A teachers union in Minneapolis recently struck a deal with the city’s school district that explicitly targets whites for firing.
Under the new contract negotiated by the union, Minnesota-based outlet Alpha News reported Sunday, “If excessing a teacher who is a member of a population underrepresented among licensed teachers in the site, the [Minneapolis school district] shall excess the next least senior teacher, who is not a member of an underrepresented population.”
In English? Fire the white teachers first.
The Daily Signal sought comment from the union, the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers and Educational Support Professionals, but did not receive a response.
Onlookers understandably were furious that the teachers union essentially told white teachers that they are less valuable than minority teachers. Questions surrounding the constitutionality of the agreement quickly entered the spotlight.
In a statement to Fox News Digital, Heritage Foundation education fellow Jonathan Butcher said that the union contract “violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and the Equal Protection Clause under the U.S. Constitution.” (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.)
The contract is only the most recent example of the radical left’s attempts to use supposed systemic racism to justify instituting blatantly racist policies.
The union attempted to justify the new race-based firing process by claiming in the contract that “past discrimination by the district disproportionately impacted the hiring of underrepresented teachers in the district, as compared to the relevant labor market and the community and resulted in a lack of diversity of teachers.”
Because discrimination previously occurred, which was bad, it is now acceptable to discriminate against white teachers, which is now suddenly good?
Makes total sense.
This is the left’s twisted vision of “anti-racism,” where every action has some form of racial bias attached to it that needs to be stamped out.
Take an incident from last month involving a 7-year-old girl and an innocuous drawing she made.
California mom Chelsea Boyle said her daughter’s school reprimanded her for drawing a picture with the phrase “any lives matter.” The drawing reportedly featured multiple ethnicities, but that apparently was not enough.
It just so happens the little girl is white.
In what sounds like something out of Mao’s playbook, the school in Mission Viejo, California, forced the girl to skip recess and then give a public apology on the playground to all the kids she supposedly offended.
Additionally, the girl said that the school principal told her she couldn’t draw pictures at school anymore.
Outside of being morally despicable to treat white people differently due to their race, there is an unintended consequence here that the radical left clearly isn’t thinking of.
History demonstrates that forcing a group to focus explicitly on race as a unifying factor is a recipe for disaster. The Black Panthers and Ku Klux Klan are great examples of why bringing people together simply based on skin tone is a terrible idea.
But that’s exactly where this obsession with categorizing people based on race will lead. And worse still, this anti-racism philosophy paints people as demons or victims based on skin color.
There is no room for nuance: All minorities are oppressed, and all whites are oppressors. The inevitable conclusion is a race war.
Minorities, who have been told over and over that they are victimized by the white devil, inevitably will rise up to fight their oppressors, à la the Black Panthers.
On the other side are whites who have been drilled endlessly about how evil they are and how nothing they can do will ever fix it. They may just take that message to heart. If there’s no way to achieve penance, why bother?
The data bears this out. According to Gallup, race relations between blacks and whites have declined since the Obama era.
Although correlation doesn’t always equal causation, it seems like about that time Americans stopped being told to be colorblind and instead began hyperfocusing on race.
The solution, therefore, is pretty simple. Stop fixating on race.
The old philosophy of viewing people as individuals worked way better than the horrible, modern idea that people are just skin tones.
It might be cliché, but the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said it best 59 years ago this month in his seminal “I Have a Dream” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington.
King said he dreamed that his children would “live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
That’s how we transcend racism, not by flipping it and targeting whites.
We figured this out in the 1970s. Why does the left want to go back in time?
What are they, racists?
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