Teaching Hate

Seattle Public Schools recently held a training session for teachers in which American schools were deemed guilty of “spirit murder” against black students. The United States is a “race-based white-supremist society,” the training instructed, and white teachers must “bankrupt [their] privilege in acknowledgement of [their] thieved inheritance.”

According to whistleblower documents I’ve obtained from the session, the trainers begin by claiming that the teachers are colonizers of “the ancestral lands and traditional territories of the Puget Sound Coast Salish People.” Then, next to an image of the Black Power fist, they claim that “the United States was built off the stolen labor of kidnapped and enslaved Black people’s work, which created the profits that created our nation.”

In the presentation materials, the organizers of the session identify themselves by both gender pronouns and race labels. For example, one speaker is identified as “He/Him, White,” while another is identified as “She/her pronouns, Black (half Black and half White).” {snip}

The central message is that white teachers must recognize that they “are assigned considerable power and privilege in our society” because of their “possession of white skin.” Consequently, to atone for their collective guilt, white teachers must be willing to reject their “whiteness” and become dedicated “anti-racist educator[s].”

The trainers acknowledge that this language might meet resistance from white teachers. They explain that any negative emotional reaction to being denounced for “whiteness” is an automatic response from the white teachers’ “lizard-brain,” which makes them “afraid that [they] will have to talk about sensitive issues such as race, racism, classism, sexism, or any kind of ‘ism.’” {snip}

In the most disturbing portion of the session, the teachers discussed “spirit murder,” which, according to Bettina Love, is the concept that American schools “murder the souls of Black children every day through systemic, institutionalized, anti-Black, state-sanctioned violence.” {snip}

The goal of these inflammatory “racial equity” programs is to transform Seattle schools into activist organizations. At the conclusion of the training, teachers must explain how they will practice “anti-racist pedagogy,” address the “current social justice movements taking place,” and become “anti-racist outside the classroom.” {snip}

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