A Louisiana resident who identified himself as Marshawn delivered a fiery, emotional speech to lawmakers during a state Senate hearing over redistricting Monday, accusing Republicans of trying to “cheat” Black voters out of political power.
“The MAGA party is the last breath of the Confederacy,” he told lawmakers.
“If y’all could give us less than zero seats, you would do it.”
Marshawn’s testimony came as Louisiana Republicans advance a new congressional map after the Supreme Court weakened key protections in the Voting Rights Act.
“There will be no more of your party,” he said. “The midterms gonna come, y’all gonna get wiped out,” he said.
#Louisiana
#Redistricting
#VotingRights
The Blacker the Content the Sweeter the Truth: theroot.com
Despite Dr. Summers’ attempt to have the Harvard trustees muzzle the Harvard Crimson, follow the link to the reporting excerpted below.
This is absolutely disgusting. Larry Summers discussed wanting to fuck a former Harvard student who was Chinese with Epstein. He nick named her "peril" a reference to the racist "yellow peril."
Larry Summers needs to resign.
www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...
With the acceptance of $23 million from Microsoft and OpenAI for an AI teacher training institute, we now know that Randi Weingarten has led the AFT over the cliff on AI.
Meanwhile, the news media is reporting on a new Common Sense Media study that show that AI bots regularly exhibit racial bias when asked to design learning tasks or behavioral interventions for black and white children.
Asked to generate intervention plans for struggling students, AI teacher assistants recommended more punitive measures for hypothetical students with Black-coded names and more supportive approaches for students the platforms perceived as white, a new study shows.
These findings underscore the need to halt the rush to use AI bots to “assist” teachers, especially new teachers or poorly-prepared one who have never taken increasingly-rare courses that offer guidance in how to root out bias in the classroom. Special education students are particularly vulnerable to misuse of these bots.
When George Clooney, Michael Moore, and the New York Times decided last summer that Biden was too old to be President, it never occurred to them, apparently, that U.S. voters might prove themselves less ageist than they are racist and/or sexist, whether explicitly or implicitly. A major oversight, we now know.
Spend a few minutes studying the visual aid below (click it to enlarge). Let its message sink in.
Does this chart suggest a reason that the Trump fascists want the nation's youth narrowly programmed in K-16 Christian nationalist schools, rather than in schools that encourage cultural and economic mixing and that allow for diversity of thought and expression?
The 6-3 decision this week by the majority on the U. S. White Supremacist Court to kill affirmative action in college admissions underscores an elite antiquarian fixation as old and as morally debauched as the white supremacist plantation owners of the antebellum South.
By stepping backwards toward a return of an apartheid Jim Crow society, this time attempting to hide its hideous naked racism behind the fig leaf of color-blindness, today's white power structure, ironically, may accomplish a feat that generations of social progressives and anti-racist education reform have been unable to pull off: the eventual elimination of racist and classist standardized testing for any high stakes purpose--be it at the individual or the institutional level).
From the ACT and SAT up to the GRE and LSAT, and down to the TCAP and MCAS and a slew of other state exams suffered each year by K-12 students, this malign decision to kill affirmative action by the six right-wing radicals on the Court will highlight the roadblocks standardized tests impose on marginalized students, whether from income or ethnicity.
To the extent that higher ed institutions continue, moving forward, their efforts to promote diversity among their student bodies, such tests, I predict, will be minimized or dropped entirely from admissions criteria (as they have been already in California's state colleges in universities).
Of course, in states with white nationalist super-majorities controlling legislatures, don't expect state institutions to be allowed any strategy to block the proliferation of the kinds of testing tools that have been used for over a hundred years to assure the dominance of a phony meritocracy based on white privilege and the oppression of minoritized groups.
In a Tennessee institution literally constructed, block by block, upon white supremacy, treasonous behavior, and political treachery, what happens when its soulless, hateful, semi-literate guardians are faced with two democratically-chosen black and young representatives who are much more intelligent and much more articulate than the entire biscuit-gravy band of dim-witted hillbilly fascists?
Being confronted, day in and day out, with their own well-groomed intellectual and moral inadequacies finally became too much to take, especially when it became clear that their own supporters were starting to notice--and starting to listen to the passionately-rational arguments set forth by these young black men determined to enact laws to protect Tennessee's children, rather than Tennessee's gun industry.
So what did they do? The Tennessee T---- Party did what their ancestors would have done, given the present legal constraints against barbarous acts. They chose televised political lynching.
Given their cognitive limitations, TN's supermajority of idiots could not see beyond the ends of their pointy noses, which they had just cut off to spite their seething red faces.
Overnight, Mr. Jones and Mr. Pearson have become inspirations for an entire generation of thoughtful progressive citizens around the entire globe. In short, the fools of the Tennessee Taliban have done more to bring about their own political demolition than the two Justins could have ever conceived just two days ago.
During the pandemic, many colleges and universities decided to drop the most infamous discriminatory tools of the college admissions trade: the SAT and ACT. Now that wishful thinking regarding Covid has entirely displaced rational analysis in our nation's policymaking centers, it's not surprising to see the first of America's most privileged universities for the most privileged move backward to once again adopting a screening tool born in an era, unlike now, when colleges did not feel compelled to hire PR firms to disguise their racism and bigotry.
Below is a clip from a brief paper by Tom Rudd in 2011, and below that are the charts which demonstrate clearly the points about family income and SAT scores. So congratulations MIT: you have shown us your reestablished priorities to protect your institution's white wealthy elitism. One would think such rarefied air would reek less of untreated sewage.
A close look at the distribution of average SAT scores by race and family income suggests that what the SAT does a very good job of measuring is “access to opportunity.” The correlation between SAT scores and reported family income is very high. In 2009, the highest average score on the SAT was posted by students who reported their family income as greater than $200,000 annually. For these students, high access to opportunity, generally evidenced by high SAT scores, is cumulative. Access to high performing primary and secondary schools leads to high SAT scores that lead to heightened opportunity to attend selective colleges and universities which leads to greater opportunity to choose a life that “one has reason to value.”Despite historic and impassioned prognostications about the public mission of the academy to energize fundamental democratic values including racial and ethnic diversity, it appears that most highly selective colleges and universities use the SAT (or the ACT) as a key component of their admissions strategy.
Here are all three test sections next to each other (zoomed in on the vertical axis, so you can see the variation among income groups a little more clearly):
Source: College Board
A few observations:
There’s a very strong positive correlation between income and test scores. (For the math geeks out there, the R2 for each test average/income range chart is about 0.95.)
On every test section, moving up an income category was associated with an average score boost of over 12 points.
Moving from the second-highest income group and the highest income group seemed to show the biggest score boost. However, keep in mind the top income category is uncapped, so it includes a much broader spectrum of families by wealth.
Legislative attempts to restrict how children are taught about racism in schools have multiplied, according to the nonprofit news organization Chalkbeat, which tracked such efforts in 28 states. Tennessee, where I live, just passed a law banning any discussion of race that might cause a student “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or another form of psychological distress.” Laws like this one are designed to tie the hands of teachers and simultaneously appeal to the meanest elements of the Republican base.
I’ve watched this play out at close range as the Williamson County chapter of Moms for Liberty, a national organization of conservative parents, filed an official grievance with the state commissioner of education. The complaint alleges that “Wit & Wisdom,” a literacy curriculum used in more than 30 state school districts, including Williamson County, violates the new state restrictions.
The specific target of Moms for Liberty’s ire: a unit in the second-grade curriculum called “Civil Rights Heroes.” The texts singled out for objection include “Separate is Never Equal” by Duncan Tonatiuh, the story of a Mexican American family’s successful effort to integrate California schools; “Martin Luther King Jr. and the March on Washington” by Frances E. Ruffin; and “Ruby Bridges Goes to School: My True Story” by Ruby Bridges, the Black woman who integrated New Orleans public schools when she was a first grader.
It’s important to note that these titles are all early readers or read-aloud stories written for young children. Nothing in them is untrue, nor is anything “anti-American” or “anti-white,” as the Moms for Liberty argue. They’re just true stories, told simply, of people contending heroically with the terrible consequences of racism.
The Moms for Liberty complaint is based in a ludicrous reading of these wonderful books. I read every book in the unit and was amazed at how carefully they all kept the unavoidable ugliness to a level that would not traumatize a child — not a Black or Brown child whose ancestors may have faced far worse than the injustices recounted in these pages, and not a white child whose ancestors may have sympathized with the people hurling insults at 6-year-old Ruby Bridges.
On the contrary, the books take care to point out that some white people did stand up for the rights of their Black neighbors. Indeed, the only message that could possibly be derived from these stories is the need to treat others with dignity and to work for justice for all people. Today Ms. Bridges gives talks to schoolchildren about what happened to her as a little girl. In “Ruby Bridges Goes to School,” she writes, “I tell children that Black people and white people can be friends. And most important, I tell children to be kind to each other.”
. . . that racism is a normal feature of society and is
embedded within systems and institutions, like the legal system, that
replicate racial inequality. This dismisses the idea that racist
incidents are aberrations but instead are manifestations of structural
and systemic racism.
Today Tennessee's GQP governor, Bill Lee, signed into law a bill that offers empirical evidence that CRT is not a theory at all but, rather, an incisive description of the factual state of affairs at the Tennessee Capitol.
Among other things, Tennessee's teachers can't instruct that “an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, is inherently privileged, racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or subconsciously.”
If teachers dare bring up the subject of racism, it is only allowed as “[i]mpartial discussion of controversial aspects of history.” No editorializing here, teachers. After all, we know there are plenty of "very fine people on both sides."
Penalties for breaking the new law include loss of state funding for schools or school systems.
The Sun Herald reports
that Biloxi administrators pulled the novel from the 8th-grade
curriculum this week. School board vice president Kenny Holloway says
the district received complaints that some of the book's language "makes
people uncomfortable."
Published in 1960, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Harper Lee deals with racial inequality in a small Alabama town.
A
message on the school's website says "To Kill A Mockingbird" teaches
students that compassion and empathy don't depend upon race or
education. Holloway says other books can teach the same lessons.
The name of the school is Narvie J. Harris Theme School. The principal's name is Lisa Watkins, and her email address is lisa_f_watkins@dekalbschoolsga.org. Phone #: 678.676.9202
From New Age box
fades to braids, a display on the wall of a suburban Atlanta elementary
school tried to illustrate a variety of “inappropriate” haircuts and
hairstyles. But there was one thing the children who were photographed
had in common: They were all black.
The
display by the Narvie J. Harris Theme School in Decatur, Ga., was taken
down on Thursday — the same day it had been put up — after being widely
criticized as racially insensitive. The episode happened at a time when
cities and states across the United States have adopted legislation
making it illegal to discriminate on the basis of a person’s hairstyle.
The
faces of the children in the photographs were covered with Post-it
notes. It was unclear if they were students at the school, which is 95
percent African-American, according to the state’s Governor’s Office of
Student Achievement.
The display went viral after Danay Wadlington, the owner of a beauty parlor in the nearby city of Duluth, posted a photograph of it on Facebook after her client, whose child goes to the school, gave it to her. That woman did not want to be identified.
Along with Tennessee's governor, Trump voters yesterday commemorated the contributions of Confederate general, war criminal, and first Grand Wizard of the KKK, Nathan Bedford Forrest. On Wednesday, Lee signed the proclamation:
"I signed the bill because the law requires that I do that and I haven’t looked at changing that law," Lee said Thursday.
He declined to say whether he believed state law should be changed to no longer require the governor to issue such proclamations or whether he had reservations about doing so.
So egregious was this act that even Ted Cruz called out Tennessee's governor this week. Now when your governor is to the right of Ted Cruz, you know you're in trouble.
This latest assault on decency is a reminder of how far we haven't come in so much of the South (and elsewhere).
Now for the quiz: What does Tennessee have in common with Mississippi and New York?
Answer: All three are among the ten states with the highest levels of segregated schools.
A hundred years ago W.E.B. Dubois advocated for selecting that most "Talented Tenth" of African Americans to receive the best education available and, thus, become the leaders for efforts to integrate a virulently-racist American society.
Today black youngsters seeking to attend New York City's best high schools must view Dubois's goal as purely aspirational.
Like thousands of other school systems in America, New York City's public school system is using the same standardized testing techniques that public and private schools (and colleges) have been using for over hundred years to keep back the black, put down the brown, and detour the poor.
The students pictured above (from the New York Times) are some of the 29 black students of the 3,300 students of Stuyvesant High School. Story here.
“Blowing the racist dog whistle in politics is shameful. This disgraceful practice against black candidates unfortunately has a long and shameful history. That this would happen in California in 2018 is deeply disturbing. It appears you have chosen to follow President Trump’s playbook of using lies and fake news to smear prominent leaders of color.” — California Hawaii NAACP letter admonishing Marshall Tuck’s racism
The NAACP’s letter rightfully calls Marshall Tuck and his corporate backers out for their “[b]lowing the racist dog whistle in politics.” For business banker Tuck and the market-share obsessed charter school industry to accuse others of “not serving minorities” is really quite astonishing.
We must bear in mind that this is the same Tuck whose policies, much like those of his contemporary counterparts Tom Horne and John Huppenthal of Arizona, caused irreparable harm to students of color. Tuck closed down popular, research proven, Ethnic Studies programs. For example, Tuck completely eliminated Ethnic Sudies at (PLAS) Santee High School. Tuck also restricted and shuttered well regarded and research proven Heritage Language Programs and Dual Language Immersion programs. These language program closures and restrictions were so egregious, and such a violation of students’ civil rights, that the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Public Counsel Law Center jointly filed a Uniform Complaint Cause of Action against Tuck on their behalf.
It took years of protracted court battles to defeat Horne and Huppenthal’s attacks on students of color. We can stop Tuck from carrying out that same agenda by simply electing Tony Thurmond. Californians have an opportunity to show Tuck and his right-wing backers that there’s no room for bigotry and ethnocentrism in our public institutions.
How reactionary is Marshall Tuck on education issues? One measure is to compare his views to those of the notoriously right-wing JBS and GOP stalwarts. Here we look at some critical issues facing students, families, and our public schools.
Remember that Marshall Tuck, like his white supremacist counterparts Tom Horne and John Huppenthal, shuttered Ethnic Studies, killed Dual Language Immersion Programs, and eliminated Heritage Language Programs.
Last January Trump's boys in Congress put together new work rules for Medicaid, which promises to brutally dump untold numbers of sick and poor people from the Medicaid roles, just to make the Kochs, Waltons, and Mercers of the world sleep a little better at night.
The Washington Post has an analysis today that provides some of the details on how states with big red voting blocks are customizing their rules to advantage the white rural Trump voters who would, otherwise, get really pissed about being treated like black folks:
. . . .In Ohio, Michigan and Kentucky, work-requirement waivers would include exemptions for counties with the highest levels of unemployment, which are overwhelmingly white, rural — and GOP-leaning. But most of these exemptions would do nothing to help people of color who live in high-unemployment urban areas, because they live in places where countywide unemployment numbers are skewed by the inclusion of wealthy suburbs. In Michigan, for instance, Medicaid work requirements would exempt those living in counties with an unemployment rate of over 8.5 percent — but leave out high-unemployment (and majority-black) cities such as Detroit and Flint. According to an analysis of state data done by The Post, whites would account for 85 percent of those eligible for the unemployment exemption, despite making up only 57 percent of the potentially affected population. African Americans, in contrast, would constitute a mere 1.2 percent of people eligible for an exemption, despite being 23 percent of the affected Medicaid population. . . .
This short essay was originally published on The Daily Censored on August 11, 2011. It would seem that all of the old works on that site are gone. That's unfortunate because I published a lot of work there. I had a teaser here linking to it, a practice I stopped doing precisely because I've learned from harsh experience that websites die and all the content is lost (like my At The Chalkface works). I was able to track down a reprint on Susan Ohanian's site, but her site is having issues as well. Ultimately, I was able to retrieve a copy of the reprint from the Wayback Machine.
I want to reproduce this last sentence from Ohanian's introduction, since she had such insight into why the essay was important:
“The hardline right wing may well love the vacuous phrase “soft bigotry of low expectations,” but let’s remember that education deform democrats love it just as much. It is mostly used to put progressive activists on the defensive.” — Susan Ohanian
Elmo isn't Gramsci for kids and the mythical soft bigotry of low expectations
“We address the soft bigotry of low expectations so that we may ignore the hard racism of inequity.” — John Kuhn
Although this footage isn't new and commentators have already discussed it, it deserves reexamination since it illuminates one of the core false tenets of the corporate education reform canon.
Amidst the bizarre assertion that Sesame Street is indoctrinating children in some sort of insidious left wing plot, reactionary Ben Shapiro says that:
"I talked to one of the guys who's at Children's Television Workshop originally and he said the whole purpose of Sesame Street was cater to black and hispanic youths who, quote unquote, did not have reading literature in the house, there kind of this soft bigotry of low expectations that's automatically associated with Sesame Street."
Ahhh — the chimerical "soft bigotry of low expectations." As opposed to the hard bigotry of the pervasive institutional racism underpinning our economic system, which facilitates the division of workers and submerses a majority in abject poverty in order to make a small minority obscenely rich. The very same minority, by the way, that supports privatizing public education via charters and vouchers.
The dubious phrase is beloved by the hardline right. The Birchers at the Heartland Institute [1] use the phrase with reckless abandon. Cato, Manhattan, Hoover, and all the other reactionary right wing think tanks repeat the phrase "soft bigotry of low expectations" as if it's the mantra necessary to permanently bring back the gilded age they all pine for.
Of course the nonsensical phrase isn't limited to fringe right-wing kooks that also think John Galt and Howard Rourke are historical figures. Many supposed-liberals, or at the very least Democratic Leadership Council party operatives, use the phrase as often, if not more often than their teabagging counterparts.
The vile billionaire hedge fund shyster Whitney Tilson uses the phrase incessantly. Remember too that the ever obtuse Tilson helped form two of the most virulent corporate reform and privatization pushing organizations in existence: Teach for America (TFA) and Democrats for Education Reform (DFER). The latter, DFER, uses the phrase in its privatization propaganda. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has used the phrase. TFA's Wendy Kopp has had a lucrative career peddling the phrase. The snarling queen of Erasuregate, Michelle Rhee, cherishes such phrases. Los Angeles' poverty pimping opportunist Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa proudly plasters the phrase on twitter.
The unprincipled construction "soft bigotry of low expectations" is typically credited to the Council on Foreign Relations's arch-reactionary Michael Gerson, who was the speechwriter for fraudulent Rod Paige's Texas Education Miracle co-fraud, George W. Bush.
Like all the philosophically threadbare propaganda from the right, the expression is vapid and vacuous, without any real meaning whatsoever, putting it right along with "no excuses," and "working hard and being nice." Professor Noam Chomsky best addresses these types of phrases:
"It doesn't mean anything... That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything. Its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something: Do you support our policy?" [2]
The policy in question is to ignore poverty and demand a false accountability from all of poverty's victims. While there are countless works discussing this, a recent pair of essays by my Schools Matter colleague Professor P. L. Thomas, EdD, really get to the heart of this issue: Poverty and Testing in Education: "The Present Scientifico-legal Complex" part 1 and part 2.
Humane Expectations Devoid of any Bigotry
In my many years I've never come across an educator that had anything but "realistic expectations tempered with compassion and empathy" for their students, regardless of where they taught. Moreover, for right wing reactionaries to accuse hard working women and men that have dedicated their lives to educating inner city students of bigotry of any sort smacks of hypocrisy of the highest order. It's laughable on its face.
Of course compassion and empathy are foreign words to the rogues gallery discuss above, none of whom have ever taught in their lives. Well, with the exceptions of Wendy Kopp and Michelle Malkin — I mean, Michele Bachmann, er, — I mean Michelle Rhee (sorry it's so easy to confuse those three). Rhee is so devoid of empathy and compassion that one of the most enduring stories from her short stint as a TFA missionary is when she taped her students mouths shut with masking tape and then walked them to the lunchroom, bleeding lips and all. Kopp is seemingly less of a sociopath than Rhee, but it's clear her passion for fame and fortune outweigh any compassion she might have once had.
Access To Books
The other thing reactionary Shapiro gets entirely wrong before employing the hackneyed "soft bigotry of low expectations" nonsense, was to dismiss the Children's Television Workshop's catering to children that "did not have reading literature in the house." Access to books in the home is a major indicator of academic achievement and impoverished families have very limited access to books. This is a fact, and not something to be dismissed by a sniveling right winger threatening to "take them [Elmo and Big Bird] out back and cap them."
Another one of my Schools Matter colleagues, the distinguished Professor Stephen Krashen, PhD, has researched and written extensively on the subject of access to books. Here are a small sampling of his available short articles linking to longer works on the subject.
Given the staunch anti-intellectualism, lack of knowledge about all thing pedagogical, and academic aversion that whiny right wingers like Shapiro are known for, it's no wonder that he didn't get the whole importance of providing additional educational resources for children that "did not have reading literature in the house" like the prescient folks at Children's Television Workshop always have.
"True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity." [3]
Now that we're discussing these things, let's talk about the stark racism and classism stemming from the corporate education reform movement, which is orchestrated by the same plutocrats that aired Shapiro's television program. After all, those are the sort of things that vacuous phrases like "soft bigotry of low expectations" are supposed to distract us from.
NOTES
[1] Heartland Institute is none other than Parent Revolution's sister organization. Word is that in addition to co-hosting school privatization forums that Ben Austin and Ben Boychuck formulate policy together.
[2] Chomsky, Noam. Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda, Second Edition. New York: Seven Stories Press., 1991. pp. 25-26.
[3] Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th Anniversary Edition. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc., 2009. p. 45.
