Teachers learned how white people harnessed sparkling vampires, the Bible, and an animated Disney mermaid to oppress and dehumanize others in order to perpetuate white supremacy.
This is Part 2 of our coverage of DPIs Fall Teacher Training Seminar funded by tax dollars intended for disabled students to justify and encourage educator-driven cultural racism in schools.
Part 1 covered Dr. Bettina Love’s demand for trillions in reparation for educational reform efforts.
Context: Wisconsin’s student achievement scores show that a large majority of K12 students can neither read nor do math at their own grade level. Yet DPI has told the legislature the top priority of all their 600+ staff is Diversity, Equity and Inclusion; these quarterly race-hate training seminars show how deep that commitment goes.
This Fall, DPI’s teacher training sessions focused on how white people are so deeply and inherently malicious and rage-filled that they have used their culture – white supremacy culture – to hijack the Bible, Disney, Twilight, and the very concept of love, to violently dominate and oppress others.
We wrote earlier this month about the DPI quarterly seminar, funded by federal tax dollars designated for special education, where CRT crusader Dr. Bettina Love educated the educators about how every form of education reform is an expression of race-based hatred and that Black people are owed more than $2 trillion in education-only reparations for the past 40 years (and a bigger bill to come later).
That may seem like plenty to cover, but DPI doesn’t do anything – aside from educating children – by half-measures. Dr. Love was joined by three other speakers:
- Durryle Brooks, whose dissertation explores the belief that white culture’s views on love are linked to power and privilege and represent an ideology that is devastating and traumatic for oppressed groups because everything from the Bible to Twilight vampires to Ariel’s romance with Prince Eric perpetuates the belief that love is only for white, hetero, cis people. Well, and vampires.
- Debby Irving, the author of “Waking up White” and an international presenter who asserts white culture (especially through white, Protestant, heterosexual cisgender men of the ‘owner class’) destroys joy and humanity.
- Paula Rabideaux spoke about how land acknowledgement is a manifestation of Indigenous cultural etiquette that predate colonization by whites and is necessary for white people to perform as a step toward reconciliation.
You might well wonder, as we do, how this slate of offerings helps disabled kids in need of special education services.
But, O, that way madness lies. (Soon few will recognize those words from King Lear, since as we reported, mentions of the bard were expunged from the DPI English standards.)
Test scores show DPI doesn’t expect reading teachers to be able to teach reading, and similarly they don’t expect to use limited special education dollars on special education. Not when every one of their 600+ staff is focused primarily on anti-racism efforts rather than pedestrian things like reading and math.
Along with Love’s presentation, the other Fall presenters centered on a theme of how whiteness – white culture, white colonizers, white people in the workplace, white being – is responsible for all societal ills.
The Ongoing Colonization of Native Lands
The land acknowledgement session, with its theme of needed reconciliation from past and present white colonizers, set the stage for Love’s demands for reparations for white rage and oppression.
Like all DPI meetings, these quarterly trainings start with a land acknowledgement, a statement that we (wherever we may be in Wisconsin) are occupying the ancestral lands of Native Americans. These DPI teacher trainings use far more aggressive land and labor acknowledgement language than the more public-facing language DPI uses.
Generally, the audience is encouraged to visit a website to see a map showing which native nation’s ancestral land(s) your home, business or workplace occupies because of white colonization and violence. The state map below shows the numerous overlapping ancestral lands of indigenous peoples; the state capitol sits on land that is listed as territory belonging to 6 different nations.
Presenter Paula Rabideaux, a member of the Menominee Nation, conducted a short session about the importance of the land acknowledgement statement. She says there is a false, perpetuated narrative that before colonizers the Native Americans were small groups of hunter-gatherers who lived hand to mouth as environmentalists who protected the environment. Rabideaux says in truth Indigenous people were and are sophisticated resource managers, and the false narratives serve to perpetuate the erasure indigenous people and their culture.
Acknowledging the land is a pre-colonization tradition of native people and is particularly important, because of past, current, and ongoing colonization, for the occupiers of the land to do at any gathering as a small step toward reconciliation.
Rabideaux encouraged teachers to use the land acknowledgement as part of their curricula.
Whiteness as a Force of Destruction
The executive summary of the next session might read: Culture is valuable and vital and should be cherished and elevated. Except white culture, which should be eliminated, oppressed, marginalized because it is toxic. White culture is white supremacy culture and white people must reject their culture.
Author Debby Irving discussed how white people can have transformational conversations – letting go of the bad habits dominant white culture instilled in them. These negative ‘dominant culture habits’ include things like wanting to do or say the right thing, rushing, and seek predictable outcomes in the dominant drive to win or succeed.
This is right out of the all-white-people-are-white-supremacists-and-here-are-15-dead-giveaways handbook. We’ve written about how this list is used in beginning teacher training in Madison schools:
It is worth noting that they seem to ignore how many of these purported markers of white supremacy are also characteristic of DEI, CRT, and Anti-Racism.
There was a discussion of the flawed concepts of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, and the harm in giving ‘stars’ for anyone who capitulates to dominant white culture by being a ‘go-getter’ wanting to do something ‘right’ or the ‘right way.’
Irving says white male protestants of the ‘owner class’ who pass as hetero and cis are the small group who “enforces” white supremacy culture, which she defines as including not just racism, but sexism, homophobia, religious intolerance, ageism, classism, colorism, ‘looksism’ and all the other isms.
When a participant suggested white culture shouldn’t be classified as “bad,” Irving pushed back. She said when top-down elements of white supremacy culture are being used to snuff out genius and joy, that’s evidence of oppression. The DPI host backed her up saying white supremacy culture hurts everyone, even white people.
Irving also indulged in the time-honored educrat’s mantra of how “mandated testing” and “scripted curriculum” – which are markers of white supremacist culture’s focus on measuring things and having there be ‘one right way’ to do things – deprive teachers of the flexibility to explore ideas and concepts with students. (Imagine all the ideas and concepts that might be open to students who can…read.)
It’s this sort of knee-jerk opposition to any guidelines and progress markers among educrats that, as we wrote recently, resulted in a generation of young people many of whom believe Jews caused the Holocaust. Even seeing this clear evidence K12 schools were failing to appropriately teach modern history, DPI refused to support mandatory Holocaust education legislation because they didn’t want to be told what to teach.
Whiteness Destroys Humanity
Irving will no doubt be back for another DPI event because she too is writing another book, this one called Whiteness Doesn’t Love You, which will talk about the way whiteness keeps people small and destroys their humanity. She explains dominant white culture has only one goal, which is to require allegiance to the toxic culture than to any other human, including oneself.
Whiteness Destroys Success
Irving spoke about the new problem of the Glass Cliff which is a term coined to describe a the phenomenon of a woman or person of color being promoted to a senior leadership role.
Sounds like that might be a positive, right? Wrong.
The Glass Cliff narrative claims women and persons of color are brought into challenging leadership roles as a form of sabotage by the white supremacists who run everything.
By placing women and minorities in senior leadership positions, especially in struggling firms, their failures will prevent them from being promoted further.
Whiteness Destroys Love
Dr. Durryle Brooks is a social justice consultant whose focus is ‘operationalizing love’ and based on the premise that white supremacists (i.e. all white people) use their dominant concept of love as a “tool of oppression” to perpetuate white supremacist ideology and to dismiss, marginalize, exploit others.
Brooks recounted a story where as a graduate student a white female professor – one he says had written extensively on social justice education and had dedicated her life to fighting oppression – told the class that she was going to “colonize” them. Brooks did not explain the context but describes this as an act of violence and oppression in the classroom that caused physical harm and trauma to his body he described (in part) as follows:.
I remember my lungs caving in. My chest gave way under the symbolic weight of that discursive act—a violent act. My body still remembers the loss and hopelessness I felt that moment. Those acts of pedagogical and epistemological violence demanded nothing less than submission and obedience. The shock and the internal destabilization that resulted was re-traumatizing. In that moment, I felt unloved and unwanted. I felt a welling up of anger and my body trembled…I could not think, concentrate, or process. She went on teaching, but there was no more learning possible for me there that day or for many weeks to come.
This classroom violence perpetrated upon him inspired him to focus on the topic of love. According to Brooks, whites have defined love as related to romance and familial contexts in order to oppress others. In order to provide justice and liberation, love needs to be redefined and based in black and brown lived experience to tend the whole person.
Whiteness Hijacked the Bible, The Little Mermaid, and Twilight
Brooks told the attendees Christiandom (sic) and theology positioned black people to be enslaved, justified it using scripture. Justice requires calling out the use of scripture to justify exploitation and ‘social control’ of Black people. And that Disney and the Twilight franchise demonstrate the toxic, oppressive form of love in white culture.
Below is the transcript of a portion of Brooks’ presentation:
What does all that really mean? It’s not entirely clear even Brooks knows. It seems to be a word salad of white-hate/social justice/CRT buzzwords that don’t necessarily form decipherable sentences, much less developed concepts.
The gist seems to be that operationalizing love means something like erasing bad/dominant/white culture and replacing it with a good/brown/black culture. Because Disney movies and vampire romances and the Bible – as manifestations of white supremacy culture – don’t center Black Lives Matter like they should.
The Left’s DEI Trap
We’ve seen colleges across the country start to abandon their DEI departments; we’ve even seen some UW schools “eliminate” their DEI divisions. Some on the right are viewing this as a positive development.
They should stop their victory laps.
The left isn’t abandoning DEI, they’re rebranding and expanding it because it doesn’t go far enough.
Irving broke down the limitations she sees in DEI efforts, word by word.
- Diversity is too limited a word. People who think the school they work in that’s 98% black is ‘diverse’ are wrong; plantations would be diverse by that measure. She says diversity is about who controls a space, not who is in the space.
- Inclusion is just a warm fuzzy word that bows to the power element of white people who gatekeep, and control who gets to be included.
- Equity is misunderstood says Irving, and should be looked at as a course correction.
She says more effort should be invested in working with white people, especially those who don’t believe in anti-racist work. She says when she works with schools “struggling” with a group trying to take control
Dr. Love derided DEI efforts in her presentation as phony efforts designed to fail because there is not enough power and authority given to DEI leaders and departments.
The left is not giving up on DEI, they’re digging in.