The fanatical thinking that’s on its way to Britain

For anyone who isn’t following the long march of racial self-flagellation through America’s institutions, last week’s revelations about the excesses of New York City’s education tsar will come as a shock. Schools chancellor Richard Carranza has introduced mandatory ‘anti-bias and equity training’ for the city’s 75,000 teachers at a cost of $23 million a year. During these ‘workshops’ the teachers are told that ‘worship of the written word’, ‘individualism’ and ‘objectivity’ are all hallmarks of ‘white supremacy culture’ and that it is better to focus on middle class black students than poor white ones.

To give you an idea of what these struggle sessions are like, take the experience of a Jewish superintendent of schools, as reported in the New York Post. At a training meeting last year, she was asked ‘What lived experience inspires you as a leader to fight for equity?’ and responded by telling the group about members of her family who’d lost their lives in the Holocaust. That had taught her about the dangers of racism, she said.

Unfortunately, this was judged to be politically incorrect and she was attacked by a black superintendent for being insufficiently woke. ‘This is not about being Jewish!’ she was told. ‘It’s about black and brown boys of colour only. You better check yourself.’ This blinkered, identarian approach is by no means confined to New York. Carranza himself was the superintendent of San Francisco’s Unified School District, which has its own Office of Equity dedicated to spreading neo-Marxist mumbo jumbo about why ‘students of colour’ are underachieving, and schools of education across America have become madrassas for indoctrinating teachers. At the University of Washington’s Secondary Teacher Education Programme, students are segregated according to race, sexuality and gender and asked to rank themselves in the intersectional hierarchy of oppression.