The man tapped by Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to write Minnesota’s ethnic studies standards recently called for the “overthrow” of the United States, because he says it is “irreversibly racist”, reports the National Review.
The Post-Millennial adds:
Brian Lozenski, a professor of urban and multicultural education at Macalester College in the city of Saint Paul, Minnesota has called for the “overthrow” of the United States. Walz had tapped Lozenski to create an “implementation framework” for Minnesota’s ethnic studies standards.
During a 2022 Zoom recording of Lozenski discussing his book, “My Emancipation Don’t Fit Your Equation: Critical Enactments of Black Education in the US,” the professor and appointee of Walz was speaking about how the text tied into education and critical race theory (CRT).
He said that a main tenet of CRT is that the “United States as constructed is irreversibly racist. So, if the nation-state as constructed is irreversibly racist, then it must be done with, it must be overthrown.” Lozenski had said that those in favor of CRT cannot simply say that CRT is “just about telling our stories and divers[ity].”
“It’s not about that. It’s about overthrow. It’s insurgent. And we, we need to be, I think, more honest with that,” Lozenski added, later saying, “The United States needs to be deconstructed, period. Right. Like that’s, you know, and so I think, I think it’s an interesting argument there. And that’s why I’m a critical race theorist.”
Alpha News also reports that Lozenski said, “You can’t be a critical race theorist and be pro-U.S. … and that’s why I’m a critical race theorist.”
Erika Sanzi of Parents Defending Education explains that Lozenski “is the person appointed by Tim Walz to draft the framework for the ethnic studies program that all MN schools must offer per state law. Not surprising that they are slow-rolling it now and missing deadlines so it won’t become public before the election.”
Minnesota State Representative Walter Hudson says, “Tim Walz and the Democrat trifecta enacted legislation mandating these ideas to be taught to Minnesota children. Teacher licensing standards have been modified to screen for compliance with radical ideology.”
Another commentator adds, “Walz’s DEI, CRT education appointee for Minnesota’s curriculum on ethnic studies advocates for insurrection against the U.S. in the name of overthrowing racism. The same argument was used to burn, loot and kill in 2020 by BLM-Antifa extremists.”
Walz knew exactly what sort of person Lozenski was when his administration put radicals like him in charge of drafting Minnesota’s curriculum. As a think-tank, the Center of the American Experiment, notes,
The inclusion of Ethnic Studies marks a victory for forces seeking to radically remake Minnesota’s public schools. Ethnic Studies goes beyond the standard “anti-racist” Critical Race Theory (CRT) focus, especially in its stress on student political activism: “disrupting,” “dismantling” and “transforming” our nation’s fundamental institutions….When MDE appointed the standards drafting committee, it took the unprecedented step of excluding academic subject matter experts in history, civics, geography and economics. Instead, it stacked the committee with political activists, community organizers and their allies, who dominated the process.
These activists’ goal was not to revise and improve “rigorous standards” in “core academic subjects” in our state’s K-12 public schools, as law requires. On the contrary, they view Minnesota’s public education system — as drafting committee member Jonathan Hamilton, of Education for Liberation Minnesota, has described it — as a “white supremacist puzzle that must be taken apart and exposed for the lie it is (emphasis added)….
When the Minnesota Legislature adopted our state’s social studies standards in 2004, it authorized MDE to revise them every 10 years to “raise academic expectations for students, teachers and schools.” By law, state standards must be both “objective” and “measurable,” and “consistent with” the U.S. and Minnesota Constitutions. But MDE’s proposed standards fail on all these fronts.
The standards are the brainchild of a radical organization, Education for Liberation Minnesota, whose leading activists and allies were put on the standards drafting committee. EdLib MN argues that schools should view students in terms of their race. It claims that black students who violate school rules “consciously or unconsciously resist racist educational contexts,” and so must be understood, not as “behavior problems,” but as “barometers who measure the toxic atmosphere” of “a deep history of anti-black and white supremacist logics.”
EdLib MN falsely claims that “modern police departments” emerged “directly” from “slave patrols” (they don’t) and it calls for the “abolition” of police, prisons, and border controls. Its ultimate goal is revolution: “The abolition of policing is about building a new world.” “Defunding the police” means “abolishing the social order and building a new society.”
EdLib MN created the Minnesota Ethnic Studies Coalition to transform Minnesota’s curriculum. MESC had a two-fold strategy: (a) to get the legislature to pass a bill mandating Ethnic Studies statewide; and (b) to revise the social studies standards by getting its representatives — all Ethnic Studies partisans — named to MDE’s drafting committee.
Alpha News reports that the “Walz administration” will hold a “racially segregated retreat for ‘BIPOC’ librarians, using “public funds to cover hotel lodging, meals and other fees for those attending the program, state documents show.”
