I’m glad that I didn’t grow up in Seattle. I managed to avoid some of their ridiculous attempts to indoctrinate kids with racist teachings. Let me show you what I mean. The public school system defines cultural racism as follows, with the more egregious parts of the definition in bold:
Those aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value and normality to white people and whiteness, and devalue, stereotype, and label people of color as ‘other,’ different, less than, or render them invisible. Examples of these norms include defining white skin tones as nude or flesh colored, having a future time orientation, emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology, defining one form of English as standard, and identifying only Whites as great writers or composers
Now, I happened to take a couple of international business classes, and one of the things we learned about was Hofstede’s Model for defining cultures. This model rates countries on five basic cultural indicators: Power Distance, Uncertainty Avoidance, Masculinity, Long-Term Orientation, Individualism/Collectivism. Seattle public schools, in their definition of cultural racism, demonstrates that they themselves are culturally racist: They rate having a future time orientation and individualism as somehow inferior to their alternatives.
Happily, however, this incident has generated enough press to get the school to pull down the definition from their website. Hopefully, all the attention will cause the school board to reevaluate their choice of leaders for their schools.
If you’re interested in finding out more, such as how this incident is an argument for school choice, check out these links from Samizdata.net.
