Welcome to the New Academia: Working Hard in the Classroom is Now Racist
America celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr. Day this past Monday, and remembered his famous dream: that people would be judged by their character and their actions, instead of their skin color.
Just in time for the national holiday honoring one of our country’s great thinkers, a liberal professor has released her own vision for America… but it’s almost completely backwards from King’s dream, and deeply racist at its core.
According to Campus Reform, an education professor and former high school teacher named Laurie Rubel is now insisting that “meritocracy” in math classes — actually having standards and rewarding hard work — is a “tool of whiteness.”
Yes, the latest liberal talking point is that believing black students can and should meet academic standards is now “racist.”
And you thought it wasn’t possible for the left to become more condescending.
“Rubel, who taught high school math for nine years before becoming a professor, argues that while meritocracy is commonly linked to hard work and talent, it also ‘functions as a tool of whiteness,'” Campus Reform reported, based on the professor’s article in the peer-reviewed Journal of Urban Mathematics Education.
Apparently “Urban Mathematics” is different than standard mathematics. Maybe urban math uses different numbers, which explains why President Barack Obama thought there were 57 states.
Incredibly, over 50 years after Martin Luther King Jr. called on America to look beyond color, this leftist professor is now attacking teachers who try to be colorblind.
“Color-blindness, too, can be an issue for math teachers, according to Rubel, who asserts that ‘Teachers who claim color-blindness—that is, they claim to not notice the race of their students—are, in effect, refusing to acknowledge the impact of enduring racial stratification on students and their families,'” continued Campus Reform.
In other words, if you treat people differently because of their skin color, you’re a racist. But if you ignore skin color and hold all students to the same standard, you’re also racist.
Rubel’s solution? Instead of expecting students to meet high standards in areas like mathematics, the leftist professor wants “social justice.”
“According to Rubel, to fix the problem, teachers need to incorporate social justice ideas into their lesson plans, a process she called ‘teaching for’ social justice,” explained TheBlaze.
How does “teaching for social justice” work in an academic area like, say, math?
The details are murky, but “social justice” usually means adjusting the results or expectations based on social factors like race.
Presumably, the liberal approach will be to ask students to solve (18 / 2) + 3, and if they say “10” and come from a disadvantaged background, it still gets marked correct because they were only a few numbers off.
The real outrage here is that by implementing half-baked social justice and patronizing racial theories, liberals are hurting the very people they claim to “help.” Minority students who have been coddled and told they can’t be expected to perform well are not being prepared for the world. They are being set up for failure.
It is deeply racist to look at a person with dark skin and say, “We don’t expect you to take the same difficult tests as other students. Here’s a watered-down lesson plan with lowered expectations.” Yet this is essentially what Rubel and other liberals are saying.
Here’s a thought: Let’s presume that minority students are just as equally able to succeed as anyone else. Let’s expect them to apply themselves, give them tools and encouragement, and then step back and watch them rise.
Let’s stop seeing everything through the lens of skin color and start treating people like individuals with inherent worth and dignity. That was the message of Martin Luther King, Jr. — and it’s amazing that the only ones left defending his dream seem to be conservatives.
Please press “Share on Facebook” if you’re fed up with the left looking down on others because of their skin color!
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