Moshe Levy Braved the Consequences for Opposing Race Essentialism at His Kid's School

[Music] some of the parents were were talking amongst themselves and they were talking about the fact that there were going to be you know some pretty serious curricular and pedagogical changes going on and i just opened up the school's website and started reading through it and just starting to understand you know what what is diversity equity and inclusion according to them and what's involved in the programming and and what are they doing in the name of this and as i as i was reading it they essentially listed you know the activities that they were doing and the consultants that they were using and all the different changes that they were making and i focused on on the consultants that they were using and all i did was just take these names and type them into google and see what popped up and from there their social media feeds popped up or actual newspaper articles popped up about these folks one of them that was teaching microaggressions to fifth graders was in three or four major national newspapers and international newspapers for organizing an online mobbing section of her jewish students while she was a professor another one had a social media feed that was just chock full of ideas like love of literature and objectivity and individualism are akin to white supremacy [Music] now my red flags were going off because i was like these values are completely antithetical to the enlightenment values or the liberal values if you will that we hold dear that are supposedly part of a progressive education that we treat each other as individuals i try to contact my daughter's teacher who is on the board and i said i wanted to talk to you before school starts is there going to be any changes can you just tell me directly she said we have to bring in the administrator so that's fine i want to talk i want to find out before school starts before everything's crazy i just want to know from you i want to know definitely it's not going to make a curriculum changes as i was researching i started to take notes and then instead of taking notes i took screenshots and i made a slideshow of all of these different consultants and all of the different documentation that was you know that the other parents were sharing with each other you know messages from the di committee messages from the teachers and the public social media feeds of these consultants and in my view the juxtaposition was so enormous between those two places that the average parent would just look at this and say this makes no sense you know we have to get a handle on this right and so i had that in my hand and we were going back and forth to each other should we send it to the parent should we not send it to the parents and we sent we set a date to ourselves that we wanted to have a meeting and we were getting rebuffed over and over again and finally we said all right we're going to send it out by this date all right this is after school starts we wanted to do all this before with them so that we would get this out of the way and start the school year fresh but couldn't get a meeting so as luck would have it as we sent this out to the parent body at large their letter came in and said okay let's meet next week a mom who's on this board committee she said you know had we known we would have responded had we know you're ready to write a letter and you were that angry i mean do we have to really be that angry to get a meeting they reacted to it by saying okay we're going to put on a town hall okay but the town hall wasn't a town hall in the traditional sense where you have an audience and you talk back and forth and maybe respectfully exchange ideas it was basically them making a video and you watching it and the video did not answer anything about what we had put forth as you know the the items of concern it just basically redefines the issue or strawmans the issue into something that you know that you never had an objection to so i said let's let us condense this down to just five simple points the use of these consultants are they still on board or are they uh not going to be on board anymore buying materials from pollyanna the racially segregated parental groups on campus which were called witnessing whiteness which was for white people and people of color affinity group for i guess non-white people the makeup and structure of the dei committee and the fifth one was the school's social media presence i gave him the five she said okay i understand what you're saying i'll get back to you in a week let me have some time to formulate my answers the week came and went she said she was very busy she couldn't answer another week came and at the end of that week i said you know do you have this yet she said no i don't i don't have it maybe we'll have it next week so now we're three weeks out and again another delay and i think it was the fourth week where finally instead of saying i'll have it to you in another week it just look i didn't do it it's unusual for me to get emotional but i was frustrated because i didn't know why it would be so difficult to just say yes no yes no there doesn't have to be war and peace level responses to this and i just wrote back i said look we've been waiting for this for a month we've been very patient these parents want to know we want to know what's going on if you don't tell us what's going on in the next couple of days i think i said the next three days we're going to basically go to the public i'm a member of fair i'm a member of other organizations i have i've published 200 articles i know editors i'm going to go to the public and say this is what's going on here and that's not not a good look because you know it's simple questions that parents want to know and you can't provide within a half an hour of that after waiting a month within half an hour of that i get something says you know what we have answers for you yes no yes no actually on everything except for pollyanna they gave answers that were satisfactory i was like yeah we're disbanding these racially parent group racial parent groups on campus the dei committee is basically disbanded for now we're going to do it in in-house in in-house with faculty not so much on the outside you know on down the line until they got to pollyanna they said we're continuing with pollyanna i said to myself that's progress i'm not going to get we're not going to get everything we want and they followed up and said you know can you come in on monday and there were three people there a guy i've never seen before and two um administrators and they just essentially handed us an expulsion letter and said uh you can read this when you get home but you're you're out and you know pick get your kids out and go her younger daughter was actually homesick that day so she didn't even get any closure ironically so she didn't even get a chance to see her teacher and her friend and i actually texted both teachers and they didn't know and like i said my one daughter's teacher is the head of the pedagogy so she was even shocked and she went to the administrator and she said my god is this really happening i had to read this text three times to absorb it and uh she said i'm just not going to be able to i can't cope with the finger daughter not in my class i cannot believe that she won't be there and meanwhile my kids are not getting an education for two weeks they're crying every day i'm crying because we we do love the school as what it is what it's supposed to be and that was that was what was hard to begin with to see that go at the end of the expulsion letter it ends by basically saying something to the effect of you're still on the hook in layman's terms for the contractual obligations that you have for tuition which means you know essentially payment through the year no matter if they kick you out or not so we're six weeks into into the school year when this happens we're in mid-october really so they want payment all the way through the end of the year the end of the school year in the summer you're kicking children out in the in the middle of the year punitively for no reason other than you know basically a political or ideological agenda my older daughter actually really likes your new schools actually worked out very well for her my younger daughter doesn't feel that way she really misses her old school she pines for it all the time she's not really happy at a new school so it's very difficult so we've gone through this whole interview without naming the school it's probably obvious by now and and i want to tell you why we didn't do it the institution itself is not monolithic right inside there you have these ideological fringe actors and activists pushing this stuff but you also have a lot of excellent teachers you have a lot of excellent parents and families we're still friends with a lot of these parents our kids still hang out and talk to each other all the time we still have enormous respect for our children's teachers who never instituted any of these things in our kids classes it can be a lonely road when you stick your head above water it can be frustrating because you're doing something that you know is right and you have people who are cheering you on and telling you you're doing the right thing and finally somebody's come along but don't tell anybody i said that right and when you hear that enough times you start to really get at least i did you start to get into a sort of a mental hole about it you're like well if you agree with me then stand with me but at the end of the day you have to look in the mirror right you have to look in the mirror and you have to be able to tell yourself i did whatever i could and if i die tomorrow and i'm hit by a bus my kids will know that i tried for them [Music] it's a position of honor to be a teacher or to be an administrator for that for that matter you have to stand up too you have a role too you went into this business because teaching children was important to you and instilling certain values in them was important to you stand up when you see people being treated unfairly when you see children being treated unfairly when you see them boxed into or stratified according to their skin color we got over that 60 years ago what are we doing playing around with those ideas again stand up be the one in the board meeting or in at wherever not around the water cooler when no one can hear you grow a spine and stand up and ask the questions that need to be asked and then maybe it makes a difference [Music] you

Channel: Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism

Views: 3,655

Keywords: racism, anti-racism, anti racism, antiracism, social justice, woke, wokeness, FAIR, Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism, Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, pro-human, prohuman, pro human, crt, Critical Race Theory

Id: HG4apkt2vSI

Length: 10min 45sec (645 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 03 2022