| Time | Text |
|---|---|
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T-Chart Controversy
00:03:09
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| In high school, my homeroom had an exercise where we made a T-chart dividing various ethnicities, religions, and other identities into the categories of oppressor and oppressed. | |
| Women, oppressed. | |
| Straight people, oppressor. | |
| Black people, oppressed. | |
| This was on the... | |
| This was on... | |
| You know what a T-chart is? | |
| Okay. | |
| Then we reached the Jew category, and we paused. | |
| This being a high school in Los Angeles, many of my classmates were Jewish. | |
| I recall we skipped it altogether, but the T-chart stayed on the whiteboard. | |
| If there were fewer Jews in that room, I'm confident that Jews would have gone squarely in the oppressor column. | |
| Social justice theory became part of everything. | |
| My senior English class was not about great literature, but about readings in critical theory, mostly about race and gender. | |
| Isn't that astonishing? | |
| I'm not sure. | |
| I mean, I take that back. | |
| It's not astonishing at all. | |
| Isn't it depressing? | |
| She didn't learn about great literature. | |
| I had a non-academic weekly homeroom class in which we learned that every white person is a racist and all men are evil. | |
| It took me a long time to shake off a hatred of men. | |
| It wasn't socially acceptable to disagree, and no one really tried. | |
| My high school got a dean of gender studies and feminism. | |
| You hear that? | |
| How much of the education money now goes to such positions? | |
| Deans of gender theory, gender studies and feminism. | |
| At the time, one of her roles, that's fascinating, it was a woman, shocking, to help seniors write their college applications. | |
| In answer to the question, what is the most significant challenge society faces today? | |
| I wrote, it was identity politics. | |
| She gave me a note saying that meant I was rejecting the advances of the civil rights movement. | |
| I changed it. | |
| Did you get that? | |
| Did you get that, folks? | |
| She's against identity politics, and therefore she is opposed to the advances of the civil rights movement. | |
| So they're taught, at least in her high school, and I assume in vast numbers of them, in a vast number of them, that the civil rights movement was about affirming racial identity. | |
| I understood the civil rights movement as saying your racial identity shouldn't matter. | |
| Your character identity, your individual identity, that's what mattered. | |