The faculty at Manhattan's prestigious Dalton School have issued an unusual hostage demand letter.  The school's students will be at the mercy of substandard Zoom teaching until the entire school — the administration, parents, and students — complies with a length list of woke demands.  On the one hand, it's exquisitely funny to see leftists eating their own, as leftists always do.  On the other hand, with cowardly courts positioning the Democrats for total victory in 2021, this is something that should terrify all sane Americans.

Dalton School is a private K–12 college preparatory school.  It has about 1,300 students, each of whom pays around $54,000 in tuition for the privilege of attending.  A faculty that's roughly 250 strong serves the needs of these gilded students.  The school opened in 1913 as a "Progressive" institution and has been that way ever since.  You won't be surprised to learn that Anderson Cooper and Matt Yglesias went there, as did a bevy of famous children or children of famous people.  Also, Jeffrey Epstein taught there in the mid-1970s.

Thanks to aggressive outreach, in 2008–2009, the school managed to have a kindergarten class that was 44% non-white.  According to a 2012 article in The New York Times, these non-white kids were miserable surrounded by the scions of New York's wealthiest (and probably mostly progressive) families, with Dalton's minority student body up to 38% that year.  They discovered that wealthy people's kids have a sense of entitlement without any offsetting grace or gratitude.

What's happening now can be called "the woke revenge."  Scott Johnston, at The Naked Dollar, broke the story that the Dalton School faculty, inspired by BLM and the Aspen Institute's definitions of racism, is refusing to return to classroom teaching until all of its race-based demands are met.  For parents already unhappy about paying $54,000 per year for inadequate Zoom lessons, this is a problem.  They're all good woke lefties, but they're not pleased about having their kids' educations held hostage.

Here are just some of the demands being made if the kids are ever to see the inside of a classroom again.

A top demand, and one that has apparently caused the most anguish for parents desperate to see their darlings hit the Ivies, is that blacks and whites have to have the same outcomes in "leveled courses" (AP classes that are ostensibly college "level") by 2023.  Blacks, they say, do worse because their teachers are inherently racist, their classmates are racist, and they witness police violence in their neighborhoods.  If the AP classes don't start giving the same grades to blacks as they give to whites, those classes need to go.

In the classroom, there must be "courses that explicitly center Black liberation and challenges to white supremacy."  (Please note that "Black" is capitalized; "white" is not.  Who's being a supremacist to whom?)  What this means is that, in addition to English, math, art, etc., "anti-racism" needs to be a subject.  Also, if faculty members serve the black community, they should get a pass on teaching a class (but still get paid, of course).

To make sure everyone is pure of heart, faculty, staff, administration, trustees, and parent volunteers must take annual "anti-racist" training (something that's pretty much already being done there).  The school also needs to have "at least 12 full-time positions" dedicated to diversity.

There also needs to be a staff member dedicated to hearing complaints from non-white students, who inundated the school with an "outpouring of pain" reflecting "ongoing trauma," and a full-time psychologist who can provide a safe space for traumatized non-white children.  In other words, there are few places worse to be non-white than in a wealthy Manhattan school, filled with progressive faculty and staff, and catering to the children of hardcore wealthy leftists.

You can read the rest yourself.  It's generic, and it bores me.  Let me just spell out the bottom line, once you cut through all the cant:

Wealthy, progressive white people and their children are awful, mean, racist people.  (That may well be true if they're committed progressives.)

White teachers are inherently racist.  (Again, true if they are true progressives, which I'm sure they are at Dalton.)

Black people are incredibly weak, helpless, failed human beings who need more support systems than a 98-year-old man with multiple organ failure in the ICU.  (I know that's not true, but that's the leftists' rap, and they're sticking to it — and, along the way, psychologically destroying generations of black children.)

This is the future that Joe Biden and Co. envision for you, one in which race is the only metric that matters, with all whites being bad and all non-whites being pathetic, failed human beings who cannot function unless the government props them up and, along the way, squashes the white population.  Martin Luther King weeps.

Image: Dalton School's main building by Jim Henderson. CC0 (public domain).