San Francisco teaches kids that “Genghis Khan was a nice guy” and “Israel is evil,” notes education writer Joanne Jacobs. It does that in its “year-long “ethnic studies” class, which is now a graduation requirement.” The class “focuses on the evils of structural racism, colonialism, capitalism and heteronormative thinking.”
The class favorably depicts Genghis Khan, the genocidal man who launched the Mongol invasions that killed 40 million people. For example, he exterminated over a million people in the great city of Merv after it surrendered, resulting in that that ancient city no longer existing. Genghis Khan exterminated the Tangut people, who numbered about 3 million.
San Francisco’s ethnic-studies class is relentlessly negative about America, focusing on tearing down our country, not on highlighting the historical contributions of nonwhite innovators or patriots.
After reviewing the curriculum on the district website, parent Viviane Safrin discovered that only “four lessons out of 55 highlight contributions by ethnic groups, she wrote in a memo last year. The word “hegemony” appeared 81 times.
“They are taught how to organize — what it means to resist,” Safrin says. “They’re taught about dominant and counter narratives. It’s an upper-level college course for one way to examine history, but it is not teaching any actual history.” “One exercise still in use” celebrates “the Red Guards, a student-led paramilitary organization from Mao’s Chinese Cultural Revolution,” which tortured and killed tens of thousands of people in China between 1966 and 1976.
Another calls for students to read a 2012 article called “Straight white male: The lowest difficulty setting there is” and asks, “What would white males need to give up (or relinquish) in order to make a more equitable society?” “The ethnic studies course aims to ‘critique empire building in history and its relationship to white supremacy, racism, and other forms of power and oppression (such as, but not limited to, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, exploitative economic systems, ableism, ageism, anthropocentrism, xenophobia, misogyny, antisemitism, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, Islamophobia, and transphobia).'”
When reporters wrote about the curriculum in The Standard, most parents quoted requested anonymity. “They described fear of being labeled as racists or right-wing and of having their children singled out at school.” Jewish parents note that their kids are told that Jews are oppressors. “In October, students at one high school were shown a presentation claiming that Israel’s founding was an ‘invasion’ that ‘decimated Indigenous populations.”
San Francisco has a lot of left-wing antisemites. Left-wing students offered to donate money to kill Jews at San Francisco State University.
A female athlete was attacked by a pro-trans mob at San Francisco State University. University officials did nothing about the attack and took no disciplinary action against the attackers.
Schools in places like San Francisco have became obsessed with “antiracism.” “Antiracism” often involves teaches kids to hate the free-market economy and to support racial discrimination. “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,” claimed Ibram Kendi’s best-selling book, How to Be An Antiracist. That book was praised as a “comprehensive introduction to critical race theory,” by the leading progressive media organ Slate. The “key concept” in Ibram Kendi’s book was that discrimination against whites is the only way to achieve equality: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination,” wrote Kendi in that book.
Woke “antiracism” has destroyed some charter schools that previously were a lifeline for students of color, turning “no-excuses” schools where kids learned a lot into chaotic places where kids get into fights and learn little.
