White students and teachers in the Evanston/Skokie Illinois School District 65 are being illegally discriminated against and forced to accept that their “white identity is inherently racist,” according to a teacher. Stacy Deemar, a drama teacher who’s been with the school district for almost 20 years, has had enough. On Tuesday, the Southeastern Legal Foundation […]
White students and teachers in the Evanston/Skokie Illinois School District 65 are being illegally discriminated against and forced to accept that their “white identity is inherently racist,” according to a teacher.
Stacy Deemar, a drama teacher who’s been with the school district for almost 20 years, has had enough.
On Tuesday, the Southeastern Legal Foundation filed a lawsuit against the school district for mandating the racial division in schools, The Federalist reports.
“By vowing to define its teachers and students solely by their race, District 65 promotes and reinforces a view of race essentialism that divides Americans into groups based solely on their skin color,” said Southeastern Legal Foundation General Counsel Kimberly Hermann. “District 65 teaches its teachers and students that their whole identity comes from the color of their skin. It teaches them to hate each other. It teaches them not only how to be racist, but that they should be racist. This is illegal, wrong, and must be stopped.”
The lawsuit alleges that the school district has implemented critical race theory into school curriculum, classroom procedures and teacher training for years.
Per The Federalist:
In October 2020, superintendent Devon Horton told District 65 teachers, “If you’re not antiracist, we can’t have you in front of our students.” In its programming, District 65 forces employees to accept that white individuals are “loud, authoritative . . . [and] controlling,” to understand, “To be less white is to be less racially oppressive,” to acknowledge that “white identity is inherently racist,” to denounce “white privilege,” to participate in racially segregated exercises, and to participate in “privilege walks,” where teachers must respond to the prompt “Because of my race or color…” If teachers fail to complete the training, District 65 openly labels them “racist.”
Additionally, the district has hosted sessions requiring teachers to read “White Fragility” by Robin DiAngelo, a literary framework for racism, segregating them into reading groups based on race, providing teachers with personal copies of the book, and even announced that DiAngelo would speak to the staff in the 2019-2020 school year. During the reading sessions, the district instructed schools to select “at least one facilitator who identifies as white.”
Teachers aren’t the only ones subjected to these racist teachings. Students have been taught racial discrimination and are mandated to attend a week dedicated to Black Lives Matter. Pre-K through fifth-grade students were even forced to read aloud “Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness (Ordinary Terrible Things)” by Anastasia Higginbotham.
