A high school senior of mixed race is suing a taxpayer-funded charter school in Nevada over the “coercive, ideological indoctrination” that is central to its Critical Race Theory-based curriculum, which forces students to associate aspects of their identity with oppression.
The student at Democracy Prep in Las Vegas, whose mother is black and deceased father was white, claims there was a hostile classroom environment, and that he felt discriminated against in the mandatory, year-long “Sociology of Change” course required for graduation. There is another required class, “Change the World,” in which students carry out a political or social work project.
Because the so-called civics curriculum implemented by new management carried the same name as the previous curriculum, parents including Mrs. Clark “were not aware of the turn towards coercive, ideological indoctrination until they began seeing the detrimental effects it worked upon their children,” the legal complaint states.
The new curriculum “inserted consciousness raising and conditioning exercises under the banner of ‘Intersectionality’ and ‘Critical Race Theory.’ These sessions ... are not descriptive or informational in nature, but normative and prescriptive: they require pupils to ‘unlearn’ and ‘fight back’ against ‘oppressive’ structures allegedly implicit in their family arrangements, religious beliefs and practices, racial, sexual, and gender identities, all of which they are required to divulge and subject to non-private interrogation.”
William was directed “in class to ‘unlearn’ the basic Judeo-Christian principles [his mother] imparted to him, and then [the school] retaliated against [him].”
“Some racial, sexual, gender and religious identities, once revealed,” the complaint states, “are officially singled out in the programming as inherently problematic, and assigned pejorative moral attributes by Defendants.”
William Clark was required for assignments, the legal complaint says, “to reveal his racial, sexual, gender, sexual orientation, disabilities and religious identities” by his teacher, who greeted the students by saying, “Hello, my wonderful social justice warriors!” Clark was told the next step would be to determine if parts of his identity “have privilege or oppression attached to it.” Privilege was defined as “the inherent belief in the inferiority of the oppressed group.”
The legal argument the Clarks make is that William is being compelled “to make professions about his racial, sexual, gender and religious identities in verbal class exercises and in graded, written homework assignments which were subject to the scrutiny, interrogation and derogatory labeling of students, teachers and school administrators.” The defendants “are coercing him to accept and affirm politicized and discriminatory principles and statements that he cannot in conscience affirm.”
Resistance
Steven Hayward lauded the lawsuit at Power Line Blog, saying it heralds the beginning of an “active resistance” and a “counterrevolution” against the far-left takeover of American institutions.“While misguided Millennials lean heavily progressive at the moment, the next generation of young people is going to swing sharply to the right out of rebellion against the stifling conformity of the progressive left that went into hyperdrive this year,” Hayward writes.
While Trump has referred to Critical Race Theory by name, the executive order does not, instead describing it as a “malign ideology [that] is now migrating from the fringes of American society and threatens to infect core institutions of our country,” including in “workplace diversity trainings across the country, even in components of the Federal Government and among Federal contractors.”
It’s an ideology “rooted in the pernicious and false belief that America is an irredeemably racist and sexist country; that some people, simply on account of their race or sex, are oppressors; and that racial and sexual identities are more important than our common status as human beings and Americans.”
She agreed with an LGBT diversity training organization that argued the order violated its free speech rights.
Rebecca Feiden, executive director of the State Public Charter School Authority, didn’t immediately respond over the holiday weekend to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.