Dennis Prager describes a high school exercise that sorted students into oppressor and oppressed categories based on identity. He criticizes how social justice ideology has entered schools, pointing to the awkward moment when teachers had to decide where to place Jewish students, and argues identity politics betrays the civil rights movement's original goals.
In high school, my homeroom had an exercise where we made a T-chart dividing various ethnicities, religions, and other identities into the categories of oppressor and oppressed. Women oppressed. Straight people oppressor. Black people oppressed. This was on the— this was on a T— you know what a teacher T-chart is? Okay, then we reached the Jew category and we paused. This being a high school in Los Angeles, many of my classmates were Jewish. I recall we skipped it altogether, but the T-chart stayed on the whiteboard. If there were fewer Jews in that room, I'm confident that Jews would have gone squarely in the oppressor column. Social justice theory became part of everything. My senior English class was not about great literature, but about readings in critical theory, mostly about race and gender. Isn't that astonishing? I mean, not— I take that back. It's not astonishing at all. Isn't it depressing? She didn't learn about great literature. I had a non-academic weekly homeroom class in which we learned that every white person is a racist and all men are evil. It took me a long time to shake off a hatred of men. It wasn't socially acceptable to disagree, and no one really tried. My high school got a dean of gender studies and feminism. You hear that? How much of the education money now goes to such positions—deans of gender theory, gender studies, and feminism. At the time, one of her roles—oh, it's a— that's fascinating, it was a woman, shocking—to help seniors write their college applications. In answer to the question, what is the most significant challenge society faces today, I wrote it was identity politics. She gave me a note saying that meant I was rejecting the advances of the civil rights movement. I changed it. Did you get that? Did you get that, folks? She's against identity politics, and therefore she is opposed to the advances of the civil rights movement. So they're taught, at least in her high school, and I assume in vast numbers of them, in a vast number of them, that the civil rights movement was about affirming racial identity. I understood the civil rights movement as saying your racial identity shouldn't matter. Your character identity Your individual identity, that's what mattered. Well, if Hamas are liberators, then racial identity is a healthy thing.
Life, Legacy, and a Dangerous Mission in the Soviet Union | Sunday Fireside Chat
