Anonymous wrote:It’s one thing to ask about a standalone DEI curriculum.

But expanding the regular canon to read important books by black authors who engage with themes about racism is not DEI.

And even if you only read booksabout successful white males with adoring trad wives, there is still a racial lens to that.

So calling this or that the “DEI book” is itself kind of racist, at least when you are talking about books that every educated person should have read.

And so if the question is whether there any good schools that don’t include “DEI books” in the curriculum, then the answer to that is obviously no.

It is very important how extensive this is and how it is mixed in. Some schools use their summer reading to accomplish this. If a school requires three books and all three are books about race, class, gender, etc., that is an emphasis on DEI. If one of the three is that way, that is healthy.

I don't think anyone opposes reading diverse authors in English and in history studying something other than the history of white men (or at least I hope they don't). But it is the extent to how it is done and which specific topics and authors are taught. Black Boy or Beloved or A Raisin in the Sun are classics by black authors. Some recent book by an unknown author about a black transgender goatherder from Peru seems extreme, particularly when there are several books like this. Classics are classics for a reason. And there is a way to teach classics while also reflecting diversity in a thoughtful, impactful, non-virtue-signaling way.

I think it’s fair to say there is a DEI curriculum. My experience of it was that it rarely included great Black authors but instead included a lot of contemporary authors whose politics were easily digestible, aka matched what people think of as the “correct” opinions. There is a rainbow of skin tones but only one opinion.

It often features a focus on the indigenous and native people, although it’s often written by people who didn’t grow up in the tribe or experience the history they are writing about. It asks kid’s their opinion before they have even learned the basic info.

The pre-DEI canon I read in HS was more diverse than what my kids read now, honestly, both in terms of range of opinions and race and class of the writer. Our ideas of “white” are very much shaped by our time and place. I have met a lot of different kinds of “white” people in my life, but by far the most conformist and eager to tell you how righteous they are are white progressives.

Birch Wathen Lenox on UES.

Great new HOS.

Lot of framing around a politically open environment for students.

It’s one thing to ask about a standalone DEI curriculum.

But expanding the regular canon to read important books by black authors who engage with themes about racism is not DEI.

And even if you only read booksabout successful white males with adoring trad wives, there is still a racial lens to that.

So calling this or that the “DEI book” is itself kind of racist, at least when you are talking about books that every educated person should have read.

And so if the question is whether there any good schools that don’t include “DEI books” in the curriculum, then the answer to that is obviously no.

Anonymous wrote:Pontificating on someone's race rather than responding to or weighing their argument is exactly the kind of crap I don't want my kids to grow up and do.

+1

Pontificating on someone's race rather than responding to or weighing their argument is exactly the kind of crap I don't want my kids to grow up and do.

White Hispanic or Asian? You guys belong to a terrible church.

Anonymous wrote:I doubt you are a POC, not that it matters. Are you new around here? The US invented and reinforced racial categories since the inception of the country and still does. It also operates a de facto caste system. So, the color blind world you are imagining just never existed here. That's not to say each person will experience it, but to pretend it doesn't exist seems a bit naive.

You clearly know very little about DEI programming incorporated into the mission of most independent schools, including the active recruitment of a diverse student body (racially, religiously, gender, sexuality, economic class, and immigrant status, if possible). The inclusion of ideas that may discuss any of these identities in history and LA courses. My children attend 2 different independent schools (one TT, one 2T) and both schools are VERY thoughtful in how they design their history and LA programs. They also have guest speakers/performers who may touch upon a cultural theme. All if this programming feels like cultural expansion, not dogma or ideology. My children's previous experience at their mostly white public school included none of this. I found it to be rather unsophisticated.

I got the same impression reading this, OP is definitely not Black because most Black people I know hate using the term POC. Likely Asian or maybe White Hispanic.

The book written by the white woman about her journey to indigenous knowledge was the DEI pick. Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Go Tell it On the Mountain (Baldwin) and Chinua Achebe were all books I read in my run of the mill private school in flyover country in the Pre-DEI 1990s. We read Othello and then Desdemona, the way Toni Morrison recommended. We read and watched Sounder (oh, that movie) and Mildred Taylor whose family experienced the Great Migration. We read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, and the Joy Luck Club. We read Night, the Diary of Ann Frank, Number the Stars and slave testimonials in US history. We did a project on the Education of Little Tree when it was revealed that the man who wrote was just another white person pretending to be Native American (once upon a time it wasn’t just white women who did that, it was men, too). It seemed very normal, yes, this rich tapestry of opinions and experiences, but it didn’t seem very “white.” I don’t like DEI because it’s shallow not because I am holding onto some Euro-supremacy. I am not a huge fan of Richard Wright’s Marxism (by the end of his life neither was he) or how he treated Zora Neale (he apologized), but Black Boy is a gut-wrenching account about growing up black in the Jim Crow South that stays with you far longer than one of these HR lectures we put our kids through.

*** I regret the snide personal remarks I made about who might have friends, etc. I apologize. It was unnecessarily pugilistic.

The DEI programming was the book about indigenous knowledge written by a white lady who joined a tribe in her forties my kids school put into the curriculum. Richard Wright who wrote Black Boy and Native Son was what I read at school in the ‘90s pre-DEI, same with Mildred Taylor and Chinua Achebe and Zora Neale Hurston, The Bluest Eye and a book called Black Ice, a memoir about being the only black girl at a boarding school in the 1980s, as well as Sounder (fantastic movie, too) and Go Tell it on the Mountain by Baldwin. We read the Education of Little Tree and did a whole project about how the writer was a Pretendian who had been in the Klan. We read Anne Frank and Night by Elie Wiesel. We read Othello so we could understand Desdemona by Toni Morrison (she said reading the play without knowing Othello would be silly) and we read slave narratives in history class. All this we read at my run of the mill nothing private christian school in a flyover state. Whatever lens that was, it wasn’t white, and it definitely seemed less white than what my kid read now.

Anonymous wrote:Post 2020, Brearley dedicated itself to becoming an anti-racist institution. They changed the curriculum after an equity audit, and equity and anti-racism is now built into the mission statement. The head of the DEI office used to be at Bank Street, and the school has followed his lead. He is very dedicated to moving the school from diversity to belonging, and they teach equity as the ideal concept starting very young. I think they have dialed back some of the gender stuff now, but they were big into teaching it in lower school for a bit (aka -- asking kids to declare a gender identity). Collegiate grades kids based on whether the teacher thinks they are working up to their potential, and their current head of admissions used to be at the School at Columbia, which is/was a very progressive school. People will call you a liar or a racist or a Trump supporter if you point it out, even though it is information available on either school's website, so if it is a lie that has a lot has changed over the past five years, it means the school is either lying to make itself look good or wasting a lot of money on consultants and faculty whose suggestions they have no intention of taking. Neither is great.

As you complain about this, I hope you understand that "white culture" was the DEFAULT lens in teaching. So, while it felt "normal" to you, and this feels like a departure from your norm . . . I think you need to give some more thought to your norm. Are racial dominance and racial hierarchy the values we want to continue to preach?

Anonymous wrote:Here, here! It's all about appearances. Don't trust any place that wants extra credit for not being racist.

LOL. Yeah! Those schools should be immediately ruled out!

Anonymous wrote:You're right, some of them still do, which is great, but I was at a school that pulled those writers in favor of books written by people like Robin Lee Kimmerer, a woman who grew up a upper middle class white woman and enrolled in a tribe as an adult who now claims access to indigenous ways of knowing. My kids can read whatever they want by whoever they want but not liking that kind of curriculum change is not the same thing as being "euro-centric." How joining a tribe as an adult isn't colonial is beyond me, but I'm happy to hear theories.
I want people to argue for their actual ideas rather than assuming that the other side is auto-racist or motivated by racism. It prevents an actual diverse conversation by assuming that because you agree with an insta-meme, you're one of the "good ones" on the "right side of history." Everyone thinks they are on the right side of history -- it's those that "know" they are that have done a lot of damage throughout history.

Odd example since this tracks as far more of an exception than the rule with DEI curricula . . . and then using this anecdote as a basis for what? Getting rid of DEI programming. Frankly, your example is likely something that often occurred BEFORE DEI was implemented anywhere.

Anonymous wrote:Also, my kids don’t walk by people on the street, they have all sorts of people from all sorts of classes in their lives as part of their lives. The only thing you thinking you can’t be a POC and against DEI tells me is that you don’t have many as friends.

Huh? Not OP. I am a POC with tons of friends of color. But not relevant. Not everyone has those relationships, and even if they did, that's even more of a reason to include everyone's "lens."

Here, here! It's all about appearances. Don't trust any place that wants extra credit for not being racist.