was working with did not want to call the police on their partners. Kaba said, Then I started asking people questions like, Why dont you want to go to the police? And people would look at me, like, What are you talking about? Why wouldnt I go to the cops? Do you not see who I am? The cops dont keep me safe. And so I slowly came to consciousness. In her book, Kaba writes, What happens when you define policing as actually an entire system of harassment, violence, and surveillance that keeps oppressive gender and racial hierarchies in place? When thats your definition of policing, then your whole frame shifts. And it also forces you to stop talking about it as though its an issue of individuals, forces you to focus on the systemic structural issues to be addressed in order for this to happen.

There is no definitive beginning point for prison-abolition politics, but it is clearly connected to a turn, beginning in the sixties, in American imprisonment, in which it went from a method, in part, of rehabilitation to one of control or punishment. During the civil-rights movement, police were the shock troops for the massive resistance of the white political establishment in the American South. By the mid-sixties, policing and the criminal-justice system were being retrofitted as a response to a growing insurgency in Black urban communities. By the seventies, they were being used to contain and control both Black radicals and Black prisoners. The scholar and activist AngelaY. Davis may be the best-known prison abolitionist in the United States today. But, in 1972, she was facing charges of kidnapping, murder, and conspiracy, after guns registered to her were used by the seventeen-year-old Jonathan Jackson, in a botched attempt to free his brother, the Black radical George Jackson, from Soledad prison.

Davis had become a leader of George Jacksons defense committee and had developed a close relationship with him. As a result of their collaboration, and of Daviss experience of spending sixteen months in jail before her acquittal, she devoted her political energies to prisoners rights and eventually to prison abolition. In an interview that she gave while awaiting the outcome of her trial, Davis said, We simply took it upon ourselves at first to defend George Jackson, John Clutchette, and Fleeta Drumgothe radicals known as the Soledad Brothers. But we later realized that the question was much broader than that. It wasnt simply a matter of three individuals who were being subject to the repressive forces of the penal system. It was the system itself that had to be attacked. It was the system itself that had to be abolished.

In 1995, the radical theorist Mike Davis wrote a cover story for The Nation describing a new prison-industrial complex being established in California, with no pretense that the exponential growth of prisons was tied to the rise and fall of crime. Indeed, according to the scholar and activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore, in her pathbreaking book Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, even though the crime rate peaked in 1980, between 1984 and the early two-thousands, California completed twenty-three major new prisons, at a cost of two hundred and eighty to three hundred and fifty million dollars each. By contrast, the state had built only twelve prisons between 1852 and 1964. Bodies were necessary to justify the rapid growth of the prison sector, and the Crime Bill of 1994, along with Californias three-strikes legislation, passed that same year, provided them. Gilmore writes that the California state prison population grew nearly 500 percent between 1982 and 2000. The three-strikes law, which mandated twenty-five-years-to-life sentences for a third felony, had an especially severe effect on Black and Latinx communities. Mike Davis reported that, during the first six months of prosecutions under the new law, African-Americans made up fifty-seven percent of the three strikes filings in L.A. County, even though they made up only ten per cent of the state population. This was seventeen times higher than the rate at which whites were being charged under the new law, even though white men were responsible for at least sixty percent of all the rape, robberies, and assaults in the state.

The three-strikes law was an accelerant to what would come to be called mass incarceration, but it was also the makings of a new movement against prisons and against the means and methods by which they became populatednamely, policing. In 1997, in Berkeley, Davis, Gilmore, and others formed the organizing group Critical Resistance, which brought together activists, the formerly incarcerated, and academics to build an international movement to end the prison industrial complex by challenging the belief that caging and controlling people make us safe. Ten years later, Gilmore published Golden Gulag, which she describes as the culmination of research projects undertaken with Black mothers of incarcerated persons in California state prisons. She wrote, What we learned twice over was this: the laws had written into the penal code breathtakingly cruel twists in the meaning and practice of justice. This produced new questions, extending far beyond the passage of new laws. The mothers, along with Gilmore, asked, Why prisons? Why now? Why for so many peopleespecially people of color? And why were they located so far from prisoners homes? In this sense, although academics have been important to formulating the movements arguments, the journey toward abolition is not an academic or intellectual exercise. Instead, it has been gestated within the communities deeply scarred by the disappearing of sons and daughters by the state.

By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the cumulative, devastating effects of twenty years of increasing policing and incarcerationinaugurated by Reagan but abetted by the policies of the Clinton Administrationcame into greater focus, as new conversations opened up about structural inequality in the United States. Michelle Alexanders book The New Jim Crow, published in 2010, offered a breakthrough analysis of continued Black inequality as a product of years of policing and imprisonment in Black communities. Kaba identifies the failure to stop the execution of the Georgia death-row inmate Troy Davis, in 2011, as catalyzing the emergence of an abolitionist consciousness among what Elizabeth Alexander has described as the Trayvon Generation. Five months after Daviss execution, Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman. Kaba noted that the call, when Trayvon Martin was killed, was to arrest and to prosecute and to convict Zimmerman. In 2014, after Michael Brown was killed, the push was to indict Darren Wilson, and for body cameras. Zimmerman was acquitted, and a grand jury failed to bring charges against Wilson. Kaba said, And, because so many of these young folks were actually mobilized in the organizing, they could see the futility of the demands that they were making and the limits of those demands, and wanted and were ready to hear something new.

That generations maturation in the world of police reform became apparent last summer, when many young activists and organizers began to embrace a demand that funding for police departments be redistributed to other public agencies and institutions. The demand originated in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed, and where the city council briefly committed to defunding the police department. But, Kaba said, its important to note that local Black radical organizationsBlack Visions Collective, Reclaim the Block, and MPD150had been campaigning for years to divest from the police department and invest in community groups, battling the police over the citys budget. She explained, Youve already got folks on the ground over there that have had two cycles of budget fights around defunding the police based on divestment. So the part of this people dont understand is the continuity of these ideas. They dont just come out of nowhere. People arent just yelling stuff randomly. It got picked up nationally because people were, like, This makes sense.

Although the demand to defund the police may have had its specific origins in Minneapolis, Kaba understands that the growing curiosity about abolitionist politics is rooted in something much broader. She said, People are frustrated by the way that the welfare state has completely been defunded. People dont have what they need to survive. And yet the military and prisons keep getting more and more and more. Contrary to the beliefs of their critics, abolitionists are not impervious to the realities of crime and violence. But they have a fundamental understanding that crime is a manifestation of social deprivation and the reverberating effects of racial discrimination, which locks poor and working-class communities of color out of schooling, meaningful jobs, and other means to keep up with the ever-escalating costs of life in the United States. These problems are not solved by armed agents of the state or by prisons, which sow the seeds of more poverty and alienation, while absorbing billions of dollars that might otherwise be spent on public welfare. The police and prisons arent solving these problems: they are a part of the problem.

At its core, abolitionist politics are inspired by the necessity for what Martin Luther King,Jr., described as the radical reconstruction of the entirety of U.S. society. They intend to promote systemic thinking instead of our societys obsession with personal responsibility. Derek Chauvins conviction was premised on the idea that he was personally responsible for George Floyds murder. The emphasis on his accountability distracts from a system of policing that administered his continued employment, even though eighteen complaints had been lodged against him during his nineteen-year career. Moreover, Chauvin was a field-training officer, who had trained two of the other officers who will face trial for participating in Floyds murder. Chauvin may be held to account for the killing, but neither the Minneapolis Police Department nor the elected officials charged with overseeing the M.P.D. will be held to account for allowing someone like Chauvin to be on the streets, let alone responsible for training others.

To approach harm systemically is to imagine that, if peoples most critical needs were met, the tensions that arise from deprivation and poverty could be mitigated. And when harm still occurs, because human beings have the propensity to hurt one another, nonlethal responses could attend to itand also to the reasons for it. To be sure, these are lofty aspirations, but they are no more unrealistic than believing that another study, expos, commission, firing, or police trial is capable of meeting the desire for change that, last summer, compelled tens of millions of ordinary people to pour into the streets. Indeed, the trial of Derek Chauvin could not even conclude before a Black man was killed at a traffic stop.

Our current criminal-justice system is rooted in the assumption that millions of people require policing, surveillance, containment, prison. It is a dark view of humanity. By contrast, Kaba and others in this emergent movement fervently believe in the capacity of people to change in changed conditions. That is the optimism at the heart of the abolitionist project. As Kaba insists in her book, The reason Im struggling through all of this is because Im a deeply, profoundly hopeful person. Because I know that human beings, with all of our foibles and all the things that are failing, have the capacity to do amazingly beautiful things, too. That gives me the hope to feel like we will, when necessary, do what we need to do. Abolition is not an all-or-nothing proposition. Even the guiding lights of the movement are embedded in campaigns for short-term reforms that make a difference in daily life. For Kaba, that has meant raising funds for mutual aid during the pandemic and campaigning for reparations in Chicago. For Gilmore, it has meant working with incarcerated people and their families to challenge the building of prisons across California. For Angela Davis, it has meant lending her voice to movements for civil and human rights, from Ferguson to Palestine. The point is to work in solidarity with others toward the world as they wish for it to be. Hope is a discipline, Kaba writes. We must practice it daily.

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The Emerging Movement for Police and Prison Abolition - The New Yorker

By Charles M. Blow| The New York Times

On Monday, CBS This Morning airedaninterview between Gayle King and former first lady Michelle Obama. Obama discussed the statement that she and former President Barack Obama issued after Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murdering George Floyd.

As Michelle Obama put it, We cant sort of say, Great, that happened. Lets move on. She continued:

I know that people in the Black community dont feel that way because many of us still live in fear, as we go to the grocery store or worry about walking our dogs or allowing our children to get a license.

As I often say, this is a constant fear of Black people and Black parents that assumptions are made in seconds, that when they pull a gun, you cant pull a resume. In the moment of fear and violence, your individuality is meaningless. When youre at the wrong end of a gun barrel, you cant achieve your way out of that moment.

But there is something more important and natural happening in the lives of the Obamas out of office, beyond Donald Trump and in an era in which racial justice is a pressing part of the national conversation: They have been liberated in their Blackness. Theyre now able to discuss racism with a candor and frankness that their time in the White House in many ways prohibited.

In The Hill, Niall Stanage wrote an article published Saturday with the headline The Memo: The Obamas Unbound, on Race. They were at one time bound because they were Black, but also because they were first.

We celebrate firsts, as we should, I suppose. They reassure us of the notion of relentless American progress, to which we have become accustomed. Although they are often also a reminder of how long people have been prohibited or denied.

Those firsts carry with their honor a burden: the weight of representing the race. They are not free to simply rise or fall on their own merit, and they bear the weight of the whole race.

Everything projected onto Black people is projected onto them every bias and every stereotype, every assumption and every hatred.

They are simultaneously blazing a trail and entering the crucible.

The Obamas were chastened often on the subject of race, from the time Obama began his run for the presidency. This resulted in a skittishness on the subject.

When the Obamas shared an innocent fist bump during the 2008 campaign, E.D. Hill, the host of Fox News Americas Pulse, teased a segment about the gesture this way:

A fist bump? A pound? A terrorist fist jab? The gesture everyone seems to interpret differently. Well show you some interesting body communication and find out what it really says.

In 2011, as a regular citizen, Trump suggested that Obama, a Black man, couldnt have written his first book, Dreams From My Father, because of its quality. He believed it must have been written by Bill Ayers, a white man. As Trump put it:

Bill Ayers was a supergenius. And a lot of people have said he wrote the book. Well, recently, as you know, last week Bill Ayers came out and said he did write the book. Barack Obama wouldnt be president and, you know, I wrote many bestsellers and also No. 1 bestsellers, including The Art of the Deal.

In 2013, after George Zimmerman was found not guilty in the killing of Trayvon Martin, Obama said:

You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.

But in the political sense, he was Martin: under suspicion from first glance, suspected of nefarious intent, stalked and descended upon by the self-appointed guardians of the space.

Later that year, Obama was pictured with his feet on the desk in the Oval Office, which sent his critics into convulsions.

This, for me, recalled an iconic scene from Birth of a Nation, the racist film that sparked the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, in which newly elected Black state legislators are caricatured as uncivilized by, among other things, putting their feet on desks.

All of this, I believe, had a chilling effect on the Obamas expressed positions on race. Now that that period has passed, they are eager to be heard on the issue of racial justice.

But as timing would have it, the Biden administration, including its Department of Justice, is now being lauded, rightfully, for forthrightly and explicitly confronting and condemning racism. It has been a whiplash-inducing reversal from four years of a white nationalist presidency.

However, any comparison between Biden and the Obamas on race is fraught: America would still rather applaud the white savior of the Black and pitied than applaud the Black and powerful seen as interested in their own liberation.

The Obamas are now freer to just be Black people, Black parents and Black citizens, and as such, they are just as upset, angry and unsettled as the rest of us.

Blow writes for The New York Times.

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Blow: The Obamas are freed in their Blackness - Austin American-Statesman

ActivistTamika Malloryjoined Jada Pinkett Smith, Adrienne Banfield-Norris, and Willow Smith for the latest episode of Red Table Talk, where the women held an intense discussion about what it means to be a Black woman in the United States. During which Mallory made a shocking admission that she once battled drug addiction.

Mallory is most notable for her work in the Black community and with the social justice movement Black Lives Matter founded in 2013 by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi as a response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martins killer, George Zimmerman.

During the Thursday, May 10, show, titled The Invisible Black Woman, Mallory opened up about the stresses shes dealt with in her line of work and the measures shes taken to cope everyday pressures of being an activist.

Considering someone whos used to speaking in front of large crowds or being the voice to the voiceless, Mallory said people might not fully understand how such a person could feel invisible, especially someone like her who describes herself as being loud and talks a lot.

So, people are like you cant be invisible. We cant miss you. Youre always there. We cant miss you. Youre always there. But my feelings are not always valued. My opinion of things, Im constantly having to raise my temperature in order for people to know that I know what Im talking about, she continued. Its been difficult for so long to feel like Ive been ignored. When I was with the womens march, I experienced that.

During her time with the organization, Mallory was the only black co-chair of the Womens March on Washington the largest single-day protest in the U.S. The experience left her questioning her purpose with the group.

Mallory shared that she was so overwhelmed she began taking pills to manage. Im getting beat up left and right. It was just too much to think about, so I started taking Xanax, taking whatever you could do to sleep. That sleep is an issue when youre stressed not being able to rest. Any pill that somebody would give me that had the ability to make you calm down and to deal with anxiety, I wanted it, she revealed. I got addicted.

Mallory explained that the road to rehabilitation was tough. She was later informed that she would have to get treatment for PTSD, citing that the root of her issues went far past her drug addiction.Mallory said her process was all tearing down and building me all back up. The40-year-oldd hasnt let that moment define her, saying, Look at me.. Im still cute.

You can catch this episode and what else Mallory had to say on Facebook where Red Table Talk is available.

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'I'm Getting Beat Up Left and Right. It Was Just Too Much': Tamika Mallory Speaks Candidly About Her Shocking Drug Addiction and Having PTSD - Atlanta...