High school students will be encouraged to support reparations as part of a new “reparations math” curriculum developed by the creators of the controversial 1619 Project.
The 1619 Project Education Network, overseen by the Pulitzer Center, released a summary of a “Reparations Math and Reparations History” curriculum last month.
“Students apply math skills, research into historical wealth gaps in the U.S., and an analysis of different reparations models to an investigation into whether or not reparations should be paid to the descendents of enslaved people in the U.S.,” the network’s website says.
The concepts in question are supposed to be taught over the course of three to four weeks, or 15 class periods, according to the proposal.
Objectives include analyzing “the way that the sugar industry, and other industries that grew as a result of slave labor, have led to a wealth gap for African Americans,” and how “reparations should be paid to descendents of enslaved people” to fix racial wealth gaps. Never mind that racial wealth gaps are not the result of racism — if they were, Asians would make less than whites, but in fact, Asians make more money than whites do, as do recent immigrants from many African countries.
The reparations math curriculum has a deep ideological slant, said Carol Swain, former professor of law and political science at Vanderbilt University and currently a senior fellow for constitutional studies at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. “It is disheartening to watch the influence the historically inaccurate and flawed 1619 Project is having on American society through seemingly unlimited access to ideologically mainstream media platforms that never allow anyone to question their flawed narratives.”
“The curriculum materials for math are clearly geared towards politicizing the youngest minds,” she said.
The proposal for reparations math follows the 1619 Project’s release of proposal last May that called for history classes centered around investigating “the wealth theft from Black Americans that has repeatedly occurred from 1619 to the present in order to research and propose a comprehensive solution.”
Materials based on the 1619 Project have been taught across America since its release in August 2019. An investigation by John Murawski of RealClearInvestigations found that the 1619 Project curriculum had been adopted in over 3,500 classes in all 50 states, mostly through “administrative fiat” without notice to the public. “With the imprimatur of the New York Times and its partners, this view has migrated quickly from the news pages to the classroom,” Murawski said in that 2020 report.
Because the curriculum materials for reparations math are being distributed to educators directly through the Pulitzer Center’s website, it is likely that many teachers will begin using these in classrooms without parents being aware of that, Matt Beienburg noted in the National Review. “The new ‘Reparations Math’ lessons, which have already been piloted by educators associated with the 1619 Project Education Network, are now primed to follow the same blueprint, saturating schools in red and blue states alike via distribution directly to educators via the Pulitzer’s website,” Beienburg wrote.
Ian Rowe, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, says the curriculum will be used to convince some children they are victims. “Students taking Reparations Math learn no opposing viewpoints,” said Rowe, a black conservative and author of “Agency: The Four Point Plan (F.R.E.E.) for ALL Children to Overcome the Victimhood Narrative and Discover Their Pathway to Power.” He says the “reparations math” is “is pure indoctrination designed to perpetuate an ideology of black dependency and retribution for historical and presumed present day racial victimization.”
This is not the first time educators have sought to use math classes to peddle racial propaganda. Two years ago, instructors at Bates College suggested redesigning many math courses to focus on “colonialism and privilege.” The instructors argued that an introductory calculus course should “situate race, white supremacy, colonialism, power, and privilege centrally and attend to them throughout the course.” These instructors falsely believed that colonialism made Africa poor. In reality, colonization made Third World countries more economically advanced, as the father of modern Liberia, William Tubman, noted. Tubman, who served as Liberia’s president from 1944 to 1971, pointed out that Liberia was economically poorer than its neighbors because it had not had “the benefits of colonization.” Colonization of Africa made it more agriculturally and economically productive and eventually curbed slavery. Colonization also abolished barbaric practices like suttee (the burning of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres) in India. Most people in many pre-colonization African societies were slaves: For example, the slave population accounted for more than two-thirds of the total population of the Songhai Empire. That empire was the successor of the similarly heavily-enslaved Mali Empire celebrated in progressive high-school textbooks, whose most famous leader, Mansa Musa, went on a pilgrimage to Mecca with an entourage of 12,000 slaves to cater to his every desire.
In July 2021, a Kentucky school system disclosed that it would be hosting a year-long “anti-racism seminar” for math teachers, which was designed to “eliminate curricular violence and innovate mathematics education” through “anti-bias, anti-racist, and racially equitable practices.”
“Anti-racism” teaches students to hate their country and view it as incorrigibly racist. “To love capitalism is to end up loving racism. To love racism is to end up loving capitalism….Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist,” says the best-selling book How to Be An Antiracist, used in some high-school classes. It advocates discrimination against whites, saying, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination [against whites]. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” That book is a “comprehensive introduction to critical race theory,” gushes the leading progressive media organ Slate, which loves this odious book.
The book’s author is Ibram Kendi, whose books are read in many American classrooms. In 2020, the Fairfax County, Virginia, Schools paid Kendi $20,000 for a one-hour presentation on “anti-racism” to school staff. At the time, they were also paying bus drivers to drive entirely empty school buses.
Neighboring Arlington, Virginia, distributed hundreds of copies of Ibram Kendi’s book Stamped to students at Wakefield High School. The book contains many errors and celebrates a Marxist anti-Semite. It also peddles conspiracy theories and is dismissive about Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass. At Arlington’s Washington-Lee High School, most students in 9th grade English were assigned to read either Stamped or a much longer book that would require more work to read. Virtually all students chose to read Stamped as a result.
“Anti-racist” books like Kendi’s don’t just disparage capitalism and whiteness. They also attack virtues such as planning ahead. The St. Paul, Minnesota schools cite cite the antiracist protocol “Courageous Conversation” as part of their Critical Ethnic Studies class required for graduation. That protocol has “guided school districts to deem traits such as the ability to plan ahead and ’emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology’ as attributes of ‘whiteness.’” Schools have also disparaged individualism and planning ahead as signs of “cultural racism,” under its baneful influence.
