Dennis Prager Show - A High School's "Oppressed or Oppressor" Activity
Aired: 2023-11-01
Duration: 03:09


=== T-Chart Controversy (03:09) ===

[00:00:00]  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.
[00:00:14]  Women, oppressed.
[00:00:16]  Straight people, oppressor.
[00:00:19]  Black people, oppressed.
[00:00:21]  This was on the...
[00:00:22]  This was on...
[00:00:24]  You know what a T-chart is?
[00:00:27]  Okay.
[00:00:30]  Then we reached the Jew category, and we paused.
[00:00:34]  This being a high school in Los Angeles, many of my classmates were Jewish.
[00:00:38]  I recall we skipped it altogether, but the T-chart stayed on the whiteboard.
[00:00:46]  If there were fewer Jews in that room, I'm confident that Jews would have gone squarely in the oppressor column.
[00:00:53]  Social justice theory became part of everything.
[00:00:56]  My senior English class was not about great literature, but about readings in critical theory, mostly about race and gender.
[00:01:04]  Isn't that astonishing?
[00:01:07]  I'm not sure.
[00:01:09]  I mean, I take that back.
[00:01:11]  It's not astonishing at all.
[00:01:12]  Isn't it depressing?
[00:01:15]  She didn't learn about great literature.
[00:01:18]  I had a non-academic weekly homeroom class in which we learned that every white person is a racist and all men are evil.
[00:01:26]  It took me a long time to shake off a hatred of men.
[00:01:30]  It wasn't socially acceptable to disagree, and no one really tried.
[00:01:37]  My high school got a dean of gender studies and feminism.
[00:01:42]  You hear that?
[00:01:43]  How much of the education money now goes to such positions?
[00:01:48]  Deans of gender theory, gender studies and feminism.
[00:01:53]  At the time, one of her roles, that's fascinating, it was a woman, shocking, to help seniors write their college applications.
[00:02:02]  In answer to the question, what is the most significant challenge society faces today?
[00:02:07]  I wrote, it was identity politics.
[00:02:11]  She gave me a note saying that meant I was rejecting the advances of the civil rights movement.
[00:02:19]  I changed it.
[00:02:21]  Did you get that?
[00:02:23]  Did you get that, folks?
[00:02:25]  She's against identity politics, and therefore she is opposed to the advances of the civil rights movement.
[00:02:36]  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.
[00:02:53]  I understood the civil rights movement as saying your racial identity shouldn't matter.
[00:03:01]  Your character identity, your individual identity, that's what mattered.