All Episodes
Previous Next
April 29, 2021 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
02:14:57
Teaching & the Voice of Conscience | Paul Rossi | EP 164
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hello.
If you have found the ideas I discuss interesting and useful, perhaps you might consider purchasing my recently released book, Beyond Order, 12 More Rules for Life, available from Penguin Random House in print or audio format.
You could use the links we provide below or buy through Amazon or at your local bookstore.
This new book, Beyond Order, Provides what I hope is a productive and interesting walk through ideas that are both philosophically and, sometimes, spiritually meaningful, as well as being immediately implementable and practical.
Beyond Order can be read and understood on its own, but also builds on the concepts that I developed in my previous books, Twelve Rules for Life, and before that, Maps of Meaning.
Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast.
Today, almost 70 years after Brown versus Blackburn,
Board of Education ushered in the civil rights movement, there is an urgent need to reaffirm and advance its core principles.
FAIR is a foundation against intolerance and racism.
FAIR gets that our civil rights and liberties need to be protected.
It's not enough just to be anti-racist.
We also need to be pro-human.
To insist on our common humanity.
To advocate for fairness and understanding.
To demand that we are each entitled to equality under law.
To bring about a world in which we are all judged by the content of our character and not by the color of our skin.
That's where FAIR comes in.
Moving forward together as one race, the human race.
I support FAIR.
Join us.
I'm pleased to have with me today Mr. Paul.
Paul Rossi.
Paul Rossi is a high school mathematics teacher and writer.
He graduated from Cornell University with a BA in French literature in 1992.
And from Hunter College in New York City, with an MA in Educational Psychology in 2010.
He's been teaching mathematics, including Algebra II and Calculus, at Grace Church High School in Manhattan since 2012.
His April 2021 essay, I refuse to stand by while my students are indoctrinated, was recently published on Substack's Common Sense with Barry Weiss.
Ms.
Weiss is a former New York Times journalist who resigned over differences with her employer and began to function as an independent investigative writer on Substack.
Thank you very much for agreeing to talk with me today.
It's a pleasure to be here.
What's your life like at the moment?
Well, I have a little more time than usual.
At this point, I would be teaching classes I would have up to three classes a day, but they've taken my classes away and assigned them to some other folks.
I basically have no more teaching duties right now.
I have a lot of time for volunteer work and some other things like this, which has been a good chance to tell my story.
Okay, so you're working at Grace Church High School.
Walk us through what happened.
You're a mathematics teacher there, and you published an essay with Barry Weiss last week.
Tell us about the school first.
Well, we're a K-12 school that opened up a high school in 2012.
It was K-8, and then they opened a 9th grade, and then as the 9th moved to the 10th, they brought in another 9th grade.
We had a complete high school by 2016.
You know, our high school is a prep school, but over the course of the, you know, particularly the last five years, we've, you know, five, six years, we've been implementing an anti-racist curriculum programming.
For our students, as well as, you know, because as we were told in 2015, diversity, equity, and inclusion is not enough, and we needed to move towards a so-called anti-racist pedagogy and program.
So that was beyond diversity, inclusivity, and equity.
Right, right.
It's a private high school?
Private high school, that's right.
It's called independent.
The tuition is approximately how much a year?
I believe that's up to 57,000 a year, I think.
Somewhere between 50 and 60.
How big a school is it?
Well, our high school has about 340 students in it, and maybe 100, 120 faculty.
I'm not really sure what the ratio is, faculty and staff.
Did you enjoy teaching there?
I did.
I love teaching math.
It's a wonderful thing.
I got into teaching math late, but it's something that I really enjoy.
This year has been hard because I've been teaching hybrid, which means I teach both on Zoom, or I guess until recently, and to students in the classroom simultaneously.
So that's been a technical challenge.
It's also been a challenge to keep everybody engaged and also to focus my attention where it needs to be.
So this has been a difficult year.
Yes, I imagine so.
Would you have considered your relationships with your faculty peers and the administration and the students, was that essentially positive during the duration of your tenure as a teacher there?
Yeah, I mean, I would say it has been positive.
I mean, my colleagues, they sort of know where I stand.
I haven't taken great pains to hide my thinking.
In some cases, I've gotten into some spats with them over, you know, differences in the way that the programming has been delivered.
And, you know, essentially the foundations, the belief, the system of belief, which animates it.
But I will say, you know, I've had very cordial relations with, you know, the Dean of Equity and Inclusion and the Office of Community Engagement.
As people, you know, I find to get along.
And with the students?
And the students, you know, I had a difficult first couple years as a teacher.
It took me some time to really settle on a personality that worked for me, but I kind of, you know, by hook or by crook, you know, worked out a kind of performative self that functioned well enough, you know, to teach pretty well.
I mean, I won't say I'm an excellent teacher.
I'm decent.
I'm pretty good by now, but, you know, it has taken a while.
And is this something that you had planned to continue pursuing?
Did you see yourself, apart from, let's say, this incident, did you see yourself in the teaching profession?
Yeah, I was thinking that I would want to be a teacher for the duration, you know, and I didn't really ever consider leaving teaching until probably this year.
What did you like about teaching?
I like the energy of the students and I like to You know, communicate with them about, you know, what I find true and beautiful about mathematics.
Mathematics is was for me personally, when I when I got back into it and teaching, I found that it was a sort of island in the storm, the storm of the culture wars and the sort of general epistemological chaos, which, you know, which I find, you know, in in language and discourse.
Right, because you have a BA in French literature, and I don't presume that your MA in Ed Psych was math-focused, but I could be wrong.
Was it?
No, it was not.
Okay, so it's interesting that you ended up teaching math, and also it's interesting that you founded an island in a storm, and I suppose the way that you talk about it makes it sound like that was a relief.
Really, from what exactly?
Well, it's a bit of a long story.
At Cornell, I studied the humanities.
I had a history major, English major, and French lit major as an undergrad.
And me and my married band of friends and cohort of, you know, Compatriots, we were really into postmodernism.
We really loved the paradoxes of language.
We studied Derrida and Foucault and Lyotard and Baudrillard.
And there was a certain enthusiasm, even a lust for paradox that we had.
And I personally had reading texts and sort of finding out how words can mean their opposite, how meanings can be Seem to be taken different ways.
And I guess I would say that my, I guess I had a kind of a breakdown from that and that I didn't really, once I realized I didn't want to become a professor or go into You know, the academic world because I found that even then I was being pushed to say things I didn't believe.
I kind of drifted for a decade, I would say, trying to find something that was meaningful.
So back when you were an undergraduate, you found the postmodernists emotionally, motivationally, intellectually engaging, and you talk about that as something that was also true of the people that you were associating with, so I get the sense that there was some sense of intellectual adventure.
What did postmodernism mean to you, and why do you think you were attracted to it?
What was exciting about it?
Well, it was a poetic sensibility.
It was nonpolitical.
In fact, you know, the true materialist Marxists that, you know, that were sort of in our social milieu, they would sort of scoff at us and say that we were bourgeois.
Oh, that's what Marxists do.
Yeah, right.
So, you know, we were just playing with language and there really was no there there.
And actually, what would...
What would deliver us from our current predicament was some revolution in terms of material circumstances.
But I was really drawn to the creativity of reading a text in a way.
I looked at it as a way like I wasn't talented enough to be a writer, but I could critique something in a creative way and sort of get my revenge, in a sense, on the text.
Geez, that's a hell of a way to put it.
When did you figure out that that's what you were doing?
I think I kind of knew it at the time, but later on reflection, I felt when I tried to be a writer in my 30s and got nowhere and became very frustrated and despondent and depressed, I thought back at that time and I realized that a lot of criticism itself is a kind of The kind of criticism that we were doing is a kind of shaking your fist at the creative process and sort of gaining power over art by interpreting
it in a way that you found, that I found You know, fit my world.
And so it is...
What do you think the pleasure...
I mean, you're making a case for the pleasure in that you said to some degree that you think it was born out of...
Well, it's something like frustration at...
And I don't want to put words in your mouth.
I truly don't.
I'm trying to extract out exactly what you're saying.
And so if I'm wrong, please correct me.
You had, and perhaps this is not rare among people who are studying literature at elite colleges, I mean, you'd have some desire to think philosophically, to be seen as a philosophical thinker, to be seen as a creative writer, to be a creative writer.
There's a romanticism about that, and of course, that ability is what the whole enterprise depends on, so it's sort of at the apex, but...
You describe what you were enthralled by, at least to some degree, as revenge against not only the text, but against the creative process itself as a consequence of what?
What would the emotion be?
I guess it would say, like, I wanted to be creative, but I just couldn't, you know, I didn't feel like I had anything to say.
And I felt that my my authority was deeply compromised just by my privilege or my place in the world.
But I could actually I could reach back into Shakespeare and reinterpret Shakespeare in a way that, you know, made me feel powerful.
You know, I could I could I could expose the contradictions of think of of your of your peers.
And what about your professors?
You know, I think it was.
I think it, I mean, I don't know their state of mind, but I feel like a lot of what animated that high postmodernism, it was, you know, but it also had an element of appreciation, you know, just like in the way that Marx admires capitalism.
It was also, there was an element of, you know, wow, this is amazing, but it's kind of actually saying the opposite and just dwelling in that You wouldn't be attending to it at all if you weren't in some sense in awe of it, right?
Because why attend to that and not something else?
So that has to be there at least implicitly.
And then after you were finished with college, you said you weren't sure exactly what direction to go in and you tried writing.
Oh, you also mentioned, let's get back to that in a minute, but you also mentioned that you discovered that you didn't have anything to say, and also you felt that your authority was compromised.
Okay, so those are two different things.
They're worth delving into.
It's not that surprising that you didn't have anything to say, in some sense, because, I mean, you were an undergraduate, and what do you know when you're an undergraduate?
I mean, there are staggering geniuses that come along who...
Who seem, as an intrinsic part of them, to just overflow with brilliant creativity.
But that's pretty damn rare.
And it's hard to have anything to say when you haven't lived much yet.
But then, so it sounds like you were hard on yourself because of that.
But also, your authority, you said you thought it was compromised.
What do you mean by that exactly?
Well, even then, I mean, I took some creative writing classes and Even then, there was a consciousness of identity politics and that the real stories that would advance society would not come from a white male perspective.
So I kind of bristled at that, but I didn't feel like...
So your lived experience wasn't of, what would you call, interest.
It wasn't of redemptive interest.
Right.
Like, I didn't have...
I had things to say, but...
People didn't really seem to value my perspective, so I kind of swallowed what I had to say.
I had a friend, I wrote about him extensively in my, not this last book I wrote, but the previous book, and he was very guilty for his existence as, this is years ago, as a white male, and he virtually refused to participate in society at all because he had swallowed hook and sinker.
I suppose the proposition that any manifestation of ambition on his part was to be viewed as part of the world-destroying force It eventually killed him.
It was complicated, but that was certainly amotivational, let's put it that way, or anti-motivational in a very profound way.
Some of that was his own cynicism, but some of it was a certain emotional sensitivity to the potential impact his existence had on oppressed others, let's say.
At least that's how he came to view it.
Yeah.
I mean, and I also had a lot of rage in that, you know, I felt like I, when my friends were organizing things like, you know, Greenpeace and so on, I would be kind of a LARPing.
They would call it LARPing today.
But I would say, you know, oh, well, you just tell me when you're ready to throw a bomb.
You know, and I was obsessed with things like...
Violent revolutions.
I wanted to learn how to hack and freak with phones without any real goal in mind other than to disrupt and break things.
I'm actually lucky there wasn't an Antifa back then.
I probably wouldn't have been a part of it.
What do you think attracted you to that?
I'm very curious about this because Antifa, for example, I understand the attraction.
There's a romantic attraction to revolution.
You know, I had a debate with Slavoj Zizek, hypothetically, about Marxism, although it didn't really go that way.
But when I was unpacking the Communist Manifesto, and I mentioned that it was a call to bloody, violent revolution, and the crowd, which was a very poorly behaved crowd in many ways, broke out laughing and clapped, which really took me aback, because I wasn't Promoting violent revolution in any positive sense, and I knew exactly or know exactly where those revolutionary sentiments got us in the 20th century.
But by the same token, there is a romantic attraction to rebellion, right?
I mean, and it's linked to something very deep, which is the sense that we all have to some degree that we are A minority of one against a faceless bureaucratic tyrant, hell-bent on at least shaping us into the form that it demands and commands,
and that that structure is to be viewed even realistically with a certain degree of skepticism and regarded at least to some degree as an arbitrary tyrant.
And to stand up against that, well, there is something...
Intrinsically heroic about that, although it can go very dreadfully wrong.
And it's something that, I mean, young people are called to that.
I mean, the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget pointed out that there's a messianic stage of late adolescent development where not everyone hits it, but a certain number of people hit it, and that manifests itself in A laudable, perhaps, concern with broader issues in the world as part of identity formation.
That all is supposed to be catalyzed and shaped in universities.
So it doesn't find channels that are fundamentally destructive psychologically and socially.
So, anyways, back to you.
You were stymied to some degree in your creative endeavor and you found some outlet for that frustration with postmodernism.
But then there was also this deeper and darker attraction to some degree that you just described.
How have you made sense out of that in the intervening years?
I think it really was a resentment at not being able to be creative in my own life, not being able to have a generative, healthy, creative life. not being able to have a generative, healthy, creative life.
I mean, a way to deal with certain impulses and channel them productively.
Why do you think you believe that that was the appropriate destiny for you to begin with?
Well, you know, the great thing is that, you know, I was able to work out issues with my father.
And, you know, if you have problems with authority, there's nothing more attractive than, I feel for myself anyway, is a moral...
A blank check morally, because then if you're doing things for the benefit of the world, well, then you can take out all kinds of debt.
You can say, well, I don't have to be a good person because I believe in all the right things and I can do whatever I do is instrumental to the coming of a better world.
So I made my mother's life miserable.
I would argue my father.
I was posing, but I was inhabiting the pose so deeply that I would give myself some...
I could justify anything by the fact that everyone else was wrong and I was right.
I found that as a way to deal with things.
It's a real high.
It's a really wonderful, thrilling thing to inhabit.
You know, now today I look at it, I look at it very, I'm very embarrassed by it.
But it's understandable.
I mean, I don't, you know, it could have been no other way, really.
Why do you think you, why aren't you like that now?
What changed for you?
Well, you know, I went through I would say teaching changed me a lot because teaching was a way for me to express myself creatively and be engaged in the world in a regular, habitual, productive way where I could tangibly see the benefits of my efforts.
It's a social thing, teaching, and it's a performative thing, teaching, and it's very creative.
Every day would be different.
There would be new kids and they would have different problems.
You know, they would bring to me, you know, their own cultural reference points.
So it's almost, it's just constant renewal.
Teaching is just a constantly renewing and self-renewing endeavor.
So, you know, I realized that with other jobs that were technical or, you know, that were wrote, those became boring, you know, within three or four years.
But after teaching for over, you know, six, seven years, I was like, this still isn't boring.
I could do this forever.
You know, I love this.
So you found a way to contribute that was concrete and habitual and regular and routine, and that actually sufficed to satiate your creative impulse, and that removed your resentment, would you say?
I would say it just kind of...
It tempered it and made me not worry about it so much.
I can't say it evaporated totally.
I mean, I still have an oppositional...
I guess I'm an oppositional guy in some sense, as far as institutions go, but...
I was able to just focus on my work and on the kids and trying to be good at what I do and enjoying it.
Were you teaching before you went back to Hunter College or after?
No, I had been tutoring for a while before that.
I turned to teaching when I The reason why I actually got the degree in educational psychology, it's a story in itself, and that was one where it was a desperate attempt to avoid suicide, essentially.
I was so depressed at that point in my life that I felt just compressed into this tiny little ball, and there was no way out.
I was just...
How I got to that point is a whole other thing, but I just went on the internet and I was like, what is the last thing that I remember enjoying in my life?
When is the last time I actually felt a part of something?
And it was when I was tutoring kids in...
I had done some light tutoring, and I was like, okay, education.
Okay, that's really crucially important, because what you just said is you were in despair.
Yeah.
And then you were looking for something that was genuinely redemptive, and you were searching your memory for that, and you found that in mentoring.
Okay, why?
What was it about mentoring that had enough value that it pulled you out of that pit, or that you could see that as a pathway out?
It was just the experience that I remembered of being with someone and being able to give them something that they could use and having that exchange be rewarding.
See, I've been very struck by the postmodern insistence that Hierarchies are predicated on power and are to be viewed with contempt as the manifestation of tyranny and as self-serving, selfish institutions.
And I believe that that is true when the hierarchies become corrupt.
But what I've observed as the appropriate counterposition is that the people that I've seen who I've admired the most who are working diligently in institutions find the biggest pleasure in their life in mentoring and it's a profound pleasure there's something about allowing the best in you to serve the best in others that can't be beat by any other form of reward And
a hierarchy that's functioning properly I think has the central aspect of a benevolent father which is something like encouragement It's certainly not exploitation by power.
And it's unbelievably cynical to make the case that that's the central aspect of functional institutions.
Having said that, I understand that institutions can become corrupted by tyranny and power and deceit.
But I do believe that the basis upon which a stable and productive hierarchy must be instituted is something like The paternal care for the upcoming generation.
And I also believe that we do take the most intense pleasure in that.
So it's very fascinating for me to see that when you were scouring your memory and inhabiting a place that was quite cynical and resentful, that that turned out to be the doorway that you could pass through and then you went back to university.
And it was a consequence of your experiences with tutoring.
Do you remember any particular episodes when you were tutoring that stood out in your mind?
You know it's just sort of an image that I have of being with You know, with a young person and, you know, having them focused on what they're doing and me feeling connected to what they were doing and just that it wasn't even a specific image.
It was just sort of a, you know, something in my body that felt good.
I mean, and I really wasn't thinking about it any more than that at that point.
Like it was just, it was literally just totally selfishly, when was the last time I felt any reward in life?
Right.
Well, that's a dead serious empirical question.
You know, if you're seeing a good therapist, if you're depressed, one of the things that therapist will ask you to do is to watch your life and see if there's anything that lifts you out of your miasma.
And it's not a matter of thinking about it exactly.
It's a matter of paying attention.
And it's often surprising.
You stumble across something and you think, oh, that makes me happy, or that alleviates my misery.
And I really didn't notice that before.
It wasn't part of my theory.
It just happened to be a fact that I was overlooking.
It's dreadfully important to...
Well, it can be life-saving, as you found out.
Okay, so you went to Hunter College, and you did an MA in Educational Psych.
What was that like?
Oh, it was, you know, I almost bailed out of the application process.
Well, you know, I... I had chosen education in the Google search, but then I think, well, I got to pair it with something else that I like.
So I just put psychology down.
I was interested in psychology, and the first thing that popped up was educational psychology degree.
And I found like, oh, there's something here.
It's a city college.
I can get the degree, and if I spend $10,000, which I saved up for my previous job, I could get this thing.
So I go.
I almost fill out the application, and then I kind of Kind of get wobbly and tell them, what's the point?
I'm not gonna, it's not gonna do anything.
And then, you know, I remember calling my mother, my mother called me and she, you know, they worried about me because I was, you know, really lost, you know, in my 30s and 40s.
And she said, you know, you got to go through with this.
You, you, She kind of got hysterical because I think she just couldn't handle another failed endeavor on my part or just getting my act together.
Just to calm her down, I went through with it.
Because she was getting hysterical.
Well, it's good to have people around that will actually support your attempts to move forward, especially when you're fighting with yourself.
I've seen so many people, they're 51-49 about moving forward.
You know, or 4951, and so they're not doing it, and someone else can come behind them and give them a little tap, but there are lots of people who don't have that, and so then they don't get that little tap, and, you know, it wouldn't have taken much to push them over the threshold, so...
Yeah, I was lucky.
So, you know, I got in, and then once I started moving, you know, I would go to classes.
I was tutoring on the side and making money that way, and I was able to do that.
And then, you know, I was going to class.
I was making friends.
I remembered how much fun school was.
I was doing assignments, and I was like, oh my god, I mean, I just have to write this paper.
Life made sense again because it brought back sort of all of the enjoyment of undergraduate life that I really liked, which is social.
And so it really was just a momentum thing, like just getting back into it.
And then...
And what was the curriculum like at that point?
Oh, it wasn't...
Yeah, it was a little bit, you know, I guess...
Educational psychology, it was more of a research-focused thing rather than an education degree.
We were considered more a science-oriented research thing.
We studied research methods.
It was fairly rigorous compared to some education degree programs.
We were sort of...
You know, insulated from a lot of the nutty stuff that was going on.
Right, so that's like an island too, in the same way that the STEM fields were somewhat of an island.
Yeah.
Okay, so you came out of Hunter College, and you were in better shape, I presume, by that time?
Yep, yep.
And then I applied to some various teaching positions.
I kind of...
Made my bones, you know, so to speak, at some different places.
Like I worked at a hagwon, I think it's called a hagwon, a Korean summer school, eight hours a day drilling SAT stuff.
I worked at a failing school teaching, you know, tutoring SAT for a while or ACT. And that was, you know, really, really heartbreaking because Those kids, they hadn't had the same math teacher for longer than six months and they were seniors and they couldn't add fractions.
It was heartbreaking.
Then I applied to Grace Church School.
It was a new school that was starting up.
I was able to tell a little story.
I had also published a book out of high school called Up Your Score, The Underground Guide to the SAT with two friends.
And, you know, that was kind of a fun little project, and that book was still selling a little bit, so I was sort of able to piece together a kind of, out of my hodgepodge life, make a little package, and I did a demo lesson, and then they liked me, and then I got hired in the inaugural faculty for Grace Church School.
And so what was it like going to teach at Grace Church School?
Well, it was really nice because I was used to a corporate environment, I guess, because of my time that I had done in a previous job at HBO. I was a technical manager.
It was a whole other career.
And, you know, I was very concerned that I reported to the right people or, you know, what's the org structure, you know, and they were just like, well, you know, just you have colleagues and you can discuss things with them and we're not going to make you do anything.
You can talk to us.
It's a very friendly conversation.
I mean, there were serious expectations, and everyone took their jobs very seriously.
But there really was a sense of belonging and community that was very welcoming, actually, and very energizing, I will say, because I wasn't used to that.
I didn't expect it.
And so I would remain aloof from it at the beginning, like what's...
What are these people?
Why are they always smiling at me?
What's going on?
I don't know why.
But gradually you loosen up.
It was kind of corny, but I would kind of go along with it.
Yeah, it's a good kind of corny.
Yeah, and I warmed up a little bit.
I did feel like I was a part of things, and I was able to sort of transmit that to others too.
And so what happened over time?
It was a very gradual change that, you know, I would say, well, within the first three years, one of the tenets of our school was that every employee and every faculty and staff member had to attend a seminar called Undoing Racism.
Mm-hmm.
That was your HR department, was it?
Yeah, it was a mandate from the dean of faculty at the time.
That was a requirement.
Yeah.
I went to that and that was a very interesting experience.
It's hard to, what would you say, refuse a call to anti-racism.
Sure.
No, I mean, what kind of monster?
Yeah.
And I, you know, I went into it and I actually felt energized and I was converted.
You know, I had a sort of...
You know, I am white, and I'm privileged, and you're right, we need to take care of this.
And there were people in a circle and people of all different races and backgrounds, and it was facilitated.
And, you know, later I looked back on it, and I realized sort of how they did it.
They did it in a very interesting, seductive way.
And what way was that?
Well, as I recall, they started out...
Well, it was sort of two parts.
The first part was the history since the slave ships landed on American soil.
And then...
Throughout time, leading up to the present, and then they focused for the second half of the session, they focused on how to help a community that has been shaped by all of this.
And very early in the session, they said, we want you to withhold any judgment of anyone's choice or agency.
Anyone, any of the minority Black populations that we're talking about here, We want you to simply bracket or withhold any analysis of the choices that people make because that will often lead to a misunderstanding or insensitivity towards what's happening.
So why do you focus on that specifically, that issue specifically?
Well, because, you know, it was as they retold the history and as they talk about the present circumstances, they never actually revisited that.
So, you know, you're constantly focused on the oppressed population in terms of what is acting upon it, acting upon those individuals.
And, you know, to me, that's like, Denying a certain agency, right?
But they never actually lifted the blinders off at the end.
Everyone sort of acknowledged that they were going to go along with this at the beginning.
And I was like, really?
We're going to do that?
We're going to treat people as less than human?
Well, okay.
It must be like a temporary thing.
And why did you see that as treating them as less than human?
I mean, I presume that the people on the other side of the fence would say, well, You know, we're all caught like corks on the sea in the throes of vast social movements over which we have little or no control.
And who are you to cast judgment on people who have been relatively deprived in that regard compared to you?
It's possible to make a fairly stringent moral case that that's the appropriate mode of behavior, but there was something in you that objected to that.
And you remember that now, despite the fact that you said that you were energized by this and pulled in by it.
Why do you think it caught you as well?
Well, it was a social thing, right?
It's the people in a circle, and people are talking about their experiences, and people are saying, as a Black person, this has happened to me.
At one point, it's empathy, right?
You care about people.
If you're sitting face-to-face with someone, of course, I'm going to be sympathetic and empathetic, and people are narrating But the problem, I think, is generalizing that to groups and getting you to make a different set of assumptions about those groups based on a sort of selective way that the empathy is leveraged, I would say.
There's also the implicit What would you say?
The implicit perceptual and categorical structure that comes along with it, which is the a priori assumption that the appropriate classification for human beings is by group.
Yeah.
And that's so implicit, but so pervasive that it, in some sense, never needs to be stated.
And as soon as you assume that the group level is the appropriate level, then you're bound to minimize or even forbid discussion of such things as individual agency.
So, there's something, if you believe in individual agency, there's something somewhat prodigious about that.
Yeah, I mean, I guess I should...
Yeah, and I don't, you know, I remember at one point they said, you know, what do you like about being white?
That was sort of a gotcha question that they asked the white people.
How did you answer that?
Well, I mean...
I'm trying to think of how...
Some of these questions seem to come up in our society right now that no one's ever asked, you know, like, well, justify marriage.
It's like, well, wait a sec, I don't know how to justify it.
We just sort of took that for granted, and maybe that was appropriate.
Right, right.
And so it's very hard when you're put on the spot like that.
Okay, so you're white.
What's so great about that, as far as you're concerned?
Yeah.
Well, I kind of knew what they were expecting, so I kind of tried to play games with it a little bit because what they were trying to do is they're trying to go through the embarrassment of saying, well, there's nothing special about me being white.
There's nothing special.
But I was just like, no, it's great.
I walk into a room and everyone pays attention to me and everyone thinks I'm an expert.
And I said it because I knew that it's kind of what they wanted.
But, you know, I don't usually feel that way, but I knew that's kind of what they wanted.
But then I said it too, like, proudly, and then I made some other people upset.
Like, some people were like, sounds like you really, really like being white.
And I said, well, you know, I'm not, that's just how I've been socialized.
And then this turned into kind of an argument, and then the facilitator had to defend me, because I actually had told him what he wanted to hear, and it turned into kind of a...
A bit of a difficult moment.
So I had to say that it was good to be white, but not be too happy about it.
Is it a reasonable question?
I think the unreasonable part is more interesting.
Spoken like a true postmodernist.
If you take racial identity as Well, this gets into a whole identity thing that I could talk about.
Please do.
Okay.
So, you know, we know that race is a folk taxonomy.
Okay.
It's not.
It has, you know, groups.
And correct me if I'm wrong.
This is my understanding.
You know, I'm not an expert.
I'm a math teacher.
But you can be sure that no matter what you say, you're wrong.
I'm sure I'm wrong.
Yeah.
But take it for what it's worth.
If you don't like it, just stop watching now.
Okay.
You know, as I understand from my memory, the races of folks like taxonomy groups or individuals vary more within the groups than between the groups.
It doesn't correspond in any meaningful way to, you know, I guess, IQ changes over time and things.
It just doesn't have a lot.
It's not a true thing.
It's not a true thing.
So when people say, you know, what do you like about being white, it requires you to accept.
It's a family resemblance category.
And so a family resemblance category, it's a very strange sort of category.
So imagine that there's a category of 11 items, and if you have four of them, you're in that category.
And what that means is that two things in that category can have two different sets of four attributes and still be in the same category.
Psychiatric diagnostic categories are like that.
So maybe there's 11 symptoms, and if you have four, you're in the category.
So it's kind of, it's got edges like a proper set, which are the categories that we usually use in science, like triangles you can define completely.
And you can tell what is and what isn't a triangle.
There aren't shades of triangle, essentially, and they're very distinguishable from squares.
But family resemblance categories we use a lot, but they're not scientific categories.
They have their utility, and we use them a lot.
Okay, so anyways, back to race.
So, you know, it's something that's not true, and if you require someone to identify with a lie, you are creating this sort of fundamental distortion.
Now, I understand that racism is real, that this lie is instantiated in the world, and as a social construct, people has had tremendous effects on history, but I've often wondered, what is the utility?
It's not even that obvious that racism exactly is real, because it's hard to distinguish from in-group preference, for example.
You know what I mean?
And fear of novelty, for example.
It's complicated.
I'm not saying that there's...
Obviously, I'm not saying that racial bias has never existed, but when you delve into it, it becomes extremely complicated.
And it's very important if you look at things like the hypothetical racism that the implicit association test measures, it's by no means obvious that what it's measuring is only, well, racism at all, but only racism.
Because of all these other issues, and it is difficult.
We tend to be in favor of in-group favoritism in certain situations, and very violently opposed to it in others, so it's complicated and murky.
But your fundamental point is, well, there's an insistence perhaps that race is socially constructed and arbitrary, and yet it's the most fundamental attribute that defines a person.
Right.
And that, you know, in our school, after we adopted a curriculum, you know, in sixth grade, and maybe even earlier, but I happened to notice this in the curriculum, There is an exploration of identity where, you know, and I would actually really like to hear your thoughts on this.
You know, the individual identity is sort of acknowledged, right?
Your interests, you know, preferences, dreams, aspirations, personality, character, all of those things are really important.
And you also have a social identity.
And your social identity is how other people see you, and you're born into this world where certain social identities are valued more than others, and so they kind of lead you outside the house of your self-understanding into this world of social You know, social impinging and gradually you sort of become separated.
I think that the effect of this is you should prioritize how other people see you when you have a self-concept.
Before you even really know who you are or you really have developed yourself, you're supposed to sort of I think the kids are supposed to sort of hold it in abeyance and then prioritize, you know, how other people view you.
And I don't think that's healthy.
What did you see as the consequences of that in the school?
Obviously, this is starting to bother you.
You buy into it to begin with, and you're enthusiastic about it to begin with, and you attribute that to the mechanics of the initial education, let's say.
It's a group phenomenon.
It capitalizes on empathy, and it sounds benevolent, certainly.
In fact, it's the very essence of benevolence in some sense.
So it's going to be seductive.
Regardless of whether or not it's correct, but you become uncomfortable with it.
Well, the first thing you're uncomfortable with is that you were implicitly asked to produce a falsehood in relationship to your own identity, which was when you were asked the question about what you liked about being white, and you said that what you said wasn't Right, exactly.
Or wasn't correct, wasn't true.
It was something that you whipped up on the spot because of the nature of the demand of the situation.
And you remember that, so obviously that's significant.
I think I was just meeting what I thought was an absurdity with an absurdity.
I felt the question was a little bit absurd.
It's sort of like the premise.
Right.
The premise is, what do you call it?
How long have you been beating your wife kind of question.
So the premise of whiteness You have to accept the premise in order to answer the question.
I really have never been comfortable with the premise, period, because I don't think that it...
Right, and it takes a lot of presence of mind when you're asked a question, to question the question, especially when you're the student and it's the teacher that's, so to speak, it's the authority figure that's posing the question because you immediately have to rebel and you have to do it in an extremely sophisticated way.
Yeah, and this could get back to the school, and I might not have passed the class, and I'm white, so that would have been problematic, and that might have had job repercussions or promotions or whatever.
You realize that to question the question...
Because this is also mandatory.
Yeah, and to question the question in these circumstances is...
The risk of that is so much greater than the triumph of dismantling the question.
You may even fail at dismantling the question.
Your little rebellion may lead nowhere and you may be wrong, which is the hesitation that anyone would have with an objection, just that you might be wrong.
Of course, you're just going to fall on that side of the equation.
That's what I did.
Some people don't.
Most people do.
And no wonder.
It's hard not, like you outlined a bunch of reasons why it's difficult to, you know, come up with exactly the right response at that second.
It's not like it's a question you're prepared for.
Right, right.
And, you know, I think the students do it all the time, you know, because there's tremendous social cost to challenging any of the Assumptions of our anti-racist programming or the manner in which it's delivered.
What are the costs for the students?
Social opprobrium.
You could have teachers write recommendations for them if they get a reputation.
There's a fear that it could affect their applications.
Students have come to me with You know, concerns and examples of papers that they wrote, you know, on taking a position that went against the orthodoxy and they've, you know, suffered a great hit from it.
And I've asked them, are you sure?
It just wasn't a good paper.
You know, are you sure?
And they're like, no, I actually cited this, this and this.
And I still, you know, and so I think...
I think they're real.
I think that they're real and there's actually been, you know, stories that they've brought to me that are, you know, someone defends capitalism or something and then they have a big talking to after class or something like that, which is just...
Well, yes.
I mean, how could you possibly defend capitalism while you're going to a $55,000 a year private school?
Right, right.
I mean, what's the probability that your parents are capitalists?
100%.
Very high.
Very high.
So basically, you're being set to task because you have the gall to defend the very attribute of your parents that enabled you to go to the school in the first place, and that, of course, enabled the school.
Right.
And it's such an ironic thing that both the administration and most faculty have such contempt for the very thing that makes them have a job You know, like, they believe that in order to achieve...
Why do you think they have contempt for that, given that it's the very thing that allows them to have a job?
I mean, this is associated with the question we discussed earlier, right, about you being resentful back when you were an undergraduate, it seems to me.
Well, let me let you answer.
I won't push it.
Yeah, no, I think that's a good connection to make.
I mean, we all, you know, if you have...
If you've baked in a resentment of authority and see all order as tyrannical, well then, you know, even the hand that feeds you is going to be a tyrant.
Well, it's also so convenient.
You know, I've watched among my professorial peers.
I've worked with business schools, for example, quite frequently, and I have my own companies and did while I was a professor.
I'm not an anti-capitalist.
Many of my colleagues would sneer at my involvement with the business school.
And I thought, okay, so what's going on here?
It's like, I know lots of businessmen.
And like, look, there's plenty of businessmen who have contempt for academics.
So it's not like it's a one-way street.
And I feel just as...
the capitalists, let's say, the entrepreneurs who sneer at the ivory tower, as I do about the ivory tower inhabitants who sneer at the capitalists.
But my sense always was something like, well, look, I have an IQ of 145, and I'm not getting paid $700 an hour like my corporate counterpart on Bay Street or Wall Street.
And I'm not getting paid $700 an hour like my corporate And I work just as hard, which is true, by the way, because top-rated professors work, you know, 60, 70, 80-hour weeks to keep on top of the research, just like the high-end lawyers do in corporate law offices.
But they're not...
Rewarded financially to nearly the same degree.
And so, to me, it was always just a matter of straight-out envy.
It's like, well, if this society was structured properly, professors would make a hell of a lot more than corporate lawyers.
It's like, well, yeah, except you have tenure and complete creative freedom, and, you know, that's actually worth something.
So, and how dare you complain when you're a tenured professor, because you have the best job in the world.
So, Anyways, so back to the faculty at the high school.
Yeah, you know, I think, well, This is not the case for all of them, and I really don't want to generalize too much, but it does seem that in certain of the humanities subjects, it tends to be more radical questioning of the foundations of what creates inequity at these schools,
which are...
It's almost like the more...
The more opportunity schools offer, the more they're part of a problem, I think, is the view.
In the sense that, you know, if you're offering some opportunity to these elite kids, well, then what about all the other kids, which is a good question.
But then, you know, instead of sort of Figuring out the best ways to help the people that need it.
The focus is on questioning and interrogating the site of the top end of the inequality.
Well, it's an interesting moral conundrum, right?
If you're working at an elite private school and your conscience is bothered by inequality, and I mean virtually everybody's conscience is bothered by inequality, there's very few people that walk down the street and celebrate tripping over a homeless person.
You know, the typical person would rather set the world up so that people didn't fall out of the system in such a painful manner.
So you have that plaguing your conscience, but...
It seems like, and so maybe that does provide a way out, is you can continue doing what you're doing, but you can also critique the system as a whole and regain some ethical equilibrium in that manner.
Yeah, I think that's a lot of it, yeah, for sure.
All right, so you're initially an advocate of this.
You're excited about it, but what happens as it rolls out?
And so when did that start?
How many years ago, about?
I kind of kicked in 2015, I believe.
Okay, so it's about six years we're talking about.
Yeah, and so, you know, the work came down.
There was a diversity, as I understand it, this is, you know, pieced together, but there was a diversity task force on the board.
There was a retreat, a board retreat, that was led by something called the Carl Institute.
The Carl Institute is...
This outfit, one of these outfits that stands for Critical Analysis of Race in Learning and Education.
And, you know, they're influenced by critical theory, I believe.
And then they, you know, they sort of pitched their tent with anti-racism as a philosophy.
And they started to Talk to the faculty a little bit.
What later became the Office of Community Engagement, which is the sort of the bureaucratic arm that That is essentially a sort of ethical priesthood of how to behave properly in the school environment and how to be a good anti-racist.
But they had meetings, but they would ask us things like, well, what does anti-racism mean to you?
And that's a perfectly innocuous question.
To me, I was like, it means not being racist.
It means not differentiating individuals based on the color of their skin and treating people with respect and dignity, no matter what their skin color is.
And they said, well, that's interesting.
That's very interesting.
And then they just heard people out.
And some people had more I guess I would say advanced ideas about being aware of systemic oppression and understanding different perspectives based on how you might assume a child had developed given their circumstances.
Those were rewarded much more.
Those are not bad ideas.
We haven't got to the bad stuff yet.
But it started to become apparent to me.
I sort of had the realization that this was really going the wrong direction when we had a professional development meeting and they passed out the, I'm sure you've seen it, the pyramid of racism.
Also known as the Pyramid of White Supremacy.
It was a schema arranged in the form of a pyramid with genocide at the top of the pyramid, and then various layers that had categorical names like overt racism, covert racism, minimization, indifference.
There must have been about 50 or 60 things sprinkled on the pyramid at various levels.
And some of the things on the pyramid I actually thought were, you know, in many cases, virtues.
So things like being apolitical, or things like, you know, there are two sides to every story.
Things that were contradictory, like You know, not believing POC, but also thinking, well, my black friend said dot dot dot.
So the idea that these two things were next to each other seemed interesting to me.
Also things that were just, you know, political party platforms.
Minimization.
We all belong to the human race.
Right, right.
That was a big one.
Post-racial society.
Why can't we all just get along?
Prioritizing intentions over impact.
That's a nice one.
Yeah.
Yes, we could talk about that for about three weeks.
Not believing experiences of people of color.
Two sides to every story.
Right.
Yeah, well, it's very interesting when you look very carefully at the words that are You lumped in with the other words, let's say.
Right.
Guilt by association.
Okay, so you had this pyramid of white supremacy.
And I was asked, how do you respond to this?
What do you think about this?
And I just, I said, I think this is extremely destructive and horrible schema to put in front of a child and I will never do it.
And I think that it's, I just, no.
And I said, I went to the office, I said, I'm not teaching this.
And so this was when you were teaching math.
Well, you know, yeah, I should explain.
At our school, all the teachers have other duties that are really important, like you have an advisory and the advisor shepherds, you know, maybe eight to ten kids through the four years.
So they come to you with problems and you can help them out.
You can help them out academically.
So this would have been something that I would need to share with the advisory.
And I think they actually...
And so you registered your objections at that point.
I did.
This is the first time I kind of registered my objection because I felt...
Why did you do that?
I mean, look, look what you just told me.
I remember what you just told me.
You said that at one point in your life you were like dangerously lost.
You found your way out through mentoring.
That put you into the education field.
Then you got a good job that you liked with people you cared for that was meaningful to you and it structured your life.
And then you bought into this anti-racist movement, let's say.
But now you decide you're not going to do it.
So why?
You have a lot at stake at this point.
A lot.
So why?
What's bugging you about this?
So much.
Yeah, I think some things had happened before this where I had spoken to the head of school prior to this and warned him, because I immediately thought, I was just thinking about anti-racism, anti-racism.
That should be a good thing.
Why does that bother me?
And what bothered me was that I knew that racism was a concept that had undergone enormous creep, That the people had very different ideas about what was and wasn't racist.
For some, the American flag was racist.
Things that were perhaps Innocuous to some would have been considered racist to others.
And then how would you adjudicate what you were actually against?
And I saw this as a real threat because it would lead to real problems in determining what it was that you should be anti.
And if you frame...
If you frame in your mission something which is anti-something vague, you're really setting yourself up for a witch hunt.
Especially, look, especially, so we look at this pyramid of white supremacy, right?
And at the top we have genocide.
So it's like the ultimate evil.
Okay, so that's what we're talking about.
We're talking about the ultimate evil.
Okay, so then you might say, well, maybe your definitions matter when you're talking about the ultimate evil.
And so maybe being vague about exactly what that evil is, especially if it's convenient for you to be vague, perhaps that's a little bit ill-advised.
Perhaps particularly when you're teaching children, Yeah.
Yeah.
And I said, well, is this the comprehensive list of things that belong on the pyramid?
Are there other things that we don't know that are on the pyramid?
And they said, well, there could be.
I said, well, that's nice.
So now we have other stuff that's just in the margins that could be thrown onto this pyramid.
Who knows what they'll be?
Maybe And who knows who will decide.
Exactly.
Okay, so this list is not exhaustive.
And that actually scared me more.
Why?
Well, because it meant that no one could anticipate where the lines were.
I mean, kids need boundaries.
And so how are the kids supposed to know what is and isn't if they just have this grab bag of all these possible things that could be associated with the ultimate evil?
You know, just setting up this whole tripwire situation where they're just...
How are they supposed to know how to trust what is and isn't falling into the schema that comes out of their mouth or that they have a thought or that they want to articulate it?
You're setting them up for anxiety and tension and, you know, who...
It means that you're really, you know, and I began to see this in actual discussions people have about it.
Kids were restricting themselves to a very narrow set of things to say that they felt were okay to say, you know, and it was all the jargon, you know, it was saying, well, We need to acknowledge our privilege.
Yes, we are privileged.
That privilege makes us unable to understand.
Okay, so what you saw as people's attempts to deal with the ambiguity was that they just stopped saying anything that wasn't approved.
Yeah, exactly.
Because that is the way out of it, right?
If what's negative is ill-defined, but what's positive is listed, then you just stick with the list.
You stick with the list.
Yeah, you stick with the list.
And then there were- And so what's the problem with that, exactly?
So the kids stick with the list.
Why is that bothering you?
Well, it's because it means that events, the multiplicity of possible reasons for things that are different depending on the actual incident, get reduced to this script of explanations.
And only those explanations...
You know, fit the paradigm and only those explanations will be considered.
And that means that you're not making sense of the world for yourself.
You're following a script.
I don't think that's right.
Okay, so now you're watching this.
It's having an impact on you.
It's having an impact on the students.
What's the impact on the students?
Yeah, I felt it personally too.
Okay.
Some of it was personal, but also I was seeing it in the students and particularly in the most recent years.
It's sort of like when you go to a meeting and everybody is...
There are people that are silent.
And there are people that are talking.
And the people that are talking are saying all the right things.
And the people that are silent are listless and disengaged and just waiting for it to end.
And then that listlessness and disengagement is being framed as resistance by the people who are running the meeting.
The people that are in charge of delivering the anti-racist programming.
And then there are meetings about how to get...
Because that's indifference.
Yeah, and so they actually call it...
It says in the pyramid of white supremacy that in a pyramid, every brick depends on the ones below it for support.
If the bricks at the bottom are removed, the whole structure comes tumbling down, which means that if you face down indifference, you eradicate genocide.
Right, exactly.
And so it's a way to use a structural metaphor to transfer all of the, like, all of the...
The weight of genocide onto all the little things.
I'm not saying it very well, but I think you know what I mean.
So we got an email.
I remember getting an email from the Office of Community Engagement that said we were looking for ways to target white White disengagement.
And white was in brackets.
It's almost as if we were embarrassed to say it, but it's white.
It's white disengagement.
And that's sort of like, we're going to say it, but we don't really want to say it.
And that just made me a little bit even more upset because it meant that if you're not even going to be honest about what you're calling it, you're going to try to have it both ways.
And what's happening among your colleagues at this point?
You're becoming dissatisfied.
What's the nature of your private conversations?
Are you starting to be isolated?
No, I mean, I'm still getting along well with my colleagues, and there are some that I have conversations with.
And they'll say, well, I won't go as far as you, but I definitely think there's something not so great about this.
Other colleagues were concerned about the same things I was.
I think free expression and The ability to have different ideas and to talk about the framework and maybe challenge it, the whole thing.
So yeah, I wasn't alone in my doubts, for sure.
Did you ever wonder if it was you going off the rails?
Sure, sure.
I mean, I still felt...
You know, I still felt like it was perhaps me, you know, in the way that...
You know, because I have had privilege in my life.
I've had substantial privilege in my life.
I would call it, you know, opportunity and I'm grateful for it.
One of the things that I learned about studying the aftermath of the Russian Revolution was that privilege creeps too.
Because it's very, very hard to find someone who isn't privileged in some manner.
Like the only person who isn't privileged in some manner is the person in the world who's suffering more than anyone else.
There's only one of him or her.
Everyone else is privileged.
So you can expand the net of guilt indefinitely by focusing on privilege.
Yeah, yeah.
And I didn't like the way that it was being used to discount people's ideas.
You know, I mean, if you have an educational institution, ideas are the whole, are everything, you know, and you should be talking about ideas based on what make ideas sound or unsound, not the person who's saying them.
So, I was seeing situations where, you know, white students would make a claim and then that claim was discounted by someone else because of their privilege.
Right, but you're making, of course, the white supremacist's assumption that there are such things as ideas, and that they can be rank-ordered in terms of quality, and that the purpose of discursive speech is precisely to do such things, and etc., etc.
Yeah, and so the whole solipsistic nature of it, I was like, this is, you can't even have a conversation.
This is not a way to have a functioning...
You're not preparing people to function in a truly vericiated world of ideas.
Well, it's worse in some sense.
The fundamental claim is that there's no such thing as a conversation.
There's just different discourses of power.
There's no conversation.
Conversation assumes ideas and the free flow of ideas and an irrational individual actor and the capacity for logos and the individual as the central unit and so on and so forth.
People who hold the critical race position, let's say, it's not that they avoid confrontational conversations.
They don't believe that there's such a thing as a conversation.
It's not part of the system.
So it's a fundamental dispute.
Yeah, no, that's true.
I mean, and then the little things, like I remember talking to a colleague about a new hire, and I said, well, what's he like, this new guy?
And she said, well, he's like you.
He's like me.
Well, what do you mean by that?
And she was like, oh, he's white.
I was like, okay.
All right.
You know, this is not a person that's a total stranger to me either.
And I kind of walked away and like, really?
So, okay.
And, you know, I also hear the objection to my objection, which is, you know, see how it feels, white man.
See how it feels to be treated as your race.
That is, it's a, you know, she might've been trying to teach me a lesson in some sense.
Like, now you know how it feels.
But that's not, you know, okay, that's a point that you're making, but that's not a healthy thing, and that's not good, because it doesn't actually...
Reduce the sum total of misery in the world.
Yeah, I mean, yeah.
All right, so you're starting to feel disquiet, and you actually make this known.
Yes, and I make it known in 2019.
I make it known in 2020.
I talked to the assistant head.
I talked to the head of school.
You're married?
I'm recently married.
I've been married over a year, just over a year.
Do you have any children?
No children.
No children, but you are married.
No, but I'm married.
Okay, so I'm just wondering what you have resting on your job.
Exactly, yeah, yeah.
And I didn't, you know, I have to say that, you know, Not having kids is a huge part of why I feel like this is happening, that I've been able to stick my neck out.
I don't judge anyone for balancing their duty to the truth and their duty to their family in whatever way that works for them, because both of them are important.
Or to put things at risk, you know, that's a personal choice and that's...
I can't speak to any of that, but I think it definitely not having mouths to feed and, you know, having some savings from my previous job and things, being smart with my money and not spending it unwisely as I had done a decade and a half ago, but...
I think that helped me to do what I'm doing.
All right.
So how are you being treated by the administrative officials to whom you're registering your objection?
Are you doing that in writing?
Are you doing that in person?
Mostly in person.
And I'm not writing anything official.
I'm in the grumbling in my beard phase, I guess.
I'm in the griping phase where I would go and I would say, this is wrong.
Why can't we teach a broad range of viewpoints?
Why do we always have to teach this ritualistic thing that's just a litany of You know, basically far left ideas.
And, you know, some of the administration were very sympathetic, like even overly so.
Like I remember talking to the assistant head, he pulled down a copy of Jonathan Haidt off the bookshelf and was like, I'd love to teach this in my class.
You know, I really want to make this happen.
I want to teach, you know.
So, you know, more than I was sort of, or maybe just modeling it or humoring me or something.
But he had the book.
He had the book, that's right.
And he knew the book, and he knew where it was on his shelf.
I know, I know.
But then in public, or in public, in front of the community, not saying nothing about it.
So I think there was a tremendous amount of preference falsification still going on there.
Well, you outlined why.
I mean, you lost your job.
So, you know, these are high-stakes games, and you make a mistake, and a mistake, you veer outside the realm of acceptable behavior, let's say, and what happens?
Well, you get disproportionately punished for it, and there's a moral element to it too, which is, well, there's no bloody way someone like you should be teaching, so not only did we fire you, but we're right to do so.
And, you know, that's a very hard thing to withstand, which is something I also want to talk to you about.
I mean, you know, confident though you may be, or anyone may be, when your institution sheds you and surrounds that with accusations about the nature of your character, if you're not a complete psychopath, it tends to strike you to your heart.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Because there's always the possibility that you're wrong.
Right, right.
But I really knew I wasn't because there was this meeting, and I referred to it in the article or my essay, the self-care through an anti-bias lens meeting, which is what kicked off the whole past two months for me.
It was a It was a meeting where students were ostensibly going to learn how to take care of themselves during the pandemic, how to manage their emotions, how to take deep breaths and cope with things.
And in that meeting, after some mind relaxing exercises like meditation and stuff, they put up the white supremacy aspects of white supremacy culture slide.
And that's different than the pyramid?
This is different than the pyramid.
That's elements of white supremacy?
Right, right.
There's different forms of it, but essentially, it's fairly common in this thing, as you know.
Yes.
Here's some professional and transactional relationships versus relationships based on trust, care, and shared commitments.
Protecting power versus sharing power.
Culture of overworking versus culture of self-care and community care.
Competition and struggle for limited resources versus collaboration and working to share resources.
That's all white dominant culture, so...
Yes, yes.
And so some of the things that were on this particular slide were objectivity, individualism, either or thinking.
Right, right.
I know that one.
There was, you know, the thing that rankled me the most was right to comfort.
Because, you know, how are you giving a self-care workshop where the 200 kids that are in there in this racially segregated workshop are challenged that they might not, you know, that having, imagining that you have a right to comfort is associated with, you know, genocidal evil.
Kenneth Jones and Tima Okun, Dismantling Racism Workbook, 2001.
God only knows what that is, but it's everywhere.
The Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture.
Perfectionism, which is an element of conscientiousness, which is a fundamental trait.
Sense of urgency.
Defensiveness.
Quantity over quality.
Worship of the written word.
Paternalism.
Either or thinking.
Notice this is all written in words, by the way.
Power hoarding.
Fear of open conflict.
Individualism, which seems to be run somewhat counter to the fear of open conflict.
Progress is bigger and more.
Objectivity, right to comfort.
Yeah, it's quite the grab bag of conceptually unrelated items.
It's incoherent at every possible level of analysis, as well as being, it's impossible to parody.
Yeah, and I saw it, and I had been thinking for a couple months prior to this because there had been some meetings that really upset me.
And I was thinking, well, and my head of school had actually said that if I was in an appropriate forum, I should feel free to ask questions.
By this point in the meeting, I think maybe 30 minutes in before this popped up, other faculty had been saying things in the chat area of the Zoom meeting.
Is that anonymous?
Is that anonymous in the Zoom chat?
So they were under their own names?
Under their own names, yeah.
And so I thought, well, when the facilitator had mentioned that if you looked at this slide, I think she said, you might have some white feelings.
And I said, I just kind of blurted out.
I didn't blurt it out angrily.
I didn't blurt it out.
I don't think I was too upset, of course.
I don't know how it was perceived, of course.
But I said, well, what do you mean?
But what is a white feeling?
What is a white feeling?
And what came back was, I think she said something that defensiveness was a white feeling.
I said, well, these feelings can belong to people of any race.
And I think that it's I don't understand why it's being attributed to a particular white people.
That kind of opened the gates a little bit and kind of broke the ice, I think, because in the chat other kids started to ask questions.
There was a debate about whether I should be allowed to ask the question.
Which question?
You mean the question about whether or not?
The white feeling question.
I see.
There was a lot of capitalism bashing in the chat, and I said, I believe capitalism is anti-racist, since it's done more to lift people of all races out of poverty than any alternative.
And I wasn't monopolizing the chat.
I was dropping in little things, and there was a lot of activity in the chat.
And then the facilitator actually went with me and she explained stuff, you know, her perspective on it.
And I thanked her and, you know, she moved on some more.
I think I asked another question, but as she said later in a meeting about the meeting in front of the whole faculty, she felt that I was asking out of curiosity.
I wasn't on a rant or saying it to be antagonistic.
I think some of my faculty members felt that I was, but the facilitator herself didn't feel that way.
And she was the one I was talking to, so I think that definitely counts.
Well, that's quite remarkable, I would say, because it's very difficult in a group like that when you know the implicit ethos to be able to say something that's questioning without having anger build up as a motivation, right?
Because you need something to break through your resistance.
Yeah, yeah.
So, to be able to say it without upsetting the facilitator...
Yeah, I mean, I was passionate, but I don't think I was, like, enraged or anything like that.
It's, you know, I was trying to modulate.
What I was really upset about was the either-or thing, because I was like, well, if either-or thinking is a...
Is it characteristic of white supremacy?
Well, then Ibram Kendi's got to be the whitest person in public life because his entire philosophy is so Manichaean.
I mean, anyway, but I didn't say that, of course, because that would have been inflammatory.
But what I really wanted to do, I've been thinking about an opportunity because I wanted to model for the students that you could ask questions that someone who Who was a teacher or someone who was an authority figure could ask a question and it was okay.
And how did the students react to your question?
It was phenomenal.
I mean, I was really gratified in that they confirmed that I was doing the right thing because things came out in the chat.
They started to ask a broader range of questions.
I received the transcript later.
You know, it was like night and day.
Kids were asking questions like, well, I don't feel like I'm ignorant just because I'm white.
Or, you know, I don't like to be reduced to my race.
And then faculty joined in.
So several faculty members also started to ask questions.
You know, I don't think the point was that people even necessarily wanted their questions answered in the forum.
They just wanted to ask them.
Sometimes you don't know what your question is until you ask.
Exactly.
That's why I think intent is kind of a silly thing because it's only an ex post facto explanation.
If you're called on it, I think a true question, there may be no intent.
It just bubbles out of you if you're truly in a conversation.
I'm not thinking about...
Okay, it's not like I'm plucking this little thing out of the inside of my head and like, well, I intend this to be, you know, that's not communication.
Not if it's a genuine conversation.
No.
You don't have time for that in a genuine conversation.
No, yeah, of course not.
But I was really gratified.
I was on a natural high from the experience.
Why?
Well, because I felt that I had, you know, I had done something.
It was just self-evidently good to me.
When I reflected on it, this is a positive thing.
Now, one of my colleagues got very upset with me, with my influence on this, because at one point I did say, I don't identify as white.
Must I internalize society's delusions about me?
It's kind of like the neutron bomb to this entire belief system.
I felt like it was something I wanted to put out there so that kids could see it and understand that maybe this is a point of view.
I'm not saying I'm right.
I'm asking a question.
The feeling was that this was anti-racism 101.
It also offers them some defense.
That they're not morally obligated to accept these characterizations.
Right.
Which is kind of the whole point of anti-racism, is that you're not obligated to accept arbitrary racial categories that are unrelated to the task at hand.
Yeah, it should be.
But, you know, then a colleague got upset with me and said, kind of got on his high horse and said, you know, I can't believe that I may be paraphrasing here, and if I am, sorry.
But he said, I believe, you know, I can't believe that a member of our, you know, one of my colleagues doesn't understand that we are white, that we are white since birth, I am white since birth, that this carries with it implicit biases that are unavoidable, and we must affirm that, you know, and that's who we are, and that's who I am.
And I just kind of interrupted him because I felt like he was kind of making me look, I don't know, he's being kind of a jerk, so I interrupted him and said, You know, I'm sorry you're stereotyping yourself.
I think it's sad.
And, you know, that kind of was a very awkward moment because it was in front of students.
And he said, you know, he expressed his dismay and I remained silent.
And then after the meeting, I said, you know, I apologized to him.
I said, you know, that was unprofessional.
Was it?
Well, you know, I felt it.
I felt that there might have been a better way that I could do it.
Maybe wait till he finished and then ask, you know, to respond.
I'm also suspicious of my own, you know, because I have been somewhat oppositional.
I'm not exactly like a Mr.
Go-along-and-get-along guy with this stuff that I don't always have the best reality check on my own behavior.
And so, you know, I was just...
Saying, well, okay, if I did cause offense, then, you know, I feel like it's okay to apologize, and there probably was a better way for me to do this.
And so I did apologize and, you know, thought about it.
You know, nothing against that.
Nothing wrong with that.
And then he accepted.
And, you know, I figured that was it.
There was a lot of processing after the meeting, I think, that went on for hours afterwards.
My phone died.
It was on my phone.
And so when I went home...
I logged back into the meeting and people were still there talking, so I talked to them.
But I underestimated the effect of this because apparently some of my comments were leaked or transmitted to other people that weren't in the meetings, people that were in the BIPOC meeting, particularly my...
BIPOC is?
Black and Indigenous People of Color.
So they were having their separate meeting of faculty and students where they received different content.
And why was it separate?
Just out of curiosity?
The rationale, as I can understand it, is so that the groups that have been marginalized won't be exposed to, you know, they'll have their own things so that they're not exposed to the, I think, the possible insensitivity of the oppressors.
It's the best I can understand the rationale.
But it wound up happening anyway because...
I suppose it would be rude of me to point out that that's somewhat paternalistic.
You know, just as an observation.
That's a good one.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, totally well.
I guess that is a characteristic of white supremacy culture, though, paternalism.
Yeah, so I guess it's quite accurate.
Well, as long as it's in a good cause, then I guess it's forgivable.
Okay, so that was how long ago, that meeting?
That was February 24th.
Oh, yes.
Okay, so things are starting to...
Yeah, this year.
And that was referred to after the fact as the events of Wednesday.
Like they couldn't even really...
It was sort of like 9-11.
They couldn't actually...
They had to come up with a euphemism for it, I guess.
So the events of Wednesday.
And so they had meetings about the events of Wednesday.
And who's they?
Well, the Office of Community Engagement, coupled with the Dean of Student Life.
And there are...
Dean level positions that exerted a lot of effort and energy because I did not make their lives easy to address the things that were said and raised in the meeting, not just by me, but by lots of different people and students.
Students spoke up as well and faculty.
I found it so interesting because the day after the meeting, There was an email that was released that said, healing resources, you know, healing resources that will help you come to terms with what happened.
And the first healing resource on the list was a CNN interview with a poet named Damon Young.
And...
Damon Young, you know, in this interview, said things like, you know, we need to get rid of all of capitalism.
We will have to do a carpet bombing, not a carpet cleansing of society.
And it was incredibly radical statements that were, I would imagine, would be frightening to many people.
And that was listed as a healing resource, as well as things like...
Well, as long as the carpet bombing only targets the malevolent people.
Well, yeah, I guess.
And then things, there was a Robin DiAngelo article that said, you know, white people need to be made or kept uncomfortable.
How can we become more uncomfortable?
Also, you know, really kind of, I would just say, racist characterizations of white people in these links.
Things like, you know, all white people have never had to be guests in this country.
Like the Irish, for example.
They weren't really white to begin with, though.
Yeah, yeah.
And so I found this very ironic.
And then I had a series.
I had two meetings.
I had a meeting with my head of high school and the assistant head.
And I had a meeting with the head of the whole school.
The head of the meeting with the head of high school- They called you in at that point?
Yeah.
What's happening around you?
Is this growing?
Well, yeah.
There's a lot of agitation.
There's meetings about meetings.
There's student diversity council meetings.
There's just a lot of agitation in the community, I would say.
And meetings about meetings.
So some of the things that would happen would be in the week, in the end, as the week continued.
There was a faculty meeting about it.
I had some advisory circles.
Circle practice was taken away because they felt that it would be, the students would be upset if I was a part of it.
So the dean had to run my advisory.
Okay, so the advisory circle is what?
Well, it's a practice that we've started this year where activities where you put up a slide and you talk about an issue and then everyone has to go around and speak one by one about a question and then you kind of do it around twice.
And then, you know, this is to sort of manage discussion.
And I've done a couple of these.
So you're persona non grata at this now because of your toxic influence on the students?
Right, right.
Or the toxic influence of your presence?
I got an email saying, you know, under current circumstances following yesterday's meeting and your role in what transpired, you know, I've asked you to recuse yourself.
Yeah.
Then, you know, there were subsequent meetings.
There was a faculty meeting.
I think at that faculty meeting, a colleague said, well, this could be terrible.
This could undo everything we've ever taught them.
Which I thought to myself, please, please, I hope so.
How are you reacting to all this?
Well, I'm on a natural high.
I mean, I know that I feel like this is something that I've finally done to open up something, like some daylight.
And all of this churn is going on around me, but I'm going about my day.
I'm teaching my classes.
I did feel the need to address my classes.
So I said at the beginning, I am an anti-racist.
You know, I want you to feel safe.
And then I would just sort of teach the class.
And then I was told not to address it with the class, with anyone in the classes.
I had written, I had sort of Had a sort of, I guess, a manic kind of outbreak at this point.
Like, I felt so much energy and enthusiasm that I was writing in my notebook a lot, and I developed a kind of...
I had a sort of creative outpouring through all of this.
I don't know whether it's maybe like a cyclothemic reaction or something to it, because I felt like my soul had kind of awakened.
No, I was having a lot of trouble sleeping.
I was, you know, maybe getting three hours a night, and I would wake up I would wake up at like four in the morning just being like wide awake and I'd go and I'd start writing and I'd write a lot of ideas down and I felt like it was really productive.
And what do you think of the ideas that you were producing during that time?
This type of thing has happened before and I've looked at them with later eyes and I don't think that I've kind of felt the despair that they weren't That there wasn't much value to them.
But this time...
Well, one thing I might point out is that, you know, writing is overproduction followed by culling.
Right?
And so you'll have periods of overproduction and you probably throw 90% of that away.
But maybe you keep 10% and that's a lot more than zero.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, mostly what I was doing was illustrating a kind of geometry.
Like I had a...
These two axes and I was sort of laying things out on them because I was trying to make sense of the whole problem of racism and the difference between reality and truth and how those things are kind of orthogonal.
And I kind of laid out a schema that made sense to me that was kind of explaining the whole problem.
And, you know, it still does make sense to me, and I still think that there's tremendous value in it, and I just want to keep working on it.
Yeah, well, it's common that those periods of creativity, you know, they're revelatory thinking, and that can be over-emotional and somewhat tangential, but it's grift for further milling.
Yeah, yeah.
And it did.
Grist.
Grist.
Yeah, great gristle.
So all of this was happening around me, but I felt like a kind of stoic indifference to it because I felt a sort of awakening in me that made all of the hubbub sort of irrelevant.
It sounds like you had decided to do this.
Yeah, I think I had been sort of unconsciously waiting for an opportunity and when it happened, when I blurted things out and it happened, then I embraced it and I realized that I was not ashamed and I was not contrite and I was proud.
I was actually proud.
When did you write the essay that was published with Barry Weiss?
I don't want to rush you.
If there's more to unpack, I'd like to hear it.
I realize I don't want to tax you either.
I knew I wanted to write about the whole thing, so I had taken a lot of notes over the years, and so my first draft was about 5,000 words.
It contained a lot of information centered around the actual Zoom meeting and then the effects on the students and what had happened to me.
Then I realized the reason why I said the thing in the meeting in the first place was because I was trying to model for the students and that was what was animating me.
I handed it off to a friend who edited it and really hacked it way down.
You know, cut out a lot of the stuff.
And then I did another draft where I was really trying to get to the main ideas and boil them down as crisply as I could.
And then Barry took a look at it and she made a few changes.
And how did you get in contact with Barry?
Through the FAIR, through FAIR, because I had been volunteering with them for a couple of months now.
And FAIR, just so everyone knows?
Is a foundation against intolerance and racism.
And, you know, we, you know, I was in the process of, I still am, you know, helping to build the organization and select chapter leadership in various states so that we can really, we're in this sort of networking phase because I'm calling, people have given us their names and I'm calling people and And what I'm finding is that everyone has a story.
So I can't just be on the phone with them for, you know, 15 minutes and all the volunteers are finding this, that there's a tremendous outpouring.
It's very emotional.
They'll talk about what's happening with their kids.
They'll talk about that they didn't suspect that anything was wrong in the culture until maybe a year ago.
And now it's clear to them and they want to do something.
And so you really have to do...
You really have to listen before you can, you know, just operationally try to plug people in.
And, you know, a lot of times it's it's it really feels like I'm not a therapist, but it feels like at the peak I was making like five calls a day and each of those were about an hour.
And you you wind up really having having an engagement with another human being.
So this is starting to inform your writing.
Yeah, definitely.
Thinking about what's going on at the school.
Yeah, and so I'm starting to feel like I have a lot of people that I'm, you know, that are, that this is something that's becoming kind of a duty, like almost a moral duty.
So, yeah, so that's kind of the background to that.
And then And then the article came out, and I waited, and there's just a tremendous...
I've had an email at the bottom of the article, and I was expecting like 50% positive, 50% negative.
I would be happy if it was 50% positive.
Now, I realized later it's on Barry Weiss's Substack, and it's mostly her fans, but I put the email out in some other places, and I was just amazed that...
Maybe 500 emails in the first two days and long emails like people writing.
Some of them are just a word or a subject line, but people had a lot to say, a lot of stories.
I've spent a couple hours each day since then going through them and responding to everyone because it's really important to do that.
I think that You know, I feel like it's just...
I can't just, you know, ignore them or just give like a one-sentence thing because some of these...
I try to, you know, I try to respond in at least one or two sentences in a way that addresses their particular situation.
And then I try to direct them to FAIR as, you know, as an organization that can help.
And people of all different backgrounds...
People wrote in from other countries.
And what are they telling you in the main?
There are just a lot of what I'm getting.
I'm just getting a lot of pats on the back.
Just like, yes, you know, good for you.
Bravo.
Like, you know, this is amazing.
Keep doing it.
Keep doing what you're doing.
I support you.
You know, 100%.
This is a huge problem, you know, and you're standing up for it and what you're doing is right.
And, you know, and, and, uh, Okay, so you publish this in Barry Weiss's Substack, and the school reacts.
What happens?
Well, they make the claim that some of what I've written is a mischaracterization, and They're not trying to...
I think it's a little blurry to me now, actually, because so much has happened since, so I kind of have to reconstruct what happened.
In this time...
So the article came out on the...
I believe on the 13th.
And...
You know, I had a contract to sign for the following year and part of that contract, my contract is up, this current contract is up at the end of August, but the deadline for me to sign next year's contract It was April 15th.
And one of the stipulations of my contract was that I had to attend restorative justice practices designed by the school to address the harm that I had caused students of color and other students.
I see.
So you were obliged to be guilty enough to go to be retrained.
Right.
And, you know, the details of this process would be revealed to me after I signed.
So I was signing something that I didn't, you know, I wouldn't know what I was signing.
Apart from an admission of culpability and guilt.
Right, right.
Of unspecified nature.
Right.
And now participation, I thought about it, I was like, well, participation doesn't mean that I have to, you know, say mea culpa, I can participate in it.
Um, maybe it's an opportunity for me to engage, you know?
Um, and I thought about it, but then I said, well, that would mean that I was signing onto it, mean that I was legitimizing it by signing it.
And so I decided not to sign it because if I, if I put my word on it, then it would mean that I was saying that that was an appropriate request to make of someone.
So I didn't sign it.
How in the world did you manage to make that decision?
Well, I just really just delayed it and thought about it.
And then I talked to friends about it.
And then I realized that, no, I'm just gonna let it lapse.
Because, you know, I've reinvented myself before.
I've had several careers.
I have math skills, coding skills.
I figured if I didn't work for Grace, I could land on my feet somehow.
I don't have kids.
I felt like I had options.
I felt like no matter what happened, I had faith that I would be okay.
I felt like I could decide whether this was right for me or not, and I could teach somewhere else, maybe not.
In New York, maybe I could find a private boarding school or something that was more aligned with my views or my values.
Have the offers come flooding in?
Yeah, I mean, since the article, you know, places in Coral Gables was like, come to Coral Gables.
We'll give you, you know, we needed someone for our math program.
Texas, Arizona, Pennsylvania.
Oh, I'm very pleasantly surprised to hear that.
Yeah, and, you know, my fears of being canceled are completely obvious, you know, blown away because, you know, the...
It's the opposite of that, I would say.
Now, I'm sure there are people that wouldn't touch me with a 10-foot pole, but do I want to work for them?
I mean, it's sort of like a self-selecting thing now.
I did this thing.
The world has sorted itself out.
There are people that would hire me.
And so those are the people that I could work with.
And then why do I need to worry about people who don't want me?
It's kind of like, all right.
You don't have to move forward on false pretenses.
Yeah, yeah.
But I think my main gratitude that I feel...
Is that...
Is that I made my dad proud.
And my mother is not with us anymore, but she would have been proud of me.
Why did it matter to you?
Well, you know, he's a...
I consider him to be a very important person.
And...
He taught me so much.
He taught me how to write.
He taught me how to think.
He's a law professor.
He was until he retired recently.
He was a real teacher.
He wasn't so much of a publisher.
He was a teacher, and he was very popular, very talented.
He would always engage me in Socratic discourse, and he always wanted me to think for myself.
And, you know, I do feel like I've probably been a disappointment more than once, to put it mildly, over the years.
And so having the opportunity, you know, he's 88, having this chance to sort of do this thing, you know, maybe just one act.
Maybe I won't write anything ever again, but at least I've done this thing.
And talking to him about it, it's a good feeling.
Now, the school has stopped you from teaching, apart from the fact that you've not signed the upcoming contract.
Right.
They offered me something I thought was kind of creative.
They offered me the chance to participate in a subcommittee of the Institutional Culture Committee, Which is a committee that's centered around designing an anti-racist culture for the school.
Now, I would work under the direct supervision of the assistant head.
But they wouldn't let me teach math.
They wouldn't let me have an advisory.
They would take away all my teaching duties.
And that's basically what I would do for the next five months until my contract expires.
I thought of that.
I think that what it really is is just a way to co-opt me and to put me in a kind of rubber room.
I don't have any confidence whatsoever that any of my suggestions or contributions would be taken seriously, which would involve complete upending of the entire program.
To account for free expression and viewpoint diversity and completely different epistemology, I don't feel that they're going to take that seriously.
I'm not sure if my continued employment, I don't think that's going to be helpful.
What were the grounds for stopping you from teaching?
How was that framed exactly?
Yeah, that was an interesting thing.
I received a threat from a member of the community.
It wasn't a physical threat.
It was a menacing threat that was centered around my employment, my livelihood.
It said a lot of things like, don't dare come back to the school.
Your life is going to change.
Your future is You're going to be canceled.
You're never going to be able to work anywhere.
We will see to it that you're...
It was a menacing email.
So I reported this email to the school.
And the school got back to me, or the head of school got back to me and said, well, if you don't feel safe, as you don't feel safe, We think it's a good idea if you stayed home and taught remotely.
Only over Zoom and don't come onto the school grounds.
And I wrote back to them and I said, well, actually, I do feel safe.
I want to come to school.
I like to teach in person.
I was simply bringing this to your attention so that you could take care of this problem.
And then they wrote back saying, well, as you know, we will be polling the students and community members to find out whether this opinion is shared by other people.
So they treated this menacing email as an opinion.
And they said, you know, subsequent to that, they said, well, since the school, you know, community feels that they can't participate in your classes because they were probably objecting to your right to comfort.
Yeah, probably.
And I said things like, well, I fully expect you to maintain order and security in the school.
I mean, that's something that you should...
And I find it rather odd that if someone who sent a menacing email to me should not have to stay home, but I should have to stay home.
Why am I the one that has to stay home?
Why isn't this other person staying home?
But they didn't have much sympathy for that point of view.
So rather, it was this...
This threat was taken as a kind of, you know, example of people's feelings of unsafeness around me.
So I was asked to stay home.
Right, you provoked them to that degree.
Right, exactly.
Now, you also exchanged an opinion or two publicly with the, if I've got this right, with the headmaster.
You said that in a conversation, he had indicated his agreement with your proposition that white people, but children in your formulation to begin with, were being demonized by the curriculum.
That's right.
And you made that claim, and he said that was not true, and then you released the audio, which I reviewed, and which seems to clearly indicate that he did, in fact, say exactly what you said he said.
That's right.
That's right.
Let me ask you something, George, because I think there's something very different about having a single experience where you make sense of it, right, and having a teacher, an authority figure, talk to you endlessly Every year telling you that because you have whiteness, you are associated with evils, all these different evils.
These are moral evils.
It's not the same as taking like a physical thing because it doesn't affect your moral value.
That's the problem.
The fact is that I'm agreeing with you that there has been a demonization that we need to get our hands around.
In the way in which people are doing this understanding.
So you agree that we're demonizing kids?
We're demonizing white people for being born.
And are some of our students white people?
What?
Are some of our students white people?
Yes.
Okay, so we're demonizing white kids.
Why don't you just say it?
We are using language that makes them feel less than, for nothing that they are personally responsible for.
Any doubt, because I've known you for nine years, of your sincerity in your belief.
And I also have grave doubts about some of the doctrinaire stuff that gets spouted at us in the name of anti-racism.
Like what?
And so I don't disagree entirely with some of your points of view.
Can you elaborate?
Because it would help me.
It would help me understand, like, what's going on.
I think that one of the things that's going on a little too much, and we've talked about this Is that the demonization of being white and the attempt to link anybody who's white to the perpetuation of white supremacy.
Thank you.
Thank you, George.
So there is no question that there is an entire strain in here That, um, cause the misinterpretation.
Now, I am so much- Wait, wait, wait a minute.
But what about impact over intent?
Don't those kids get the benefit of impact over intent?
Our attempt is going to be to get everybody centered again.
All right.
Um, I will tell you, I mean, that's a huge task because I will tell you that we are, if you, if you try to do that, um, They're already like the barn doors open and they're all in the barn.
I mean, they're fighting a revolution that you don't even know they're fighting.
And Grace, they're going to hollow out Grace and they're going to move on to the next institution.
That's what's going to happen.
I think that they've hollowed out a bunch of other ones ahead of us.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
You're just a little stone in the path.
This beautiful, wonderful institution that's educated so many children over almost a century.
What was the consequences for him of that?
I have no idea because I haven't heard anything in the two days since the audio has been released at this point.
So he's still employed as far as you know?
As far as I know, yes, I don't know what's happening there.
I'm not privy to...
I mean, I still have email.
My email account is still active.
But I don't...
You know, I haven't seen any communications about anything.
So I don't know his situation.
There hasn't been any statement from the school at this point.
Okay.
So a couple of things that we should cover before we stop.
I'm...
What are your feelings about the importance of what is transpiring around you to broader, let's say, educational society?
Let's start with that, with regard to teachers and students in private and public institutions, high schools, junior highs, elementary schools.
In your state and across your country, what do you see this...
If anything, what does this indicate?
Well, I have hopes.
I feel that if students can...
If the type of willingness to ask a question in response to some of these...
You know, what I consider to be indoctrination, frankly, at other schools.
And you think that's happening at other schools?
Yeah.
I mean, it's no question because of the calls that I've received and the conversations I've had with people all over Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey.
You know, their parents are very concerned with their children.
They've seen it because of the pandemic through the Zoom classes.
They've witnessed what's being taught to their kids.
And they're very, very concerned.
And they have specific receipts to back it up.
And they're sending me curriculum.
So this is not simply a rarefied independent school problem.
This is happening at school boards and districts all over the country.
A lot of it spurred by the, you know, the George Floyd killing and the reaction to it.
I believe it was taken as an opportunity to, you know, redress that with misguided Yeah, an opportunity for what?
It's like I'm trying to figure out, I keep trying to figure out, because I've been concerned about this for a long time, and I still can't get to the bottom of it.
It's like I don't understand exactly.
I know there's a resentment element to it, but I can't understand exactly what's driving this and why it's...
Despite the fact that it's clearly the view of a very small minority of people, perhaps 5%.
That's what the survey seemed to indicate.
I cannot understand why it's making the headway that it's making at the rate that it's making and what it's really aiming at.
What do you think about that?
Like, what's your sense?
Because obviously it's bothering you.
Yeah, I think I have a sense why, and maybe it's a theory.
It's not just my theory, but I've seen it in other places or hinted at in other places.
I think when you sort of, you know, over the past few decades, you have a gradual sort of leeching from the soil of society of sort of a moral sense, a moral tradition, moral grounding in society.
You know, long, long religious traditions, essentially, when they depart from the public sphere, it leaves a kind of vacuum.
And, you know, wokeness is a way to sort of paint by numbers moral righteousness, and it gives people the sense that they're good people.
I think people have an almost, you know, I don't know whether it's evolutionarily based, but they have a need to have a moral character and sense of themselves.
And if And if something comes along which is going to offer that and give you that thing, well then there's a tremendous hunger for it.
So people will adopt it quickly.
And so you can have, you know, a very small percentage of the population that's pushing it can have a real powerful outsized influence.
Do you have a traditional religious belief of any sort?
And are you a practicing religious person?
It's a really good question.
I was raised Catholic, and I have lapsed.
I have a joke that I use sometimes.
I'm so lapsed, I'm prolapsed.
But basically, I was a functioning agnostic, then atheist, and But I don't feel like I really need a lot of God.
But I do need to have something, which is like a conscience.
Like, I guess I believe in a conscience.
I believe in some little mirror of the divine, which sort of is in me.
It's not like above me or around me, but it is within me.
And so it's sort of like a reflective thing that I can...
And it's sort of reactivated, I guess, as part of this whole experience.
So I can take in the world and the world of reality, but I can reflect it against something which is not of this world.
I don't know how else to describe it.
And then...
That's pretty good.
What comes back...
I'm satisfied with that answer.
You know, like, what comes back is something that I should attend to.
It's something that is...
It is something important.
And that is the...
And now that I feel like I have that or an awareness of that, it's just like, okay, I've got...
Thank God.
It's been there.
Exactly.
Thank God.
I want to say thank God, but I don't know that there's a God with a capital G. I just know that there's something which is not of this world, but is in this world.
And it's not out there.
So what do you think?
Okay, so what about...
When I read your...
Oh, I have two questions.
The first question is, why did you...
One of the questions is, why did you agree to talk to me?
And the second question is, what do you have to say to teachers who are wrestling with their conscience in relationship to this issue?
So let's start with that one.
Start with the second one.
No, yeah, with the teachers.
What do you have to say?
I mean, you already said you're not interested in judging people for their decisions, but you've been through this, you've thought about it.
Like, what's your conclusion and your hope?
Or if it's not a recommendation, maybe it's a hope.
I would just say, you know, stand up for the truth in whatever way you can.
If you feel, if you have that same reflective feeling, If what I'm saying makes sense to you, in terms of your sense of right and wrong, if you feel that what you're being asked to teach or what your students are going through is wrong, then Weigh that.
Do it smartly, but really take it seriously.
Why?
Why?
Because it's crucial.
It's what will save us.
If you don't stand up...
Crucial.
That's a hell of a word to use in that context.
Yeah, right.
The root of that, yeah.
You...
You know, you're being asked, you're being called to do something.
And, you know, it doesn't mean that you have to, like, run around and proclaim, you know, and save the world.
It just means you have to do something in a way that is constructive and well thought out.
And that will help the immediate circumstances in which you find yourself and help to, you know, set an example.
And if you don't?
And if you don't, well, then you're leaving it up to the next guy.
Maybe the next guy isn't up to it.
And maybe the next guy isn't up to it.
And maybe the next guy isn't up to it.
And then...
What happens then?
Then you may not get a chance.
If all you can teach is the words on the appropriate list, you could just be replaced by the list.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, I mean, the thing that's so wonderful about teaching is that you get to make contact with someone else with you.
And so if that's being whittled away in favor of The approved list, then there isn't a hell of a lot of room for you.
And it's kind of hard for me to see how you could derive any source of meaningful engagement from your job if you've been reduced to a set of moralistic platitudes, especially when extreme punishment accompanies deviation from them.
So that's the thing I always noticed when I was a clinical psychologist.
I always brought, because I don't practice now, for a variety of reasons.
There's a price to speaking, but there's a price to remaining silent when you have something to say.
So you get to pick your price.
Yeah.
So why did you agree to talk to me?
Well, I wanted to talk to you because, you know, you've been a pretty big influence on my life.
I followed you from the Bill C-16 video, and your biblical lectures were very, very moving to me.
I mean, I had never thought of, I never imagined even that there was a way to sort of Harmonize, you know, evolution and religion in that way.
It seems just like a remarkable achievement to sort of kind of find a third way out of the, you know, along another dimension from the conflict of, you know, is it true?
Is it not true?
Is it true?
Is it not true?
And sort of saying it doesn't matter.
That's not the question.
The question is, like, Why does this matter?
And, you know, what...
I don't know the way he did it.
It was just like...
It apparently matters.
The question is why.
It seems to matter.
And it sort of reframed it in a way that I couldn't...
That I couldn't ignore.
Because I was raised with these stories.
But they didn't really...
Makes sense in the modern paradigm that I've been, you know, that I experienced as a kind of drifting away.
I think that my experience in relating to your work is quite common.
I think a lot of people have this experience listening to your work and your lectures.
And that finding a way to sort of connect with myself as, you know, when I was a boy, I was an altar boy.
I studied the Bible.
You know, these were things that That were important to me, but I didn't understand them.
And finding a way to understand them in a new and better way was just marvelous.
It was marvelous.
And that it would have meaning for me as an adult is something I never would have even imagined was possible.
So, you know, that was very important to me.
And also that the importance that there is, you know, I don't I don't know It seems that it almost doesn't matter what your religious thing is, but it is important that there's something important about truth,
that truth is important, and it's not the same as reality, and people think that reality is truth, and a lot of it is, but there's some of it that's not, and that being able to say, I don't know whether this is something that I'm getting from you or that you actually said, But I thought that you might be someone that kind of understood that, where I was coming from about that.
And I felt the sort of kinship there.
And that's why it was really important for me to go on your show.
Thank you for talking to me today.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me.
My pleasure, man.
▲
Export Selection