Grace Church High School: Teaching and the Voice of Conscience | Paul Rossi - JBP Podcast S4 E17

hello if you have found the ideas i discussed interesting and useful perhaps you might consider purchasing my recently released book beyond order 12 more rules for life available from penguin random house in print or audio format you could use the links we provide below or buy through amazon or at your local bookstore this new book beyond order provides what i hope is a productive and interesting walk through ideas that are both philosophically and sometimes spiritually meaningful as well as being immediately implementable and practical beyond order can be read and understood on its own but also builds on the concepts that i developed in my previous books 12 rules for life and before that maps of meaning thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast [Music] today almost 70 years after brown versus board of education ushered in the civil rights movement there is an urgent need to reaffirm and advance its core principles fair is the foundation against intolerance and racism fair gets that our civil rights and liberties need to be protected it's not enough just to be anti-racist we also need to be pro-human to insist on our common humanity to advocate for fairness and understanding to demand that we are each entitled to equality under law to bring about a world in which we are all judged by the content of our character and not by the color of our skin that's where fair comes in moving forward together as one race the human race i support fair i support fair i support support i support faith support i support fair join us i'm pleased to have with me today mr paul rossi paul rossi is a high school mathematics teacher and writer he graduated from cornell university with a ba in french literature in 1992 and from hunter college in new york city with an m.a in educational psychology in 2010 he's been teaching mathematics including algebra 2 and calculus at grace church high school in manhattan since 2012 his april 2021 essay i refuse to stand by while my students are indoctrinated was recently published on stacks common sense with barry weiss ms weiss is a former new york times journalist who resigned over differences with her employer and began to function as an independent investigative writer on sub stack thank you very much for agreeing to talk with me today it's a pleasure to be here what's your life like at the moment uh well i have a little more time than than usual at this point i would you know be teaching classes um uh you know i would have you know up to three classes a day but they've they've taken my classes away um and assigned them to some other folks and uh so i i basically have no more teaching duties right now um so i have a lot of time for volunteer work and some other other things like this uh which has been you know a good chance to tell my story okay so you're working at at grace um at sorry it's grace grace church high school and walk us through what happened you you're a mathematics teacher there and you published an essay with barry weiss uh last week and tell us about the school first well we're we're k through 12 school that opened up a high school in 2012 so that um well it was it was k through eight and then they opened in ninth grade and then as the ninth moved to the tenth and they brought in another ninth grade and so we we had a complete high school by 2016. and you know our high school is um it's a prep school um but over over the course of the you know particularly the last five years we've you know five six years we've been implementing um an anti-racist uh curriculum programming uh for our students as well as you know because as we were told in 2015 diversity equity and inclusion is not enough and we needed to move towards a so-called anti-racist um pedagogy and program so that was beyond diversity inclusivity and equity right it's a private it's a private high school private high school that's right it's called independent the tuition is approximately how much a year i believe that's up to 57 000 a year i think um i could it's somewhere between 50 and 60. and how big a school is it uh well our high school has about 340 students in it um and you know maybe 100 120 faculty i'm not really sure what the ratio is my faculty and staff did you enjoy teaching there i did i love teaching math um i it's just it's a wonderful thing and i you know i didn't i got into teaching math late um but it's it's something that i really enjoy uh this year has been hard because we've been teaching i've been teaching hybrid which means i teach uh both on zoom um or you know i guess until recently uh and to students in the classroom simultaneously so that's been a technical challenge it's also been you know a challenge to keep you know everybody engaged and also to to focus my attention where it needs to be um so this has been a difficult year yes i imagine so um would you have considered your relationships with you your faculty peers and the administration and the students was that essentially positive during the duration of your tenure as a teacher there yeah i mean i would say it has been positive i mean my colleagues um they sort of know where i stand i haven't i haven't sort of i haven't taken great pains to hide my thinking um in some cases i've gotten into some spats with with them over you know differences in the way that the programming has been delivered um and you know the essentially the foundations the belief the system of belief which animates it but i will say you know i've had very cordial relations with you know the dean of equity and inclusion and the office of community engagement as people you know i find i finally get along and with the students and the students you know i had a difficult first couple years as a teacher i did took me some time to really settle on a personality that worked for me but i kind of you know by hooker by crook uh you know worked out a kind of performative self that that functioned well well enough uh you know to to teach what teach pretty well i mean i won't say i'm i'm i'm excellent teacher i'm i'm decent i'm pretty good by now but you know it has taken a while and is this something that you had planned to continue pursuing did did you see yourself apart from let's say this incident did you see yourself in the teaching profession yeah i yeah i could i could um i was thinking i would i would want to be a teacher for the duration you know and uh and i i didn't really ever consider leaving teaching um until until probably this year what did you like about teaching uh i like the energy yeah i i like the energy of the students and i like to to um you know communicate with them about you know what i find true and beautiful about mathematics mathematics is was for me personally when i when i got back into it and teaching i found that it was a sort of island in the storm uh the storm of the culture wars and the sort of general the epistemological um chaos which you know which i find you know in in language and discourse right because you had a you have a b a b a in french literature and i i can't i don't presume that your m and ed psych was math focused but i could be wrong was it no it was not it wasn't okay so it's interesting that you that you ended up teaching math and also it's interesting that you founded an island in a storm and i suppose that the way that you talk about it makes it sound like that was a relief yeah from what exactly um well uh it's it's a bit of a long story uh at cornell um i studied the humanities i had a history major english major and french lit major as an undergrad and me and my my merry band of friends and cohort of of uh you know compatriots we were really into post-modernism we really loved the the paradoxes of language we studied daridan foucault and and leotard and beaudrillard and there was a certain like enthusiasm even a lust for paradox that we had and i i personally had reading texts and sort of finding out how words can mean their opposite how meanings can be seen to be taken different ways and i guess i would say that my i guess i had a kind of a breakdown from that and that i didn't really once i realized i didn't want to become a professor or go into um you know the academic world because i found that even then it was i was being pushed to say things i didn't believe i you know i kind of drifted for a decade i would i would say trying to find something that was meaningful so back when you were an undergraduate you found the postmodernists emotionally motivationally intellectually engaging and you talk about that as something that was also true of the people that you were associating with so i get the sense that there was some sense of intellectual adventure and what was it what what did post-modernism mean to you and why do you think you were attracted to it what was exciting about it well it was a poetic sensibility it was non-political in fact um you know the the true materialist marxists that you know that were sort of in in our in our uh social milieu they would they would sort of scoff at us and say that we were bourgeois um oh that's what marxists do yeah right so you know we were just playing with language and there really was no there there and actually what would what would deliver deliver us from our current predicament was some revolution in terms of material circumstances and so um but i was really you know i was really drawn to the creativity of reading a text in a in a way it was i looked at it as a way like i wasn't talented enough to be a writer but i could critique something in a creative way and sort of get my get my revenge in a sense like on the text right because that's a hell of a way to that's a hell of a way to put it when did you figure out that that's what you were doing um i think i kind of knew it at the time but later on reflection i felt when i tried to be a writer in my 30s and got nowhere and became very frustrated and despondent and depressed i thought back at that time and i realized that a lot of criticism itself is a kind of the kind of criticism that we were doing is a kind of shaking your fist at the creative process and sort of gaining gaining power over over art by by interpreting it in a way that that you found you know that that i found you know fit my world and so it it is you know what do you think the pleasure and i mean you're you're you're making a case for the pleasure in that you said to some degree that you think it was born out of well it's something like frustration at and i don't want to put words in your mouth i i truly don't i'm trying to extract out exactly what you're saying and so if i'm wrong please correct me you you had and perhaps this is not rare among people who were studying literature at elite colleges i mean you you'd have some desire to think philosophically to be seen as a philosophical thinker to be seen as a creative writer to be a creative writer there's a romanticism about that and of course that ability is what the whole enterprise depends on so it's sort of at the apex but you describe what you were enthralled by at least to some degree as revenge against not only the text but against the creative process itself as as a consequence of of what what would the emotion be because it would say like i didn't i wanted to be creative but i just couldn't you know i i didn't feel like i had anything to say and i felt that my my authority was deeply compromised just by my privilege or my place in the world but i could actually i could reach back into shakespeare and reinterpret shakespeare in a way that you know made me feel powerful you know i could i could i could expose the contradictions think of of your of your peers and what about your professors you know i i think it was i think it i mean i i don't know their state of mind but i i feel like a lot of what animated that high post modernism it was you know but it also had an element of appreciation you know just like in the way that marx admires capitalism it was also there was an element of you know wow this is amazing but it's kind of actually saying the opposite and and this just dwelling in that right you wouldn't be attending to it at all if you weren't in some sense in awe of it right because why attend to that and not something else so that has to be there at least implicitly so and and then you after you you were finished with college you said you you weren't sure exactly what direction to go in and you tried writing and oh you also mentioned let's get back to that a minute but you also mentioned that you discovered that you didn't have anything to say and also you felt that your authority was compromised okay so those are two different things they're worth delving into it's not that surprising that you didn't have anything to say in some sense because i mean you were an undergraduate and what what do you know when you're an undergraduate i mean there are staggering geniuses that come along who who who seem as an intrinsic part of them to just overflow with brilliant creativity but that's pretty damn rare and it's it's hard to have anything to say when you haven't lived much yet but then so so it sounds like you were hard on yourself because of that but also your authority you said you thought it was compromised what do you mean by that exactly well even then i mean there was in my i took some creative writing classes and even then there was a conscience of consciousness of identity politics and that the the real stories that would advance society would not come from a a white male perspective so i kind of bristled at that and but i didn't feel like the experience wasn't um of what would you call interest it wasn't of redemptive interest right like i didn't have i had things to say but but you know the people people didn't really seem to value my perspective so i kind of swallowed what i had to say i had a friend i wrote about him extensively in my not this last book i wrote but the previous book and he was very guilty for his existence as um this is years ago as a white male and he virtually refused to participate in society at all because he had swallowed hook and sinker i suppose the proposition that any manifestation of ambition on his part was to be viewed as part of the world destroying force now it eventually killed him there it was complicated but that was certainly uh a motivational let's put it that way or anti-motivational in a very profound way so some of that was his own cynicism but some of it was a certain emotional sensitivity to the potential impact his existence had on oppressed others let's say at least that's that's how he came to view it so yeah i mean and i also had a lot of rage in that you know i felt like i when my friends were do we're organizing things like or you know greenpeace and so on i would be kind of a larping they would call it larping today but i would i would say you know well you just tell me when you're ready to throw a bomb you know i was obsessed with things like you know a violent revolutions i wanted you know i was i wanted to learn how to hack and freak with phones and you know without without any real goal in mind other than to to to disrupt and break things um and so i i guess you know i'm actually lucky there wasn't an antifa back then i probably would have been a part of it and what what do you think what do you think attracted you to that i'm very curious about this because antifa for example i i understand the attraction there's a romantic attraction to revolution you know i was i i had a debate with slavo shizek about hypothetically about marxism although it didn't really go that way but when i was unpacking the communist manifesto and i mentioned that it was a call to bloody violent revolution and the crowd which was a very poorly behaved crowd in many ways broke out laughing and clapped which which really took me aback because i wasn't promoting violent revolution in any positive sense and i knew exactly or know exactly where those revolutionary sentiments got us in the 20th century but by the same token there is a romantic attraction to rebellion right i mean and and it's linked to something very deep which is the sense that we all have to some degree that we are um a minority of one against a faceless bureaucratic tyrant hell bent on at least shaping us into this into the form that it demands and commands and that that structure is to be viewed even realistically with a certain degree of skepticism and regarded at least to some degree as an arbitrary tyrant and and to stand up against that well that there is something intrinsically heroic about that although it can go very dreadfully wrong and it's something that i mean young people are called to that i mean the the developmental psychologist jean piaget pointed out that there's a messianic stage of late adolescent development where not everyone hits it but a certain number of people hit it and that manifests itself in a laudable perhaps concern with broader issues in the world as part of identity formation that all supposed to be catalyzed and shaped in universities so it doesn't find channels that are fundamentally destructive psychologically and socially so anyways back to you so you were stymied to some degree in your creative endeavor and you found some outlet for that frustration with post-modernism but then there was also this this deeper and darker attraction to some degree that you just described how have you made sense out of that in the intervening years um i i think it really was a resentment at not being able to be creative in my own life not being able to have a generative healthy creative life i mean a way to to deal with certain impulses and channel them productively why do you think you believed that that was the appropriate destiny for you to begin with well you know the great thing is that you know i was able to to work out issues with my father and you know if you have problems with with authority there's nothing more attractive than i feel for myself anyway like is a moral a blank check morally because then if you're if you're doing things for the benefit of the world well then you can you can take out all kinds of debt you can you can say well i'm you know i'm i don't have to be a good person because i believe in all the right things and i can do whatever i do is instrumental to the the coming of a better world so i you know i could i made my mother's life miserable i would argue my father i was you know i was posing but i was inhabiting the pose so deeply that i would be that i would give myself some you know i could justify anything by by the fact that everyone else was wrong and i was right and you know i i found that as a as a way to to deal with things and i it was it's a real high i mean it's a really wonderful thrilling um thing to inhabit um even though you know now today i look at it i look at it very i'm very embarrassed by it um but it's understandable i mean i don't you know it could have been no no other way really why why do you think you why aren't you like that now what changed for you well you know um i went through uh i would say teaching teaching changed me a lot because teaching was a way for me to to express myself creatively and be engaged in the world in a regular habitual productive way where i could tangibly see the benefits of my efforts and it was a social pro it's a social thing teaching and it's a performative thing teaching and it's very creative and you know every day would be different there would be new kids and they would have different problems and you know they would bring to me um you know their own cultural reference points so it's almost it's just constant renewal teaching is just a constantly renewing and self-renewing endeavor so i know you know i i realized that with other jobs that were technical or you know that were wrote those became boring very you know within three or four years but after teaching for over you know six seven years i was like this is this still isn't boring i could do this forever you know i love this so you found a way to to contribute that was concrete and habitual and regular and routine and that actually sufficed to satiate your creative impulse and that removed your resentment would you say or i would say it just it just kind of um it tempered it and and uh made me not worry about it so much i can't say it evaporated totally i mean i still have an oppositional i guess i'm an oppositional guy in some sense but um as far as institutions go but um i i was able to just focus on on my work and on the kids and and trying to be good at what i do and enjoying it you know and were you teaching before you went back to to hunter college or after no i had i had um i had been tutoring for a while before that and you know i turned to teaching when i you know the reason why i actually got the degree in educational psychology it's a story in itself and that was one where it was a jet it was it was a desperate attempt to avoid suicide essentially like i i was so depressed at that point in my life that um i felt just compressed into this tiny little ball and there was no way out i was just you know how i got to that point is all the thing but i i just went on the internet and i was like what is the last thing that i remember enjoying in my life when is the last time i actually felt a part of something and it was when i was tutoring um kids and and uh you know i had done some light tutoring and i was like okay that's really crucially important so so because what you just said is you know you were you were in des in despair yeah and then you were looking for something that was genuinely redemptive and you were searching your memory for that and you found that in mentoring okay why what was it about mentoring that had enough value that it pulled you out of that pit or that you could see that as a pathway out it was just the experience that i remembered of being with someone and being able to give them something that they could use and having having that exchange be rewarding see i've been i've been very struck by the postmodern insistence that hierarchies are predicated on power and are to be viewed with contempt as as the manifestation of tyranny and as self-serving selfish institutions and i believe that that is true when the hierarchies become corrupt but what i've observed as the appropriate counter position is that the people that i've seen who i've admired the most who are working diligently in institutions find the biggest pleasure in their life in mentoring and it's a profound pleasure there's something about allowing the best in you to serve the best in others that can't be beat by any other form of reward and a hierarchy that's functioning properly i think has the central aspect of a benevolent father which is something like encouragement it's certainly not exploitation by power and it's unbelievably cynical to make the case that that's the central aspect of functional institutions having said that i understand that institutions can become corrupted by tyranny and power and deceit but i don't i do believe that the the basis upon which a stable and productive hierarchy must be instituted is something like the paternal care for the upcoming generation and i also believe that we do take the most intense pleasure in that so it's very fascinating for me to see that that when you were scouring your memory and and inhabiting a place that was quite cynical and resentful that that turned out to be the doorway that you could path pass through and and then you went to you know you went back to university and it was a consequence of your experiences with tutoring do you remember any particular episodes when you were tutoring that stood out in your mind you know it's just sort of an image that i have of being with um you know with the with a young person and uh you know having having them focused on what they're doing and and me feeling connected to what they were doing and just that it wasn't even a specific image it was just sort of a you know something in my body that felt good i mean and i really wasn't thinking about it any more than that at that point like it was just it was literally just totally selfishly when was the last time i felt any reward in life right well that's a that's a dead serious empirical question you know if you're if you're seeing a good therapist if you're depressed one of the things that therapist will ask you to do is to watch your life and see if there's anything that lifts you out of your miasma and it's not a matter of thinking about it exactly it's a matter of paying attention and it's often surprising you stumble across something you think oh that makes me happy or that alleviates my misery and i really didn't notice that before it wasn't part of my theory you know it just happened to be a fact that i was overlooking it's dreadfully important to well it can be life-saving as you as you found out so okay so you went back to you went to uh hunter college and you you you you did an m.a an educational psych what was that like oh it was you know i i almost i almost bailed out of the application process well i you know i i had i had chosen education in the google search but then i think well i got to pair it with something else that i like so i just put psychology down i was interested in psychology and i the first thing that popped up was educational psychology degree and i found like oh it's there's something here it's a city college it's i can get the degree and you know if i spend ten thousand dollars which i saved up for my previous job i could get this thing so i go i i almost fill out the application and then i kind of kind of get wobbly and tell what's the point i'm not gonna it's not gonna do anything and then you know i remember calling my mother my mother called me and she you know they worried about me because i was you know really lost you know in my 30s and 40s and she said um you know you've got to go through this you you know she kind of got hysterical because i think she just couldn't couldn't handle like another failed endeavor on my part or just getting my act together and i you know just to calm her down i i went through with it you know because just to sort of because she was getting hysterical and yeah well it's good to have people around that will actually support your attempts to move forward especially when you're fighting with yourself and you know i've seen so many people they're 51-49 about moving forward you know or 49-51 and so they're not doing it and someone else can come behind them and give them a little tap but there are lots of people who don't have that and so then they don't get that little tap and you know it wouldn't have taken much to push them over the threshold so yeah i was lucky um so you know i got in i and then once i started moving you know i would go to i would go to classes i was tutoring on the side and and making money that way and i was able to do that and then you know i was going to class i was making friends i was i remembered how much fun school was i was doing assignments and i was like oh my god i mean i i just have to write this paper um life made sense again because it brought back sort of all of the the enjoyment of of undergraduate life that i really liked which is social and so it really was just a momentum thing like just getting back into it um and then um and what was the curriculum like at that point oh it wasn't um yeah it was it was a little bit uh you know i guess educational psychology it was uh more of a research focused thing rather than an education degree so we were considered more you know a science sort of a science-oriented research thing like you know um but and you know we studied research methods you know it was fairly rigorous uh you know compared to some education degree programs so we didn't you know i didn't we were sort of you know insulated from a lot of the the nutty stuff that was going right so that's like an island too in the same way stem fields are or were somewhat of an island so yeah okay so you came out of hunter college and you were in better shape i presume by that time yep yep and then i applied to some various teaching positions i teached i i kind of made my bones uh you know so to speak at some different places like i worked at a hague at a um i think it's called the hagwon a korean uh summer school eight hours a day drilling s.a.t um stuff um i worked at a at a failing school teaching you know tutoring s.a.t for a while or a ct and that was you know really really heartbreaking because you know those kids they hadn't had the same math teacher for longer than six months and they were they were seniors and they couldn't add fractions it was heartbreaking um and then i i applied to grace church school it was a new school that was starting up and they i was able to sort of tell a little story um you know i had i had also published a book out of high school um called up your score the underground guy did the sat with with two friends and um you know that was uh uh that was kind of a fun little project and that that book was still selling a little bit so i was sort of able to piece together a kind of out of my hodgepodge life um make a little package and i did a demo lesson and they liked me and then i got hired in the uh the inaugural faculty for the for grace your school and so what was it like going to teach at grace at grace church school well it was it was really nice because you know i was used to a corporate environment i guess i you know because of my time that i had done in a previous job at hbo um i was a technical manager it was a whole other career and you know i might i was i was very concerned that i reported to the right people or you know what's the org structure you know and they were just like well you know just you have colleagues and you can discuss things with them and we're not going to make you do anything you can you can talk to us it was it's a very friendly um environment i mean there were serious expectations like you know and and everyone took their jobs very seriously but there really was a sense of belonging and community they were very it was that was very welcoming actually and very energizing i will say because i wasn't used to that i didn't expect it and so i would be remain aloof from it you know at the beginning like what's where are these people why are they always smiling at me like what's going on you know like i don't know why i just but they gradually loosen up and you you know it was kind of corny but i would kind of go along with it and i i it's a good kind of corny yeah and i did actually you know i warmed up a little bit i felt i did feel like i was a part of things and i was able to sort of transmit that to others too and so what happened over time um it was a very gradual change that you know i would say well the within the first three years one of the tenets of our our school was that you every employee and every faculty and staff member had to attend a seminar called undoing racism that was your hr department was it or who yeah it was it was a you know it was a mandate from the dean of faculty at the time and the it was a requirement yeah yeah and you know um so i went to that and that was a very interesting experience you know it's hard to um what would you say refuse a call to anti-racism sure i mean what i mean what kind of monster yeah um and i you know you i went into it and i actually felt energized and i was converted you know i had a sort of you know i am white and i'm privileged and you're right we need to take care of this and there were people in a circle and people of all different races and backgrounds and it was facilitated and you know later i look back on it and i i realized sort of how they how they did it they did it in a very interesting seductive way um and what way was that well you know as i recall they they started out um well it was sort of two parts the first part was the history since this you know the slave ships landed on american soil and then throughout time leading up to the present and then they focused for the second half of the session they focused on you know how to help a community that has been shaped by all of this and very early in the very early in the session they said we want you to withhold any judgment of anyone's choice or agency anyone you know any of you know the minority black populations that we're talking about here we we want you to simply bracket or put you know hold hold withhold any analysis of the choices that people make because you know they that will often lead to a misunderstanding or insensitivity towards what's happening here so why do you focus on that specifically that issue specifically well because you know it was as as they retold the history and as they talk about the present circumstances they never actually revisited that so you you know you're you're constantly focused on the oppressed population in in terms of what is acting upon it as far as acting upon those individuals and you know to me that's like denying a certain agency right and that but they never actually lifted the blinders off at the end like they they would put these everyone sort of acknowledged that they were gonna go along with this at the beginning and i was like really we're going to do that we're going to treat people as less than human well okay i just it must be like a temporary thing and why did you see that as treating them as less than human i mean i presume that the people on the other side of the fence would say well you know we're we're we're all caught like corks on the sea in in the throes of vast social movements over which we have little or no control and and who are you to cast judgment on people who have been the relative relatively deprived in that regard compared to you it's possible to make a fairly stringent moral case that that's the appropriate mode of behavior but you were there was something in you that objected to that and you remember that now yeah despite the fact that you said that you were energized by this and pulled in by it why do you think why do you think it it caught you as well well it was a social thing right it was it's a people in a circle and people are talking about their experiences and people are saying as a black person i have this has happened to me and at one point they asked they actually you know and they it's it's empathy right you you care about people you you feel if you're sitting face to face with someone of course you're going to be i'm going to be sympathetic and empathetic and and people are narrating um you know but the problem i think is generalizing that to groups and you know getting you to make a different set of assumptions about those groups based on the sort of you know selective way that the empathy is leveraged i would say well there's also the implicit there's the implicit what would you say the implicit perceptual and categorical structure that comes along with it which is the a priory assumption that the appropriate classification for human beings is by group yeah and and that that that's so implicit but so pervasive that it in some sense never needs to be stated and as soon as you assume that the group level is the appropriate level then you're bound to minimize or even forbid discussion of such things as individual agency so there's something if you believe in individual agency there's there's something yeah i mean i guess about that yeah yeah and i don't you know i um i remember at one point they said you know what what do you like about being white that was that was sort of a gotcha question that they asked the white people hmm how did you answer that well i mean i'm trying to think of how it's some of these questions these questions seem to come up in our society right now that that no one's ever asked you know like well justify marriage it's like well wait a sec i don't know how to justify it we just sort of took that for granted and maybe that was appropriate right right and so it's very hard when you're put on the spot like that okay so you're white what's so great about that as far as you're concerned well i kind of knew what that i kind of knew what they were expecting so i kind of tried to play games with it a little bit because i you know they they what they were trying to do they're trying to go through the embarrassment of saying well hi there's nothing special about me being white there's nothing special but i was like no it's great i walk into a room and everyone pays attention to me and everyone thinks i'm an expert and i said it because i knew that it's kind of what they wanted um but you know i i don't usually feel that way but i knew that's kind of what they wanted but then i said it too like proudly and then i made some other people upset like some people like sounds like you really really like being white and i said well you know i i'm not that's how i've been socialized and then it was turned into kind of an argument and then the facilitator had to defend me because i actually had told him what he wanted to hear and uh it turned into kind of a a bit of a difficult moment um so i had to i had to say that that it was good to be white but not be too happy about it do you think it's a is it a reasonable question i think the i think the unreason the unreasonable part is more interesting like it's reasonable if you take spoken like a true postmodernist if you take it if you take racial identity as well this gets into a whole identity thing that i i could talk about but please do okay so so you know we know that race is a folk taxonomy okay it's not it has you know groups and it correct me if i'm wrong this is my understanding you know i'm not an expert i'm a math teacher so this is you can be sure that no matter what you say you're wrong i'm sure i'm wrong um yeah but take it for what it's worth this if you don't like it just stop watching now um you know as i understand from my races of folks taxonomy groups or individuals vary more within the groups and between the groups um it doesn't correspond in any meaningful way to you know i guess iq changes over time and things it it just doesn't have a lot it's a it's it's not a true thing it's not a true thing so when people say you know you know what do you like about being white it requires resemblance category and so a family resemblance category it's a very strange sort of category so imagine that there's a category of 11 items and if you have four of them you're in that category what that means is that two p two things in that category can have two different sets of four attributes and still be in the same category psychiatric diagnostic categories are like that so maybe there's 11 symptoms and if you have four you're in the category so it's kind of it's got edges like a like a a proper set which are the categories that we usually use in science like triangles you can define completely and you can tell what is and what isn't a triangle there aren't shades of triangle essentially and they're very distinguishable from squares but family resemblance categories we use a lot but they're they're not scientific categories they have their utility uh and we use them a lot so okay so anyways back to race um so you know there it's something that's not true and if you require someone to identify with a lie you are ins you are creating this sort of fundamental distortion now i understand that racism is real that is it this lie is instantiated in the world and it's as a social construct people is had tremendous effects on history um but i have often wondered what it is it's that obvious that racism exactly is real because it's hard to distinguish from in-group preference for example you know what i mean and and fear of novelty for example and it's complicated i'm not saying that there's obviously i'm not saying that racial bias has never existed but right you delve into it it becomes extremely complicated and it's very important if you look at things like the the hypothetical racism that the implicit association test measures it's by no means obvious that what it's measuring is only well racism at all but only racism because of all these other issues and it is different difficult we we tend to uh be in favor of in-group favoritism in certain situations and they're ver and very violently opposed to it in others so it's complicated and murky but your fundamental point is well there's there's an insistence perhaps that race is socially constructed and arbitrary and yet it's the most fundamental attribute that defines a person right and and that you know in our school after we adopted a curriculum um you know in sixth grade um and maybe even earlier but i happen to notice this in the curriculum there is there is an exploration of identity where you know and i would actually really like to hear your thoughts on this you know the individual identity is sort of acknowledged right your interests you know preferences dreams aspirations personality character all of those things are really important and you are also have a social identity and your social identity is how other people see you and you're born into this world where certain social identities are valued more than others and so they kind of lead you outside the the house of your self understanding into this world of social you know social impinging and and gradually you sort of become separate i think that the effect of this is you should prioritize how other people see you when you when you have a self-concept before you even really know who you are or you've been you you really have developed yourself you're supposed to sort of i think the kids are supposed to sort of hold it in abeyance and then um prioritize you know how other people view you and i don't think that's healthy what did you see the what did you see the car what did you see as the consequences of that in the school i mean obviously this is starting to bother you as this year you buy into it to begin with and and you're enthusiastic about it to begin with and you attribute that to well the mechanics of the initial uh education let's say um it's it's a it's a group phenomena it capitalizes on empathy it and it sounds benevolent certainly in fact it's it's the very essence of benevolence in some sense so it's it's it's a it's going to be seductive regardless of whether or not it's correct but you you become uncomfortable with it well the first thing you're uncomfortable with is that you were implicitly asked to produce a falsehood in relationship to your own identity which was yeah when you were asked the question about what you liked about being white and you said that what you said wasn't right exactly or wasn't correct wasn't true it was something that you whipped up on the spot because of the nature of the demand of the situation and you remember that so obviously that's significant i think i was just meeting and what i thought was an absurdity with an absurdity you know like i i felt the question was a little bit absurd it's sort of like a the premise right the premise is what do you call it like how how long have you been beating your wife kind of question you know so the premise of whiteness is you're supposed you have to accept the premise in order to answer the question i really have never been comfortable with the premise period because i don't think that it you know right it takes a lot of presence it takes a lot of presence of mind when you're asked a question to question the question especially when you're the student and it's the teacher that's so to speak it's the authority figure that's posing the question because you immediately have to rebel and you have to do it in an extremely sophisticated way yeah and you know this could get back to the school and i might not have passed the class and you know i'm i'm white so that would have been problematic and why are you why and that would might have had job repercussions or you know promotions or whatever you know you just you realize that to question the question mandatory yeah and to question the question in these circumstances is you know the the risk of that is so much greater than the the triumph of of dismantling the question that you're just not you're never gonna and you may see you may even fail at dismantling the way like your little your little rebellion may lead nowhere and you may be wrong you know which is the hesitation that anyone would have with an objection just that you might be wrong and so of course you're just going to fall on that side of the equation i mean that's what i did some people don't but that would you know no most people do yeah and no wonder right it's hard not like you you outlined a bunch of reasons why it's difficult to you know come up with exactly the right response at that second it's not like it's a question you're prepared for right right and you know i think i think the students do it all the time you know because there's tremendous social cost to challenging any of the assumptions of our anti-racist programming or the the manner in which it's delivered what are the costs for the students um social you know social appropriation you could have you know teachers write recommendations for them if they get a reputation that there's a fear that it could affect their applications um students have have come to me with you know concerns and examples of papers that they wrote say you know on taking a position that went against the orthodoxy and they've you know suffered a great hit from it and i've i've asked him like are you sure it just wasn't a good paper you know are you sure and then like no i actually cited this this and this and i stood you know and so i think um i think they're real i think that they're real and there's actually been you know stories that i've that they've brought to me that are you know someone defends capitalism or something and then they have a big talking to after class or something like that which is just well yes i mean how could you possibly defend capitalism while you're going to a 55 000 a year private school right right um i mean what's the probability that your parents are capitalists a hundred percent very high very so basically you're you're being you're being set to task because you have the goal to defend the very attribute of your parents that enabled you to go to the school in the first place and that of course enabled the school right and it's so it's such an ironic thing that both the administration and most faculty have such contempt for the very thing that makes them have a job you know like they they believe that if in order to achieve why do you think they have contempt for that given that it's the very thing that allows them to have a job i mean this is associated with the question we discussed earlier right about you being resentful back when you were an undergraduate it seems to me and i well let me let you answer i won't i won't push you yeah no i think that's a good connection to make i mean we all you know if you if you have baked in a resentment of authority and and and see all order is tyrannical well then you know even the hand that feeds you is going to be a tyrant and so it's also so convenient you know i've watched among my professorial peers i've worked with business schools for example quite frequently and i have my own companies and did while i was a professor and i'm not an anti-capitalist and many of my colleagues would sneer at my involvement with the business school and i thought okay so what's going on here it's like i know lots of businessmen and like look there's plenty of businessmen who have contempt for academics so it's not like it's a one-way street and and i feel just as dubious about the capitalists let's say the entrepreneurs who sneer at the ivory tower as i do about the ivory tower inhabiters who sneer at the capitalist but my sense always was with something like well look i have an iq of 145 and i'm not getting paid 700 an hour like my corporate counterpart on bay street and or wall street and i work just as hard which is true by the way because top rated professors work you know 60 70 80 hour weeks to keep on top of their research just like the high-end lawyers do in in in corporate law offices but they're not rewarded financially to nearly the same degree and so to me it was always just a matter of straight out envy it's like well if this society was structured properly professors would make a hell of a lot more than corporate lawyers it's like well yeah except you have tenure and complete creative freedom and you know that's actually worth something so and how dare you complain when you're a tenured professor because you have the best job in the world so anyways so back to the back to the faculty at the high school yeah um you know i i think well you know i this is not the case for all of them and i really don't want to generalize too much but it does seem that in certain of the humanities subjects it tends to be more um you know radical uh questioning of you know the the the foundations of you know what what creates inequity in the you know over at these schools which are you know it's almost like the more the more opportunity these schools offer the more they're part of a problem i think is the view in the sense that you know it's if you're offering me some opportunity right like if you're offering tuning into these elite kids well then what about all the other kids which is a good question um but then you know instead of sort of figuring out you know the best ways to to help the people that need it the focus is on sort of you know questioning and interrogating the you know the the the site of the top end of the inequality mm-hmm well it's an interesting moral conundrum right if you're working at an elite private school and your and your conscience is bothered by inequality and i mean virtually everybody's conscience is bothered by inequality there's very few people that walk down the street and celebrate tripping over a homeless person you know that the typical person would rather set the world up so that people didn't fall out of the system in such a painful manner so you have that plaguing your conscience but it seems like and so maybe that does provide a way out is you can continue doing what you're doing but you can also critique the system as a whole and regain some ethical equilibrium in that manner yeah i think that's a bit that's a lot of it yeah for sure um all right so you're initially uh an advocate of this you're excited about it but what happens yeah what as it rolls out over and so when did that start how many years ago about i kind of kicked in 2015 i believe okay so it's about six years we're talking about yeah and so you know that the the word came down there was a diversity as i understand it this is you know um pieced together but there was a there's a diversity task force on the board there was there was a retreat a board retreat that was led by something called the carl institute the carl institute is this outfit one of these outfits that uh that stands for critical analysis of race and learning and education and you know they you know influenced by critical theory i believe and then they you know they they sort of pitched their tent with anti-racism as uh as a philosophy and they started to you know talk to the faculty a little bit um you know the what later became the office of community engagement or which is the sort of the bureaucratic arm that you know is essentially a sort of ethical priesthood uh of how to behave properly in you know the school environment and you know how to be a good anti-racist uh but they would ask they had meetings but they would ask us things like well what does anti-racism mean to you and that's a perfectly innocuous question and you know to me i was like it means not being racist it means not differentiating you know individuals based on the color of their skin and treating people with respect and dignity no matter you know what their what their skin color is and and and they say well that's interesting you know well you know that's very interesting you know okay well they and then they just heard people out and some people had more you know i guess i would say advanced ideas about you know being aware of systemic oppression and understanding different perspectives based on how you might assume a child had been you know had developed given their circumstances and those were rewarded you know much more and those are not bad ideas you know we haven't we haven't got to the bad stuff yet um uh but it started to become apparent to me i sort of had the realization that this was really going the wrong direction when we we had a professional development meeting and they they passed out the you i'm sure you've seen it the pyramid of racism also known as the pyramid of white supremacy and it it had this a schema it was a schema arranged in the form of a pyramid with genocide at the top of the pyramid and then various layers that had categorical names like overt racism covert racism minimization indifference and then various there must have been about 50 or 60 things sprinkled on the pyramid at various levels and some of the things on the pyramid um i actually thought were you know in many cases virtues uh so things like um being apolitical or things like you know um you know there are two sides to every story um things that were contradictory like um you know not believing poc but also thinking well my black friend said dot dot dot so the idea that these two things were next to each other seemed interesting to me um also things that were just um you know political party plat you know platforms minimization yeah belong to the human race right right that was that was post-racial society why can't we all just get along prioritizing intentions over impact that's a nice one yeah yes we could we could talk about that for about three weeks yeah not believing experiences of people of color two sides to every story right yeah well it's very interesting when you look very carefully at the words that are lumped in with the other words let's say right by association okay so you had this pyramid of white supremacy and i was asked you know what do you how do you respond to this what do you think about this and i just i said i think this is extremely destructive and horrible schema to put in front of a child and i will never do it and i think that it's i just know and i said i went to the office i said i'm not teaching this and so this was when you were teaching math well you know uh yeah i should explain it at our school all the teachers um have other duties that are really important like you have an advisory and the the advisor shepherds you know maybe eight to ten kids through the four years so they come to you with problems and you can help them out you can help them out academically so this would have been something that i would needed to share with with the advisory and i think they actually so you you registered your objection i did this this is the first time i kind of registered my objection because i felt why did you do that i mean look look what you just told me remember what you just told me you said that at one point in your life you were like dangerously lost and you found your way out through mentoring that put you into the education field then you got a good job that you liked with people you cared for that was meaningful to you and it structured your life and then you bought into this anti-racist uh movement let's say and but now you decide you're not going to do it so like why you have a lot at stake at this point a lot so why what what's bugging you about this so much yeah i i think it i think some things had happened before this where i had spoken to the head of school prior to this and and warned him i i because i immediately thought of i was just thinking about anti-racism anti-racism why does that should be a good thing why why does that bother me and i what bothered me was that i knew that racism was a concept that had undergone an enormous creep that the people had very different ideas about what was and wasn't racist to some of the american flag was racist uh things that were you know perhaps um innocuous to some would have been considered racist to others and then how would you how would you adjudicate what you were actually against and i saw this as a real threat because it would lead to real problems in determining what it was that you should be anti and if you if you frame if you frame in your mission something which is anti something vague you're really setting yourself up for a witch hunt and i just sort of especially look especially so we look at this pyramid of white supremacy right and at the top we have genocide so it's like the ultimate evil okay so that's what we're talking about we're talking about the ultimate evil okay so then you might say well maybe your definitions matter when you're talking about the ultimate evil and so maybe being vague about exactly what that evil is especially if it's convenient for you to be vague perhaps that's a little bit ill-advised perhaps particularly when you're teaching children yeah yeah um and you know i i said well is this the is this the comprehensive list of things that belong on the pyramid are there other things that we don't know that are on the pyramid and they said well you know there could be i said well that's nice so now we have other stuff that's just in the margins that could be thrown onto this pyramid who knows what they'll be um maybe maybe and who knows who will decide exactly exactly like this is okay so this list is not exhaustive um and that actually scared me more uh why well because it meant that no one could anticipate where the lines were i mean kids need boundaries and so how are the kids supposed to know what is and isn't if they just have this grab bag of all these possible things that could be you know associated with the ultimate evil um you know that it just setting up this whole tripwire situation where they're just how are they supposed to know how to trust uh what is and isn't falling into the schema that comes out of their mouth or could they have a thought or that they want to articulate it how how you're just setting that you're setting them up to for anxiety and intention and you know who it means that you're really you know and i began to see this in actual in actual um discussions people have about it peop kids were restricting themselves to a very narrow set of things to say that they felt were okay to say you know and it was all the jargon you know it was saying well you know we need to acknowledge our privilege yes we are privileged you know that privilege makes makes us unable to understand okay so what you saw what you saw as people's attempts to deal with the ambiguity was that they just stopped saying anything that wasn't approved yeah because that is the way out of it right if if what's negative is ill-defined but what's positive is listed then you just stick with the list you stick with the list yeah you stick with the list um and um and then what's the problem with that exactly so the kids stick with the list why why is that bothering you well it it's it's because it means that you know events the the multiplicity of possible reasons for things that that change that are different depending on the actual incident get reduced to this script of of explanations and only those explanations you know fit the paradigm and only those explanations will be considered and and that means that you're not making sense of the world for yourself you're following a script i don't think that's what you can do okay so now you're you're watching this it's having an impact on you it's having an impact on the students what's the impact on the students personally too i felt okay some of it was personal but also i was seeing it in the students um and particularly in the most recent years it um it's sort of like when you go to a meeting and you know everybody is the people there are people that are silent and there are people that are that are talking and the people that are talking are saying all the right things and the people that are silent are listless and are disengaged and just waiting for it to end and then that listlessness and disengagement is being framed as resistance by the people who are running the meeting they're the people that are in charge of delivering the anti-racist programming and then there's there are meetings about how to get because that's indifference yeah and so they actually call it pyramid of white supremacy that in a pyramid every brick depends on the ones below it for support if the bricks at the bottom are removed the whole structure comes tumbling down which means that if you face down indifference you eradicate genocide right exactly and so it's it's a way to use a structural metaphor to transfer all of the like all of the the weight of genocide onto all the little things um i'm not saying it very well but i think you know what i mean um so white so we would get we got an email i remember getting an email from the office of community engagement that said we're looking for ways to target white white disengagement and white was in brackets right it's almost as little we we're embarrassed to say it but it's it's white it's white disengagement right and that's sort of like we're going to say it but we don't really want to say it and that just made me a little bit even more upset because it meant that if you're not you're not even going to be honest about what you're calling it you're gonna try to have it both ways um so and what's happening among your colleagues at this point you're you're becoming dissatisfied yeah what's the nature of your private conversations are you starting to be isolated no i mean i i i i still getting along well with with the column with my colleagues and you know there are there are some that i have conversations with and they'll you know they'll say well i won't go as far as you but i definitely think there's something not so great about this um you know i think it's you know the other other colleagues were concerned about the same things i will i was i think free expression and the ability to entertain to have different ideas and to talk about the framework and you know and maybe challenge it the whole thing um so yeah i was i wasn't alone in my doubts for sure did you ever wonder if it was you going off the rails sure sure i mean i i still felt um you know i still felt like it was perhaps me you know in the way that um you know because i have had privilege in my life i've had i've had substantial privilege in my life uh i would call it you know opportunity and i'm grateful for it one of the things that i learned about studying the aftermath of the russian revolution was that privilege creeps too because it's very very hard to find someone who isn't privileged in some manner like the only person who isn't privileged in some manner is the person in the world who's suffering more than anyone else there's only one of him or her everyone else is privileged so you can expand the net of guilt indefinitely by focusing on privilege yeah yeah and i didn't like the way that it was being used to discount people's people's ideas you know i mean if you're if you're if you have an educational institution ideas are the whole are everything you know and and the i there should be you should be talking about ideas based on what make ideas sound or unsound not not the person who's saying them so oh i was seeing situations where um you know white students would make a claim and then that claim was discounted by someone else because of their privilege you're making of course the white supremacists assumption that there are such things as ideas and that they can be ranked in terms of quality and that the purpose of discursive speech is precisely to do such things and etcetera etcetera yeah and so the whole solipsistic nature of it i was like this is you can't even have a conversation this is not this is not a way to have a functioning you're not you're not preparing people to function in a truly virginia world of ideas it's not well it's it's worse in some sense is that the claim fundamental claim is that there's no such thing as a conversation there's just different discourses of power there's no conversation assumes ideas and the free flow of ideas and the an irrational individual actor and the capacity for logos and and the individual as the central unit and and so on and so forth people who hold the critical race position let's say don't uh it's not that they avoid confrontational conversations they don't believe that there's such a thing as a conversation it's not part of the system so it's a fundamental dispute yeah no that's true i mean and i i and then the little things like i remember talking to a colleague about a nuke about a new hire and then and and she said um i said well well what's he like this new guy and she said well he's like you he's like me well what do you mean by that and she was like oh he's white i was like okay all right you know this is not a person that's a total stranger either and i kind of walked away and like really so okay and you know i also i also hear the objection to my to my objection which is you know see how it feels white man see how it feels to be treated as your race that is it's it's a you know she might have been trying to teach me a lesson in some sense like now you know how it feels but that's not you know okay that's that's a point that you're making but that's not that's not a healthy thing and that's not that's not good because it doesn't actually reduce the some type of misery in the world yeah i mean yeah um all right so you're starting to get feel disquiet and you actually make this known yes and i i make it known in 2019 i make it known in in 2020 i talk to the assistant head i talk to the head of school you're married i i'm recently married i was i've been married over a year just over a year do you do you have any children no children no children but you are married and okay so i'm just wondering what you have resting on your job exactly yeah yeah and i i didn't you know i'm i have to say that you know not having kids is is is a huge part of why i feel like this is happening that i've been able to to stick my neck out um and you know i'm not not um i don't judge anyone for for for balancing their duty to the truth and their duty to their family in whatever way that works for them because both of them are important um or to put things at risk you know that's that's a personal choice and that's i can i can't speak to any of that but i think it definitely not having mouths to feed and and you know having having some savings from my previous job and and things um being smart with my money and not spending it um unwisely as i have as i had done a decade and a half ago but um i think that that helped me to do what i'm doing all right so how are you being treated by the administrative officials to whom you're registering your objection are you doing that in writing are you doing that in person you know mostly in person and you know i'm not writing anything official i'm i'm in the grumbling in my beard phase i guess i'm in the griping phase uh where i would go and i would say you know this is wrong like why can't we teach you know a broad range of viewpoints why do we always have to teach this ritualistic thing that's just a litany of you know basically far-left ideas and you know some of some some of the administration were very sympathetic like even overly so like i remember talking to um the assistant head he pulled down a copy of jonathan hate off the off the bookshelf and was like i'd love to teach this in my class when i i really want to make this happen i want to teach you know so you know more more than i was sort of or maybe just modeling it or humoring me or something but he had the book he had the book that's right and he knew the book and he knew he knew where it was on his show i know so like but you know then in public you know or in public in the in front of the community you're not saying nothing about it right so i think there's a tremendous amount of preference falsification still going on there you know well you outlined why i mean yeah you lost your job yeah so you know these are high stakes games and right you make a mistake and and a mistake you you veer outside the the realm of acceptable behavior let's say and what happens well you get disproportionately punished for it and there's a moral element to it too which is well there's no bloody way someone like you should be teaching so not only did we fire you but we're right to do so yeah so and you know that's very hard thing to withstand which is something i also want to talk to you about i mean you know confident though you may be or anyone may be when your institution sheds you and surrounds that with accusations about the nature of your character if you're not a complete psychopath it tends to strike you to your heart because there's always the possibility that you're wrong right right but i i really i really knew i wasn't because you know coming out there was this meeting and i referred to it in the article or my essay the self-care through an anti-bias lens meeting which is what kicked off the whole um past two months for me it was a it was a meeting where students were ostensibly going to learn how to take care of themselves during the pandemic how to manage their emotions how to take deep breaths and cope with things and in that meaning you know after some some mind relaxing exercises like meditation and and stuff they put up the white supremacy you know aspects of white supremacy culture slide and that's different than the pyramid or this is different than the pyramid and this is you know this is elements of white supremacy right right it's actually um you know they there's different forms of it but essentially you know it's it's fairly common in this in this thing as you know and um uh yes so here's some professional and transactional relationships versus relationships based on trust care and shared commitments protecting power versus sharing power culture of over working versus culture of self-care and community care competition and struggle for limited resources versus collaboration and working to share resources that's all white dominant culture so yes yes and so some of the things that were on this particular slide were objectivity individualism um either or thinking right right and uh i know that one there was um you know the the thing that wrangled me the most was right to comfort because you know how how are you giving a self-care workshop where the 200 kids that are in there in this racially segregated workshop are challenged that they might not you know that having imagining that you have a right to comfort is associated with you know genocidal evil kenneth jones and teema oaken dismantling racism workbook 2001. god only knows what that is but it's everywhere the characteristics of white supremacy culture perfectionism which is an element of conscientiousness which is a fundamental trait sense of urgency defensiveness quantity over quality worship of the written word paternalism either or thinking notice this is all written in words by the way power hoarding fear of open conflict um individualism which seems to be run somewhat counter to the fear of open conflict progress is bigger and more objectivity right to comfort yeah it's uh it's quite the grab bag of conceptually unrelated items it's incoherent at every possible level of analysis as well as being it's it's impossible to parody yeah yeah and i i saw it and i you know i had been thinking for a couple months prior to this because there had been some meetings that really upset me and i was thinking well and my head of school had actually said that if i was in an appropriate forum i should feel free to ask questions by this point in the meeting i think maybe 30 minutes in before this popped up other faculty had been saying things in the chat area of the zoo meeting so you know is that anonymous is that anonymous in the zoo no it's it's they were so they were under their own names under their own names yeah um and so i thought well why you know when the when the facilitator mentioned that if you looked at this slide i think she said i think she said you know you might have some white feelings um and i said i just kind of blurted out i didn't i didn't blurt it out angrily i didn't flirt it out i i don't think i was too upset of course you know i i don't know how it was perceived of course but i said well what do you mean but what is a white feeling what is the white feeling and i you know what came back was i think she said something that defensiveness was a white feeling i said well these feelings can belong to people of any race and you know i think that it's i i don't know whether it's i don't understand why it's being attributed to a particular the white people um and you know i had that kind of opened the gates a little bit and kind of broke the ice i think because in the chat other kids started to ask questions there was a debate about whether i should be allowed to ask the question um there was which question do you mean the question about the white feeling question i see there were also some there was a lot of capitalism bashing in the chat and i said you know i believe capitalism is anti-racist since it's done more to to lift people of all races out of poverty um than any any alternative um and you know i wasn't monopolizing the chat i was dropping in little things and there was a lot of activity in the chat and then um the the the facilitator actually went with me and she she explained stuff you know her perspective on it and i thanked her and you know she moved on some more and um i think i i asked another question but i really as as she said later in a meeting about the meeting in front of the whole faculty she felt that i you know i was asking out of curiosity didn't i wasn't you know on a rant or saying it you know to to be antagonistic i think some of the some of my faculty members felt that i was but the facilitator herself didn't feel that way so and she was the one i was talking to so i think that definitely counts that's quite remarkable i would say because it's very difficult in a group like that when you know the implicit ethos to be able to say something that's questioning without having anger build up as a motivation right because you need something to break through your resistance yeah so yeah to be able to say it without upsetting the the uh yeah i mean i was passionate but i wasn't i don't think i was like enraged or anything like that um it's you know i was trying to modulate what i was really upset was that was the either or thing because i was like well if either or thinking is a is a characteristic of white supremacy well then ibram candy's got to be the whitest person in public life because his entire philosophy is so manichaean i mean anyway so but i didn't say that of course because i would have been inflammatory but um what i really wanted to do i've been thinking about an opportunity because i wanted to model for the students that you could ask questions that someone who who was a teacher or someone who was an authority figure could ask a question and it was okay and and did and how did the students react to it was it was phenomenal i mean i was really gratified and that they confirmed that my it confirmed that i was doing the right thing because things came out in the chat they started to ask a broader range of questions i received the transcript later and you know it was like night and day kids were asking questions like well i don't feel like i'm ignorant just because i'm white or you know i don't like to be reduced to my race and then faculty joined in so several faculty members also started to ask questions um you know and i don't think the point was that they people they if people even necessarily wanted their questions answered in the forum they just wanted to ask them i got you sometimes i don't know what your question is until you ask exactly like this this that's why i think intent is so it's kind of a silly thing because you never really it's only an ex post-facto explanation if you're called on it i think like a true question there may be no intent like it just bubbles out of you if you're if you're truly in a in a conversation i'm not thinking about okay i'm not it's not like i'm plucking this little thing out of the inside of my head and like well i intend this to be you know that's not communication that's not if it's a genuine conversation no you don't have time for that in a genuine conversation no yeah of course not and so you know but i was really gratified i was on a natural high from the experience um why well because i felt that i had you know i had done something good like it was just self-evidently good to me like it just when i reflected on it this is a positive thing um now one of the my colleagues got very upset with me with my influence on this and because at one point i did say you know why you know i don't identify as white must i internalize society's delusions about me um which is you know like it's kind of like the neutron bomb to this entire belief system but i was on i was on a you know i felt like it was something i wanted to put out there so the kids could see it and you know understand you know that maybe this is a point of view you know i'm not saying i'm right i'm i'm asking a question um and you know the the feeling was that this was you know anti-racism some defense yeah like i could just i'm not morally obligated to accept these characterizations right which is kind of the whole point of anti-racism is that you're not obligated to accept arbitrary racial categories that are unrelated to the task at hand yeah well it should be um but uh you know then a colleague got upset with me and said kind of got on his high horse and said you know i can't believe that i may be mis you know paraphrasing here and if i am sorry but he said i believe you know i can't believe that a member of our you know our one of my colleagues doesn't understand that we are white that we are white since birth i am white since birth that this has carries with it implicit biases that are unavoidable and we must affirm that you know and and that's who that's who we are and that's who i am and i just it kind of interrupted him because i felt like he was kind of making me look i know he's being kind of kind of a jerk so i interrupted him and said you know i'm sorry you're stereotyping yourself i think it's sad [Music] and you know that kind of was a very awkward moment because it was in front of students and he said you know he expressed his dismay um and i remained silent and then after the meeting i said i apologized to him i said you know that was unprofessional was it well you know i i unders i felt it i felt that there might have been a better way that i could do it maybe wait till he finished and then asked you know to respond i i i'm i'm also suspicious of my own you know because i i i have been somewhat oppositional i'm not exactly like a mr go on and get along guy with this stuff that i don't always have the best reality check on my own behavior and so i'm you know i i was just saying well okay if i if i did cause offense then you know i i feel like it's okay to apologize and there probably was a better way for me to do this and so i did apologize and you know and thought about it no nothing against that nothing wrong with that and then he accepted and you know i figured that was that was it and there was a lot of processing after the meeting i think that went on for hours afterwards my phone died it was on my phone and so when i went home um you know i logged back into the meeting and people were still there talking so i talked to them but i underestimated the effect of this because apparently um some of my some of my comments you know were leaked or made or transmitted to other people that weren't in the meetings people that were in the the bipark meeting you know particularly my mice bypark is a black and indigenous people of color so they were having their separate meeting of faculty and students where they received different content and why was it separate the rationale as i could as i can understand it is so that the groups that have been marginalized won't be exposed to you know they'll have their own thing so that they're not exposed to the uh i think the incense possible insensitivity of the [Music] oppressors that's the best i can understand the rationale um but it wound up happening anyway because i suppose it would be rude of me to point out that that's somewhat paternalistic you know just as yeah you know observation that's a good one um yeah i mean yeah totally well i guess that is a characteristic of white supremacy culture though paternalism yeah so and i guess it's well as long as it's in a good cause then i guess it's forgivable yeah okay so that was how long ago that meeting that was february 24th oh yes okay so things are starting to yeah this year and that was referred to after the fact as the events of wednesday like they couldn't even really it was sort of like 9 11 they couldn't actually they had to come up with a euphemism for it i guess um so the events of wednesday and so they had meetings about the events well the office of community engagement it coupled with the dean of student life and there there are dean level positions that exerted a lot of effort and energy because i did not make their lives easy um to to address the things that were said and raised in the meeting not just by me but by you know lots of different people and students students you know spoke up as well and faculty and so um what i found it so interesting because the day after the meeting there was an email that was released that said healing resources you know healing resources that will help you come to terms with what happened and the first healing resource on the list was a cnn interview with a poet named damon young and damon young you know in this interview said things like you know we we need to get rid of all of capitalism we will have to do a carpet bombing not a carpet cleansing of society i mean it was incredibly radical statements that were i would imagine would be frightening to to many people and that was listed as a healing resource as well as well as long as the carpet bombing only targets the malevolent people well yeah i guess and then things there was a robin d'angelo article that said you know what white people need to be made or kept uncomfortable um how can we become more uncomfortable um also you know really kind of i would just say racist characterizations of white people in these links um things like you know white people have never had to be guests in this country and like the irish for example they weren't really white to begin with though so yeah yeah um and so i found this very ironic and then i had a series i had two meetings i had a meeting with my head of high school and the assistant head and i had a meeting with the head of the whole school and then you know i the head of the meeting with the head of high school they called you in at that point yeah i mean what's happening around you is this is growing this is this well yeah there's a lot of there's a lot of agitation there's meetings about meetings there's student diversity council meetings um there are um there's just a lot of agitation in the community i would say uh and and meetings about meetings so some of the things that would happen would be in the week in the end as the week continued there was a faculty meeting about it um i had some advisory circles circle practice was taken away because they felt that it would be the students would be upset if i was a part of it so the d so the environment circle is what um well it was it's a it's a practice that we've started this year where um activities um where you you put up a slide and you talk about an issue and then everyone has to go around and speak one by one about a question and then you kind of do it around twice and then you know this is to sort of manage discussion um and i've done so you're not you're persona non grata at this now because yeah what your toxic influence on the students right right and so you know i got an email saying you know under current circumstances following yesterday's meeting in your role and what transpired you you know i've asked you to recuse yourself um then you know there were subsequent meetings there was a faculty meeting i think at that faculty meeting a colleague said well this is this could be terrible this could undo everything we've ever taught them which i thought to myself please please i hope so um but uh the uh and there was how are you how are you reacting to all this well i'm on a natural high i mean i i know that i feel like this is something that i finally done to to open up something like some daylight and i all of this churn is going on around me but i'm going about my day i'm i'm teaching my classes uh i'm you know i i did feel the need to address my classes so i said at the beginning you know i am an anti-racist um you know i want you to feel safe and then i would just sort of teach the class and then i was told not to address it with the class with anyone in the classes i had written i had sort of had a sort of i guess a manic kind of outbreak at this point like i felt so much energy and and enthusiasm that i was writing in my notebook a lot and i developed a kind of i had a sort of creative outpouring through all of this um i don't know whether it's maybe like a psychothemic reaction or something to it because i felt like my soul was kind of awakened no i was having a lot of trouble sleeping i was you know maybe getting three hours a night and i would wake up i would wake up at like four in the morning just being like wide awake and i'd go and i'd start writing and i'd write a lot of ideas down and i felt like it was really productive and what do you think of the ideas that you were producing during that time um i've this type of thing has happened before and i've i've looked at them with later eyes and i don't think that i i've kind of felt the despair that they weren't um that there wasn't much value to them but this time well one thing i might point out is that you know writing writing is overproduction followed by culling right and so you'll have periods of overproduction and you probably throw 90 of that away but maybe you keep 10 and that's a lot more than zero yeah yeah i mean mostly what i was doing was illustrating a kind of geometry like i had i had a these two axes and i was sort of laying things out on them because i was trying to make sense of of the whole problem of of racism and um the difference between reality and truth and how those things are kind of orthogonal and i kind of laid out a schema that made sense to me that would that was kind of explaining the whole problem and you know it still does make sense to me and i still think that there's a tremendous value in it and i just need to want to keep working on it um but yeah well it's common that those those those periods of of creativity you know they're they're revelatory thinking and that can be over emotional and yeah it's so so tangential but but it's it's gripped for further milling yeah yeah and it did crisp crisp over the wrist yeah grist great crisp bristle um so i all of this was happening around me but i felt like a kind of stoic indifference to it because i i felt a sort of awakening in me that that that made ever all of the hubbub uh sort of irrelevant you know it sounds like you had decided to do this yeah i think i i think i had been waiting sort of unconsciously waiting for an opportunity and when it happened when i blurted things out and it it happened then i embraced it and i realized that i had i was not ashamed and i was not controlling and i was proud i was actually proud and when so now and then when did you write the essay that that that was oh yeah with barry weiss i don't want to rush you if there's okay yeah and i hate to hear it i i realize that you know i don't want to you know tax you either but um i had um i knew i wanted to write about the whole thing so i i i had taken a lot of notes over the years and so my first draft was about 5 000 words and it contained a lot of information centered around the actual zoo meeting and then you know the effects on the students and you know what had happened to me and then i realized like what the reason why i did why i said the thing in the meeting in the first place was because i was trying to model for the students and that was what was animating me and so i i'd you know i i handed it off to a friend who edited it and really hacked it way down you know cut out a lot of the stuff and then i did another draft where i was really trying to get to the main ideas and boil them down as crisply as i could and then barry took a look at it and and how she made it through the fair through fair because i had been volunteering with them um for a couple of months now and fair just so everyone knows is is a foundation against intolerance and racism and you know we you know i was in the process of i i still am you know helping to build the organization and and select chapter leadership in in various states so that we can really we're in this sort of networking phase because i'm calling people have given us their names and i'm calling people and and what i'm finding is that everyone has a story so i can't just be on the phone with them for you know 15 minutes and all the volunteers are finding this that there's a tremendous outpouring it's very emotional they'll talk about what's happening with their kids they'll talk about that they didn't suspect that anything was wrong in the culture until maybe a year ago and now it's clear to them and they want to do something and so you really have to do you have to listen before you can you know just operationally try to plug people in and you know a lot of times it's it's it really feels like i'm not a therapist but it feels like at the peak i was making like five calls a day and each of those were about an hour and you you wind up really having having an engagement with another human being so this is starting to inform your writing yeah and the way you're thinking about what's going on at the school yeah and so um i'm sorry i'm starting to feel like i have a lot of people that i'm you know that are that this is something that's becoming kind of a duty like almost a moral duty uh so um yeah so that's kind of the the background to that and then and then the article came out and um i i waited and there's just a tremendous i've had an email at the bottom of the article and i was expecting like 50 positive 50 negative i would be happy if it was 50 positive now i realize later it's on barry weiss's sub stack and it's mostly her fans but i put the email on some other places and uh and i was just amazed that you know maybe 500 emails in the first two days and and long emails like me people writing you know some of them are just a word or a subject line but people had a lot to say a lot of stories and i've spent um a couple hours each day since then going through them and responding to everyone because it's really important to do that i think that you know i feel i feel like it's just i can't just you know ignore them or just give like a one sentence thing because some of these some of these uh i try to you know i try to respond in at least one or two sentences in a way that addresses their particular situation and then i and they try to direct them to fairs as you know as an organization that can help and all people of all different backgrounds people wrote in from other countries and what are they telling you in the main they're just a lot of what i'm getting i'm just getting a lot of pats on the back just like yes you know good for you bravo like you know this is amazing keep doing it keep doing what you're doing we support you you know 100 this is a huge problem you know and you're standing up for it and what you're doing is right and you know and and uh okay so you publish this in barry weiss's sub stack and the school reacts and what happens well they make the claim that um um that i've you know some of what i've written is is a mischaracterization and uh you know they're not trying to you know they they i think it's a little blurry to me now actually because so much has happened since so i kind of have to reconstruct what happened but um uh in this time so the article came down on the i believe on the 13th and um you know i had a contract assigned for the following year and part of that contract my contract is up this current contract is up at the end of august but the deadline for me to sign next year's contract was april 15th and as one of the stipulations of my contract was that i had to attend restorative justice practices designed by the school to address the harm that i had caused students of color and other students i see so you were obliged to be guilty enough to go to be retrained right and you know the details of the of this process would be revealed to me after i signed so i was signing something that i didn't you know i wouldn't know what i was signing so i waited from an admission of culpability and guilt right right unspecified nature right and now participation i thought about i was like well participation doesn't mean that i have to you know say me a copa i can participate in it um maybe it's an opportunity for me to engage you know um and i thought about it but then i said well it would mean that i was signing on to it mean that i was legitimizing it by signing it and so i decided not to sign it because if i if i put my word on it then it would mean that i was saying that that was an appropriate request to make of someone so i didn't say how did you manage to make that decision well i just really just delayed it and thought about it and then i talked to friends about it and then i i realized that no i'm just gonna i'm just gonna let it lapse because you know i'm i'm uh i've reinvented myself before i've had several careers i i have math skills coding skills i figured you know if i didn't work for grace i could find i could land on my feet somehow i didn't i don't have kids so there there were i had i felt like i had options you know i felt like no matter what happened i i had faith that i would be okay um so i you know i felt like i could kind of decide whether this was this was right for me or not and i could teach somewhere else maybe not you know in new york maybe i could find like a private boarding school or something that was more aligned with my views or my values have the offers come flooding in yeah i mean since the article uh you know places in coral gables was like come to coral gables we'll give you you know we'll we need someone for our math program texas arizona and surprised to hear that yeah and you know i my fears of being canceled are completely obvi you know blown away because you know that it's the opposite of that i would say um no i'm sure i'm sure there are people that wouldn't touch me with a 10-foot pole but do i want to work for them i mean it's sort of like a self-selecting thing now you know i did this thing the world has sorted itself out there are people that would hire me um and so those are the people that i will that i could work with and then what do i need to why do i need to worry about people who don't want me you know it's kind of like all right so and also you have to move forward on false pretenses yeah yeah and um but i think my my main gratitude that i feel is that uh is that i made you know i made my dad proud and uh and my mother is not with me not with us anymore but she would have been proud of him why did it matter to you well you know he's a i consider him to be very important person and uh he taught me so much he taught me how to write he taught me how to think he's uh he's a law professor he was until he retired recently and um he was a great he was a real teacher he wasn't a he wasn't so much of a publisher he was a teacher and he was very popular um very talented uh and he would always engage me in socratic discourse and he always wanted me to think for myself and um you know i did i do feel like i've probably been a disappointment more than once to put it to put it mildly over the years and so having the opportunity you know he's 88 having this chance to sort of do this thing now maybe just one act maybe i'll i won't write anything ever again but at least i've done this thing um and talking to him about it and it's uh it's a good feeling now the school has stopped you from teaching apart from the fact that you've not signed the upcoming contract right they had they offered me um they offered me something i thought was kind of creative they offered me the chance to participate in a subcommittee of the institutional culture committee um which is a committee that's centered around designing an anti-racist culture for the school now i would work under the direct supervision of the supervision of the assistant head but it would they would they wouldn't let me teach math they wouldn't let me have an advisory they would take away all my teaching duties and that's basically what i would do for the next um july you know the next five months until my contract expires um so i thought of that i i think that what it really is is just a way to co-opt me and to sort of put me in a kind of rubber room i mean i don't have any confidence whatsoever that any of my you know any of my um suggestions or contributions would be taken seriously um which would involve like complete upending of the entire program um to account for free expression and viewpoint diversity and you know diff completely different epistemology um i don't feel that they're going to take that seriously and so if you know i'm not sure if my my continued um employment you know i i don't think that's what were the grounds for stopping you from teaching how was that framed exactly yeah that was an interesting thing so i received a threat from a member of the community it wasn't a physical threat it was a menacing threat that was centered around my my employment my livelihood you know it said a lot of things like don't dare come back to the school your life is going to change your future is you know you're going to be canceled you're you're never going to be able to work anywhere you know the this we will see to it that you're it was it was a menacing email so i reported this email to the school and um you know the school got back to me or the head of school got back to me and said well you know if you don't feel safe as you don't feel safe um we don't ask that we we you might we think it's a good idea if you stayed home and taught remotely oh you know only over zoom and don't come on to the school grounds and i wrote back to them and i said well actually i do feel safe i want to come to school i like to teach in person um and you know i i expect i was simply bringing this to your attention so that you could take care of this problem um and then they wrote back saying well as you know we will be polling the students and and community members to find out whether this opinion is shared by other people so they treated this menacing email as an opinion and and they said you know subsequent to that they said well since the school you know community feels that they can't participate in your classes because they were probably objecting to your right to comfort yeah probably you know and i said things like well i fully expect you to maintain order and security in the school i mean that's that's something that you should and i find it rather odd that if if you know someone who sent a a menacing email to me should not have to stay home but i should have to stay home what is the why am i the one that has to stay home why why isn't this other person staying home so but they didn't have much sympathy for that point of view so rather it was this this threat was taken as a kind of um you know example of people's feelings of of insec unsafeness around me so i was i was asked to say right you provoked them to that right right exactly um now you also exchanged an opinion or two publicly with the if i've got this right with the headmaster you said that in the conversation he had indicated his agreement with your proposition that's right white people but children in your formulation to begin with were being demonized by the curriculum and through you made that claim and he said that was not true and then you released the audio which i reviewed and which seems to clearly indicate that he did in fact say exactly what you said he said that's right that's right let me ask you something george because i think those are i think there's something very different about having a single experience where you make sense of it right and having a teacher an authority figure talk to you endlessly every year telling you that because you have whiteness you are associated with evils all these different evils these are moral evils it's not the same as taking like a physical thing because it doesn't affect your your your moral value that's the problem the the the fact is that i'm agreeing with you that there has been a demonization that we need to get our hands around in the way in which people are doing this understanding okay so you agree that we're demonizing kids we're demonizing um kid we're demonizing white people for being born and are some of our students white people what are some of our students white people yes okay so we're demonizing white we're demonizing white kids why don't you just say it we are right we are using language that makes them feel less than um for nothing that they are personally responsible for any doubt because i've known you for nine years of your sincerity in your belief and i also um have grave doubts about some of the doctrinaire stuff that gets spouted at us in the name of any races like what and and so i don't disagree entirely with some of your points of view can you elaborate because that would help me it would help me understand like what's going on i think that one of the things that's going on a little too much and we've talked about this is that um the demonization of being white um and in the attempt to link anybody who's white to the perpetuation of white supremacy thank you thank you george so there is no question that there is an entire strain in here that um causes that misinterpretation now i am somewhat wait a minute but what about impact over intent don't those kids get the benefit of impact over intent our attempt is going to be to get everybody centered again all right um i will tell you i mean that's a huge task because i will tell you that we are if you if you try to do that um they're they're already like the barn doors open and they're all in the barn i mean they're gonna they're gonna they're fighting a revolution that you you don't even know they're fighting and grace they're gonna hollow out grace and they're gonna move on to the next institution that's what's gonna happen like i i think that they've hollowed out a bunch of other ones ahead of us so yeah that's what i'm saying you're just you're just a little stoned in the path this beautiful wonderful institution that's educated so many children over so over almost a century is what was the consequences for him of of that well i have no idea because i haven't heard anything in the in the two days since the audio has been released at this point so he's been still employed as far as you know as far as i know yes i don't know what's happening there um i'm i'm not privy to i mean i still have email my email account is still active but i don't you know i i haven't seen any communications about anything so um i don't know his situation there hasn't been any statement from the school at this point okay so a couple of things that we should cover before we stop um what do you what are your feelings about the importance of what is transpiring around you to broader let's say educational society let's let's start with that with with with regard to teachers and students in private and public institutions high schools junior highs elementary schools in your state and across your country what what do you see this if anything what does this indicate well i have hopes you know i i feel that if if students can if i if if the type of you know willingness to ask a question it in response to some of these you know what i consider to be indoctrination frankly at other schools and you think that's happening in other schools yeah i mean i it's no question because of the the calls that i've received in the conversations i've had with people all over pennsylvania virginia maryland new jersey you know their their parents are very concerned with their children they've seen it because of the pandemic through their through the zoom zoom classes they've witnessed what's being taught to their kids and they're very very concerned and they have specific receipts to back it up and you know they're sending me curriculum um so you know i i have this is not simply a a rarified independent school problem this is happening at you know school boards and districts all over the country um a lot of it spurred by the you know the george floyd it's killing and the reaction to it um i believe it was taken as an opportunity to you know redress um that with uh misguided yeah an opportunity for what it's like i'm trying to figure out i keep trying to figure out because i've been concerned about this for a long time and uh i still can't get to the bottom of it it's like i don't understand exactly i know there's a resentment element to it but i can't understand exactly what's driving this and and why it's despite the fact that it's clearly the view of a very small minority of people perhaps five percent that's what the survey seemed to indicate i cannot understand why it's making the headway that it's making at the rate that it's making and what it's really aiming at what do you think about that like what's your sense because obviously it's bothering you yeah i think i have a sense why and maybe it's a theory it's not just my theory but it's i've seen it in other places or hinted at in other places i think when you sort of you know over the past few decades you have a gradual sort of leeching from the soil of society of sort of a moral sense a moral tradition moral grounding in you know long long religious traditions essentially when they depart from the public sphere it leaves a kind of vacuum and you know wokeness is is a way to sort of sort of paint by numbers moral righteousness and it gives people the sense that they're good people i think people have an almost you know i don't know whether it's evolutionarily based but they have a need to have a moral character and sense of themselves and if and if something comes along which is going to offer that and give you that thing well then there's a there's a tremendous hunger for it so people will adopt it quickly and so you can have you know a very small percentage of the population that's pushing it can have a real powerful outsized influence do you do you have a traditional religious belief of any sort and are you a practicing religious person i am i am um it's a really good question i am i was raised catholic and i you know was i've lapsed you know i i have a joke that i i use sometimes you know i'm so lapsed i'm prolapsed but uh basically uh i i you know was a functioning agnostic then atheists uh and um but i i don't feel like i really need a lot of god but i do need to have something which is like a conscience like i guess i believe in a conscience i believe in some little mirror of the divine which sort of is is in me it's not like above me or around me but it is within me and so it's sort of like a reflective thing that i can and it's sort of reactivated i guess and as part of this whole experience so i can i can take in the world and the world of reality but i can reflect it against something which is not of this world i don't know how to describe it and then that's pretty good what comes back i'm i'm i'm satisfied with that answer you know like what comes back is something that i should attend to it's something that is the it is it is something important and that is the you know and and now that i feel like i have that or an awareness of that you know it's just like you know ah you know okay like i've got thank god it's been there exactly thank god i want to say thank god but i don't i don't i don't know i don't know that there's a god with a capital g i just know that there's something which is which is not of this world but is in this world and it's it's it's not out there so what do you think okay so what about when i read you oh i have two questions the first question is why did you one of the questions is why did you agree to talk to me and the second question is what do you have to say to teachers who are wrestling with their conscience in relationship to this issue so let's start with that one start with the second one no yeah with the with the teachers what do you have to say i mean you already said you're not interested in judging people for their decisions but no you've been through this you've thought about it like what's your conclusion and what and your your hope or if it's not a recommendation maybe it's a hope i would just say you know stand up for the truth and in whatever way you can if you if you feel if you have that same reflective process within yourself or you if what i'm saying makes sense to you in terms of your your sense of right and wrong if you feel that what you're being asked to teach or what your students are being are going through is wrong then weigh that like like do it smartly but but really take it seriously and and and why why why why because because it's crucial it's it's it's what will save us if you don't if you don't stand up crucial that's a hell of a word to use in that context yeah right yeah the root of that yeah um you you you know the you're being asked you're being called to do something and you know it doesn't mean that you have to like run around and and proclaim you know and save the world it just means you have to do something in a way that is constructive and well thought out and and will that will help the immediate circumstances in which you find yourself and help to you know set an example and if you don't and if you don't um well then it's you're leaving it up to the next guy maybe the next guy isn't up to it and maybe the next guy isn't up to it and maybe the next guy isn't up to it and then what happens then then you've then you've you may not get it you may not get a chance you may not get it all you can teach is the words on the appropriate list you could just be replaced by the list yeah yeah you know i mean the thing that's so wonderful about teaching is that you get to make contact with someone else with you and so if that's being whittled away in favor of the approved list then there isn't a hell of a lot of room for you and it's kind of hard for me to say see how you could take any derive any source of meaningful engagement from your job if you've been reduced to a set of moralistic platitudes especially when extreme punishment accompanies deviation from them so that's the thing i always noticed when i was a clinical psychologist i always brought because i don't practice now for a variety of reasons there's a price to speaking but there's a price to remaining silent when you have something to say so you get to pick your price um yeah so why did you agree to talk to me well i wanted to talk to you because uh you know you've you've been a pretty big influence on my on my life uh i followed you from the you know from the bill c-16 video and um your your biblical lectures were very very moving to me i mean i i had never thought of i never imagined even that there was a way to sort of harmonize you know evolution and religion in that way it seemed just like a remarkable achievement to to sort of kind of find a third way out of the you know along another dimension from the the conflict of you know is it true is it not true is it true is it not to it does and sort of saying it doesn't matter that's not the question the question is like why does this matter and and you know what i don't know the way he did it was like it apparently matters the question is why it seems to matter um and it sort of reframed it in a way that i couldn't um that i couldn't ignore and that admit it because i was raised with these stories but they didn't really make sense in the modern paradigm that i've been you know that that i experienced as a kind of drifting away i think that my my experience in in relating to your work is quite common i think a lot of people had this experience listening to your work and your lectures um and that finding a way to sort of connect with myself as you know when i when i was a boy i was an altar boy i studied the bible you know these were things that that were important to me but i didn't understand them and finding a way to understand them in a new and better way was just marvelous it was marvelous and that it would have meaning for me as an adult is something i never would have even imagined was possible um so you know that was very important to me and also that the importance that there is you know i don't i don't know it seems that i don't it almost doesn't matter what your religious thing is but it it is important that there's something there's something important about truth that truth is important and it's not the same as reality and people think that reality is truth and a lot of it is but there's some of it that's not and that you and that being able to i don't know whether this is something that that that i'm getting from you or that you actually said but i thought that you might you might be someone that kind of understood that where i was coming from about that and i felt the sort of kinship there and that's why that's why it was really important for me to go on your show thank you for talking to me today thank you thank you for having me my pleasure man [Music] you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 227,285

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism, critical race theory

Id: ysQBegyQP8A

Length: 135min 18sec (8118 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 29 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/2HBA1]

Submission Statement: Jordan Peterson talks to Paul Rossi, a high school math teacher who was fired (in effect) for refusing to go along with the Anti-Racism program at his school.

This wasn't quite what I was expecting, because JBP didn't go right into what had happened at Grace Church High, he got Rossi to talk about his whole life beforehand. It added so much depth to hearing all his thoughts and feelings as the program unfolded at his school. From being initially on board, to gradually becoming more concerned as he saw the absurd contradictions in the teaching, and the damaging effect on students (and faculty too) who were constrained from expressing themselves in any way except regurgitation of the approved script.

This was an incredibly deep conversation, both intellectually and emotionally, because Rossi responded to JBP's questions with tremendous honesty and eloquence. I can't believe how brave this guy is, because any admission of flaws, any acknowledgment of vulnerability, is going to be used as ammunition against him.

It was also really great to see JBP back in top form. I'm sure he's still struggling with health problems, but you couldn't tell from this interview. He showed such an amazing combination of incisiveness and empathy.

[u/Qxc4]

This is a really interesting discussion about CRT being forced into one private NYC school, but it’s actually happening in private and public schools throughout the US. For those of you think people who complain about Wokeness are making much ado about nothing, and I know you’re out there, this interview describes what the rest of us are freaking out about.

[u/Pondernautics]

Good post OP