Historian Questions Religious Group's 'Anti-Racism' Training in Schools
by Jim Brown
May 27, 2005
(AgapePress) - A school district in Greensboro, North Carolina, is being criticized for using tax dollars to implement mandatory "anti-racism" diversity training workshops for teachers.Guilford County Schools plans to spend half-a-million dollars next year on more anti-racism training from Crossroads Ministry, a Chicago-based inter-faith organization that offers education and training "to dismantle racism and build anti-racist multicultural diversity." According to the Crossroads website, its workshop -- "Analyzing and Understanding Systemic Racism" -- examines individual, institutional, and cultural racism and their effects on communities. It also looks at the issue of racism and the task of dismantling it from "spiritual, ethical, political, and social perspectives," the objective being to equip individuals to contend with racism when they encounter it.
David Beito is an associate professor in history at the University of Alabama, where he successfully protested the same training five years ago. He contends the group teaches that that all whites are racist and no black can be racist, and also favors the redistribution of wealth.
"Their argument is that you're automatically privileged if you're white, so therefore you are a racist; where blacks are not privileged, therefore they cannot be racist," Beito says. "Of course, I think Condoleezza Rice might disagree with that statement."
The history instructor considers such a "collectivist notion" equivalent to racism. "Right there, you've got a distinction based solely on skin color," he says. "Now, of course, they would say whites are privileged. But again, there are plenty of privileged blacks in this society -- and there are plenty of unprivileged whites, but they don't look at those distinctions." The group's "collectivist ideology," he adds, is a "form of Calvinism in an odd sense."
Beito recommends an alternative to the controversial training. "Why not have a voluntary speakers series, bringing in people like Thomas Sowell, bringing people on the Left like Cornell West, and bring in diverse viewpoints and make it voluntary?" he suggests.
Because Crossroads is an explicitly religious organization, Beito questions the constitutionality of the group's mandatory workshops in schools -- and he wonders why groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State are not questioning that as well.
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
