Reject the NEA and side with South Dakota families
by State Rep. Jon Hansen
The South Dakota Education Association Teachers Union (the SDEA) is the local affiliate of the National Education Association Teachers Union (the NEA). The SDEA teachers union forces all of its members to also be members of the NEA teachers union.
The SDEA teachers union needs to take a stand, either with the radical leftists who control the NEA teachers union and the philosophies they promote, or with South Dakota parents who don’t want their kids indoctrinated with far left ideology in our schools.
A few years ago I sponsored and passed a legislative resolution denouncing the NEA teachers union for taking an official position in support of abortion. The NEA teachers union stated–in its officially adopted position–that, “the NEA vigorously opposes all attacks on the right to choose and stands on the fundamental right to abortion under Roe v. Wade.” Is that the message that the SDEA teachers union wants their member teachers to be teaching your kids in school?
Now, the NEA teachers union has taken an official position in support of Critical Race Theory. Critical Race Theory rejects Martin Luther King Jr’s dream that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Instead, Critical Race Theory teaches your young child that he or she is an intrinsic oppressor of minorities and systemically racist. Is that the message that the SDEA teachers union wants their member teachers to be teaching your kids in school?
For the SDEA teachers union, in the words of Ronald Reagan, this is a time for choosing. Will the SDEA teachers union continue to side with the radical leftists in the NEA? Will the SDEA teachers union continue to affiliate with, support, and fund the NEA which officially supports abortion and Critical Race Theory? Will the SDEA teachers union continue to force its members to be a part of the radical NEA?
Or, will the SDEA teachers union denounce the radical positions of the NEA and side with South Dakota parents so that parents know that when they send their child to school in our state that they receive a proper education rather than indoctrination?
To me, the answer is easy, reject the NEA and side with South Dakota families. How will the SDEA teachers union answer?
Does the teachers’ union have a position on kids with cell phones in schools and WiFi in schools?
“Critical Race Theory rejects Martin Luther King Jr’s dream that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Instead, Critical Race Theory teaches your young child that he or she is an intrinsic oppressor of minorities and systemically racist.”
Nice how republicans are trying to profess a love of minorities and weepy affection for MLK while doing everything they can to restrict their ability to vote.
“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.”
“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.”
Good advice for YOU to follow.
So you’re one of the children who think any restrictions on free-for-all voting is suppression. How very infantile of you to spew the bilge that any attempts to make sure only those LEGALLY entitled to vote are able to vote is suppression. I guess you don’t value your vote much, do ya’?
Do you remember which party was the party of the Klan? Yep, the Democrat party. Which party was Robert Byrd, the known racist, a member of? The Democrat party. Which party is senile Joe, who purports to instruct all African Americans on how to vote or they surrender their race, a member of? Right, the Democrat party.
from what I have been able to determine, Critical Race Theory is a religion.
Judaism is an historical religion: all history is explained as divine intervention. Everything that ever happened in the history of the Jews was something God did to either punish or reward them. Likewise, in CRT, everything that ever happened in US history was about racism. Racism seems to have been the motivation behind everything.
Where these two religions intersect is going to be interesting. You know, like Germany declaring war on the USA on December 11, 1941. was that racism or God?
Yes. Only I think it might be fairer to call CRT (and its umbrella ideology, Wokism/Critical Social Justice) a fundamentalist religion or cult.
The big traditional religions tend to be relatively open and flexible. CRT/Wokism, on the other hand, is a dogmatic system built on a handful of crude axioms that are repeated ad nauseum. Life is all about oppression. Every disparity is due to racism. The privileged are always holding down the marginalized. Whiteness is in everything. Etc, etc..
You basically always know what the woke are going to say about something beforehand, which isn’t the case with adherents of real religions. In other words, if I know you are a Catholic, I can’t then automatically know what you’ll say about most political and social issues. But if I know you’re woke, I can probably figure out what you’ll say because you’re working from a script. It’s like talking to a wind-up doll programmed by an angry teenager, or by a conspiracy-theorist.
Thank you Rep Hansen.
You always seem to beFighting for religious freedom and good values
Heaven forbid kids learn and talk about things like the Tuskeegee experiments, Patriot Act raids, and difference between crack and powder cocaine sentencing.
Comments like the above show you that the campaign against Wokism is making progress. The Woke and their allies have retreated to the motte (https://newdiscourses.com/2020/05/stealing-motte-critical-social-justice-principle-charity/). They are pretending that CRT is all about teaching students uncontroversial facts, like the existence of the Tuskegee experiments. It’s not. CRT is about teaching that racism is embedded in every American institution as a central organizing force, that this the THE TRUTH, and that all other views are illegitimate and need to be suppressed.
Saying that CRT is about teaching students discrete facts is an obvious, verifiable misrepresentation. Or, maybe you don’t even understand what you are talking about and just float about blissfully on the assumption that everything on the left must be good and reasonable at the end of the day?
Fortunately, the CRT deception campaign isn’t working so well anymore because the left is losing its ability to just tell everyone “the sky is pink today” (or when it comes to CRT, at least).
Comments like the above show you that the campaign against Wokism is making progress. The Woke and their allies have retreated to the motte (just google: “Stealing the Motte: Critical Social Justice and the Principle of Charity”). They are pretending that CRT is all about teaching students uncontroversial facts, like the existence of the Tuskegee experiments. It’s not. CRT is about teaching that racism is embedded in every American institution as a central organizing force, that this the THE TRUTH, and that all other views are illegitimate and need to be suppressed.
Saying that CRT is about teaching students discrete facts is an obvious, verifiable misrepresentation. Or, maybe you don’t even understand what you are talking about and just float about blissfully on the assumption that everything on the left must be good and reasonable at the end of the day?
Fortunately, the CRT deception campaign isn’t working so well anymore because the left is losing its ability to just tell everyone “the sky is pink today” (or when it comes to CRT, at least).
I mean, if you’re teaching students about those discrete facts you would so discus the underpinnings that brought about those facts: the belief the black bodies aren’t worth NOT infecting with syphilis, the idea that people of Middle Eastern descent very well MIGHT be terrorists, and the concept that drugs associated found more readily in minority communities SHOULD be punished more harshly than those found in New England country clubs. I get what you’re saying, it’s scary to think that where we are today came about and continues to be affected by racist actions, but that’s worth understanding. Depriving students of the ability to grapple with that risks leaving them wandering through life with horse blinders not understanding that those “bad” sides of town and the like don’t JUST exist because of the actions of people in the present, but also because of very clearly crappy actions in the past. I mean, look at the reservations! Do you think Native people CHOSE some of the worst places in the state to settle down? Nope. That was a conscious decision. Just like it was a conscious decision to flood all of the best land along the Missouri with the dams in mid century. And if you think those conscious decisions are not still affecting those communities today, I just might tell Kristi Noem on you because she told us no-no to recreational pot and you’re clearly smoking something.
Apologies, I was on a bit of a tangent. To clarify: Native people didn’t chose to settle down where the reservations are today, (white) bureaucrats made that decision for them. Just like (white) bureaucrats chose to flood em half a century later.
I don’t know what to do with this. Yes, bad things have happened. They should be examined and addressed in thoughtful and sane ways. What you are doing is totally different. You are selectively holding up this and that wrong, using them to buttress some low-resolution, anachronistic argument about “racism” being the prime mover in history, and, like the woke people you are defending, you use that narrative to cover up and justify the new forms of racism and authoritarianism being pushed by leftists.
Apparently, having achieved cultural hegemony has deprived progressives of the sorts of signals that normally tell people “that’s an overly simplistic explanation,” “what you are proposing is morally wrong and a violation of people’s basic rights,” etc. So, it is now up to people outside of the leftwing echo chamber to contain the illiberal left. Hence the anti-CRT laws.
To be frank, your understanding of history and how it works is very poor. I fully concede that many of the wrongs you cite occurred. But do you really think history consists of a series of decision points at which some sort of malevolent white man behind the curtain chose to stack the deck in his favor, and what we have today is simply the outcome of that process? What about the fact that the wars on crime and drugs were in many cases strongly supported by Black leaders fed up with high crime levels in their communities? What about Black agency? Or do Black people only count as Black when they are sticking it to the man?
Not sure if you’ll return to this comment thread but at no point did I say that racism was the prime mover of history and I am sorry if that was the implication you received. There have been plenty of pushes and pulls throughout history, racism being one of them (in some ways, a pretty big one of them), but neglecting the grapple with that puts students in a simple-minded position. I’m just digging into some examples our current curriculum really glosses over in a rose-tinted manner. Racist acts or acts driven by racist thinking did have and continue to have effects on the world around us. But digging into that doesn’t remove the agency of any group of people. It might if we just dealt with them like some sort of “woe is me” topic, but do you really think history classes are going to just go down a laundry list of bad acts in the past? No, for every one of those examples given above, there are hundreds of examples of the affected people taking steps to rectify those wrongs, which should be equally studied and equally celebrated (albeit, celebration in a history class seems kind of creepy). The anti-CRT folk out there seem to have this mindset that actually trying to grapple with historical wrongs that have reverberated to the present will absolutely dismantle the country, which is fairly telling. If you agree that those bad things happened and if you agree that, hey, maybe racism had something to do with them, then how would you go about teaching that to kids? How would you check off that laundry list to make sure kids knew that racism was a mover but not the prime mover of history? That people have agency even when facing seemingly insurmountable odds? That, just as the US has done some pretty amazing things, it has also done some pretty terrible things? Let me know how you would teach that to a high schooler and then take a look at any of these curricula being discussed as options today and you might see some weird similarities.
And for anybody in the camp of “you can’t rewrite history,” newsflash: history was written, it can and always has been rewritten. History isn’t real, it’s past, there’s no way to set ourselves back squarely in the past to get an accurate and objective understanding of what was at play. History is literally always, in some ways, a reflection of the moment the History was written just as much as it is a telling of the historical event itself. Today, racism is at the forefront of people’s minds and it probably will be for some time. That’s the lens people are going to examine the past through. Using it as the only lens is silly, but that’s a skill we should teach children: how to approach things through multiple lenses. Got any problems with that?
Depending on the lens it can distort the view; understand? When you are starting with the view that all white people are evil and being white is evil, yeah, I got problems with that.
I don’t know much about CRT, but having lived in Al. my first 35 years i will without hesitation bet that those opposing CRT as an evil “leftist” program would have been calling the civil rights movement and integration of schools an evil “leftists ” plan from socialist outsiders… It is still a pig..
Some statements are so stupid that one cannot even come up with a sensible retort.
Do these right-wing zealots know the schools aren’t teaching that the Earth is flat?
You seem to be playing from a political playbook from decades ago. Look around you. Things have changed. The far left (which is behind CRT) is authoritarian and illiberal. The right is in fact trying to defend traditional liberal values, including the rights of the individual and personal liberty.
A big problem with CRT is that it either explicitly or implicitly calls for the suppression of alternative views. So the problem is not just that the ideas of CRT are alarming and abhorrent, but that it actually calls for shutting down debate.
Obviously, CRT (and broader woke ideology) shouldn’t be taught as fact or as articles of faith to our kids. This is the whole issue.
I was watching Noam Chomsky on CSpan a few years ago and he started in on his theory that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery, not separate from the UK.
It’s an interesting idea but doesn’t explain what happened in Boston where it all started. The abolitionist movement was already underway there and most of the people who started the war didn’t own slaves. It might have been a motivating factor in the other colonies’ decision to join the conflict but in Boston it was motivated by excessive taxation and widespread dislike of Governor Hutchinson.
The war for Texas’ independence was really about the abolition of slavery in Mexico. But would it have happened without religion as well? How much of it was motivated by a distrust of Roman Catholicism among the settlers who had moved there from the US?
Religion has been a motivation for a lot throughout history. CRT is brought to you by the same people who want to abolish religion from our culture, so that’s another objective. The woke people don’t even want us to talk about the role of religion in the Middle East, and anybody who brings it up is accused of Islamophobia. This is why the 1619 project is so important to them. Generations of Americans were taught that our country started with pilgrims arriving in 1620 seeking religious liberty, (which in their Puritan minds meant mandatory church attendance, prohibition of “keeping Christmas” and persecution of Quakers) and they want to revise that to teach about what had already been established further south. They can’t erase the concept of religious liberty without erasing the history of it first. See how this works?
Does Jon do anything other than repeat talking points from AFP? He doesn’t represent South Dakotan’s, won’t talk with any of his constituents, which are mostly picked off from a gerrymandered district anyway, and is heavily funded by AFP. I wish there were more free thinkers, and pragmatists that would actually address the issues in SD, and not the talking points from a national PAC that is just trying to get people to rage over some social issue.