MLK advisor: Local Critical Ethnic Studies curriculum "a perversion of history"

A growing network of parents and educators is appalled at the extreme and inaccurate racial demagoguery contained in county schools' Critical Ethnic Studies classes, textbooks, and teacher training. In a letter to county educators, the group Alliances for Constructive Ethnic Studies explains the extremist ideology on display in the courses.

One tenet of Critical Ethnic Studies (CES) is that white skinned people are always defined as oppressors and therefore can’t be part of the solution to racism and discrimination. One of the key authors cited in the curriculum, Paulo Freire, whose Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a seminal CES work, writes in his book, "The oppressors, who oppress, exploit, and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both."

A consequence of the CES framing is that, rather than addressing racism constructively, an ideological litmus test is applied, resulting in one-dimensional misrepresentation of ethnic groups and their role models. Seminal leaders and peaceful agents of change, such as Martin Luther King and John Lewis, do not warrant a mention in the list of 154 Important Historical Figures Among People of Color included in Draft 3 – a list that includes countless violent and/or neo-Marxist revolutionaries.  

Dr. Clarence B. Jones, speechwriter and adviser to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and founding Director of the Institute for Nonviolence and Social Justice at the University of San Francisco, shared “great concern for the perversion of history that is being perpetrated by the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC).”

For more on the Alliance for Constructive Ethnic Studies: Alliance for constructive ethnic studies here.

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