Oregon embraces a level of racism last seen before the Civil War
One of the sins of the antebellum South was that it made it illegal to educate slaves. The idea behind this policy was that educated blacks might rebel against the system that oppressed them. After all, while slavery was normative in Africa, educating them in the Western canon might show them that it didn’t have to be this way. I thought of that when Oregon’s Department of Education announced that it was racist to require minorities to have basic skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic upon graduation. What better way to keep blacks from understanding that there is something better than what leftism offers?
Oregon initially did away with graduation standards because, during COVID, it allowed its entire K-12 education system to collapse. However, it’s now decided to extend the absence of standards through 2028 because, according to its Department of Education, standards harm minorities:
High schoolers in Oregon won’t need to demonstrate basic competency in reading, writing or math in order to graduate for at least five more years because, according to education officials, such requirements are unnecessary and disproportionately harm students of color.
[snip]
The essential skills requirement has been on pause since the coronavirus pandemic, and last week the Oregon State Board of Education voted unanimously to continue suspending the graduation requirement through the 2027-2028 school year.
Under the requirement, 11th graders had to demonstrate competence in essential subjects through a standardized test or work samples.
Students who failed to meet expectations were required to take extra math and writing classes in their senior year — thus missing an elective class — in order to graduate.
Board members said the standards were unnecessary and harmed marginalized students since higher rates of students of color, students with disabilities and students learning English as a second language ended up having to take the extra step to prove they deserved a diploma, The Oregonian reported.
There are only two ways to interpret this decision (and they are not mutually exclusive), both of which speak to leftist racism and are hugely insulting to Oregon’s black population. The first interpretation is that Oregon’s Board of Education has decided that blacks are incapable of being educated.
The underlying thinking is that Oregon’s black students are just too…what’s the word? Ah, yes, stupid. This is exactly the same thinking that allowed post-Enlightenment Southerners to continue slavery, even when they knew that the blacks they enslaved were also children of God. Sure, the racists argued, they’re children of God, but they’re also perpetual children, incapable of development, who are best served by being completely controlled…for their own benefit, of course.
It's a vomitous notion and racist all the way down.
The second way to interpret this is that Democrats are afraid that, if they truly educate blacks so that blacks are capable of going on to educate themselves throughout their lives, that will reveal to them that everything the Democrat party has done has damaged the black community. Slavery, Jim Crow, generational welfare, the breakdown of the family, the attack on faith, the war on police, the war on the value of education… Every one of these things has degraded what blacks were able to do in the years following the Civil War despite the unconstitutional, brutal inequities they suffered.
There is no racist like a Democrat. That was true in 1828 when the party was formed, and it’s true today. The only difference is that today’s Democrats have learned to frame their demeaning racism in the language of compassion to mislead the victims of their policies.
Image: Classroom by freepik.