by Christopher F Rufo at City-Journal
There are only a few places on earth where radicals and their children ritualistically burn the American flag and chant “Death to America”: Tehran, Baghdad, Beirut, Kabul, Ramallah—and Portland, Oregon.
The City of Portland, a cloud-covered metro on the south bank of the Columbia River, has become known for its political protesters. Anarchists, Communists, ecofascists, and various other agitators regularly denounce the police, politicians of both parties, and America itself, and flag-burning has become part of the protesters’ liturgy. Last summer, protesters associated with Antifa upped the ante with chants of “Death to America” and participated in months of violent protests to avenge the death of George Floyd while he was in police custody in Minneapolis. Children as young as four marched with the crowd to the federal courthouse, raising the Black Power fist and chanting “Fuck the Police!”
Famously the “whitest city in America,” Portland has become the unlikely headquarters of race radicalism in the United States. The city has elevated white guilt into a civic religion; its citizens have developed rituals, devotions, and self-criticisms to fight “systemic racism” and “white supremacy.” The culminating expression of this orthodoxy is violence: street militias, calling themselves “antiracists” and “antifascists,” smash windows and torch the property of anyone transgressing the new moral law.
We might be tempted to dismiss this as the work of a few harmless radicals “keeping Portland weird,” but in recent years, their underlying ideology on race has become institutionalized. The city government has adopted a series of Five-Year Plans for “equity and inclusion,” shopkeepers have posted political slogans in their windows as a form of protection, and local schools have designed a program of political education for their students that borders on propaganda.
I have spent months investigating the structure of political education in three Portland-area school districts: Tigard-Tualatin School District, Beaverton School District, and Portland Public Schools. I have cultivated sources within each district and obtained troves of internal documents related to the curriculum, training, and internal dynamics of these institutions. We can best understand the political education program in Portland schools by dividing it into three parts: theory, praxis (or practice), and power. The schools have self-consciously adopted the “pedagogy of the oppressed” as their theoretical orientation, activated it through a curriculum of critical race theory, and enforced it through the appointment of de facto political officers within individual schools, generally under the cover of “equity and social-justice” programming. In short, they have begun to replace education with activism.
The results are predictable. By perpetuating the narrative that America is fundamentally evil, steeping children in race theory, and lionizing the Portland rioters, they have consciously pushed students in the direction of race-based “revolution.” In the language of the Left, the political education programs in Portland-area districts constitute a “school-to-radicalism pipeline”: a training ground for child soldiers. This is not hyperbole: some of the most active and violent anarchist groups in Portland are run by teenagers, and dozens of minors were arrested during last year’s riots. These groups have taken up the mantle of climate change, anticapitalism, antifascism, and Black Lives Matter—whatever provides a pretext for violent “direct action.”
Contrary to those who believed that the end of the Trump presidency would bring a “return to normalcy,” the social and political revolution in Portland has only accelerated under President Joe Biden. On Inauguration Day, teenage radicals marched through southeast Portland, smashing the office windows of the state Democratic Party and unfurling large banners with hand-painted demands: “We don’t want Biden, we want revenge”; “We are ungovernable”; “A new world from the ashes.” Intoxicated by revolution and enabled by their elders, Portland’s kids are not all right.
Tigard, Oregon, is a placid suburb southwest of Portland. A local shopping mall hosts a Macy’s, a Dick’s Sporting Goods, and a Cheesecake Factory. The city’s historic main street is a pastiche of coffeehouses, boutiques, repair shops, and restaurants. Historically, the city’s political squabbles have concerned zoning and land-use issues—in other words, the typical politics of an affluent American suburb. Demographically, Tigard is not diverse; it numbers only 636 blacks out of a total population of 52,368, making up approximately 1 percent of residents.
Nonetheless, educators at the Tigard-Tualatin School District have gone all-in on the social-justice trinity of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Last June, at the height of the nationwide unrest, Superintendent Sue Rieke-Smith and Board Chair Maureen Wolf signed a proclamation “condemning racism and committing to being an anti-racist school district.” The preamble to the document recited the names of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, and confessed that the district’s “students of color, and Black students in particular, still regularly experience racism in [their] schools.” To rectify this, the superintendent pledged to become “actively anti-racist,” “dismantle systemic racism,” implement a “collective equity framework,” establish “pillars for equity,” deploy “Equity Teams” within schools, create racially segregated “Student Affinity Groups,” and use “an equity lens for all future curriculum adoptions.”
The next month, the district announced a new Department of Equity and Inclusion and installed social-justice activist Zinnia Un as director. Un quickly created a blueprint, which I have obtained through a whistle-blower, for overhauling the pedagogy and curriculum at Tigard-Tualatin schools. The document calls for adopting the educational theories of Brazilian Marxist Paulo Freire, whose “pedagogy of the oppressed” (summarized in a 1968 book with that title) was originally designed to instill “critical consciousness” among impoverished South Americans and to forge the conditions for overthrowing the dictatorial governments of the era. (See “Pedagogy of the Oppressor,” Spring 2009.) Following Freire’s categorizations, Un writes that the Tigard-Tualatin school district must move from a state of “reading the world” to the phase of “denunciation” against the revolution’s enemies and, finally, to the state of “annunciation” of the liberated masses, who will begin “rewriting the world.”
“At the final stage, trainers plumb their subjects’ psyches to ensure that ‘whiteness’ has been banished.”
In her blueprint, Un describes the new oppressor as an amalgamation of “whiteness,” “colorblindness,” “individualism,” and “meritocracy.” These are the values of capitalist society—but for Un, they are the values of white society, the primary impediment to social justice.
What is the solution to pathological whiteness? According to Un and the Tigard-Tualatin School District, the answer lies with a new form of “white identity development.” In a series of “antiracist resources” provided to teachers, the Department of Equity and Inclusion includes a handful of strategies for this identity transformation, intended to “facilitate growth for white folks to become allies, and eventually accomplices, for anti-racist work.” Couched in the language of professional development, the process assumes that whites are born “racist,” even if they “don’t purposely or consciously act in a racist way.” The first step in the training document is “contact,” defined as confronting whites with “active racism or real-world experiences that highlight their whiteness.” The goal is to provoke an emotional rupture that brings the subject to the next step, “disintegration,” in which he or she feels intense “white guilt” and “white shame,” and admits: “I feel bad for being white.” The training then outlines a process of moving white subjects from a state of “reintegration” to “pseudo-independence” to “immersion” to “autonomy.”
In the early stages, activities include “attending a training, joining an allies group, participating in a protest.” Later, white subjects are told to analyze their “covert white supremacy,” host “difficult conversations with white friends and family about racism,” and use their “privilege to support anti-racist work.” At the final stage, trainers plumb their subjects’ individual psyches to ensure that their “whiteness” has been banished. Subjects must answer a series of questions to demonstrate their commitment: “Does your solidarity make you lose sleep at night? Does your solidarity put you in danger? Does your solidarity cost you relationships? Does your solidarity make you suspicious of predominantly white institutions? Does your solidarity have room for Black rage?”
This is a pedagogy not of education but of revolution. It’s also textbook cult indoctrination: convince initiates of their fundamental guilt; present a remedy through participation in the group; manipulate emotions to achieve compliance; identify and organize against an amorphous scapegoat; demand total loyalty to the new orthodoxy; proselytize through personal circles; isolate from old friends and family; and keep the ultimate solution always out of reach. A veteran teacher who requested anonymity, out of fear of reprisals, told me that the “big change” happened when the new superintendent and equity and inclusion director took over the district. Immediately, the focus shifted from academics to politics, and employees were expected to fall in line with the new ideology. The teacher described one professional-development training that left some of her colleagues in a neighboring school devastated: “They had teachers actually crying because of their ‘whiteness.’ ”
Which brings us to the last plank in Tigard-Tualatin’s antiracism program: enforcement. As soon as Un took over as equity and inclusion director, she formulated a new “hate speech” policy designed not just to prevent truly discriminatory speech but also to pathologize any political opposition to the new order. The cultural cues in the district are clear: teachers must support Black Lives Matter protests and oppose anything that smacks of conservatism.
“I almost feel like we’re walking around on eggshells. You have to be careful what you say,” a veteran teacher told me. “I’m afraid of speaking up for fear I might lose my job. . . . I mean, what would happen if I said I’m a conservative Republican Christian? How would that go?” When I asked how the new political education program had affected her personally, her voice broke: “I don’t want go back to work. I don’t believe in this. It goes against my faith system. . . . We’re all created as equals in God’s sight, and this is just wrong, the way we’re teaching our children. I don’t have to be embarrassed because of my skin color.”…
Continue Reading