Critical Race Theory Comes to Rye Schools
The Rye City School District recently invited representatives from NYU’s Steinhardt School of Education to speak to the District’s Task Force on Race, Inclusivity, and Community. At an August 27 meeting, Natalie McCabe Zwerger, Director, and Luis Alejandro Tapia, Equity Coach and Consultant, delivered a PowerPoint presentation. The documents were also presented to the Board of Education on August 25 in a public meeting.
Among the assertions in the presentation are:
- Students should prioritize racial equity (equality of results) over equality of opportunity.
“Racial Justice is the fair treatment of people of all races that results in equitable opportunities and outcomes for everyone.”
- Differences in levels of achievement, income, or wealth among races and ethnic groups are entirely explained by systemic racism.
“Racial equity is the condition that would be achieved if
one’s racial identity no longer predicted, in a statistical
sense, how one fares. This includes elimination of
policies, practices, attitudes, and cultural messages that
reinforce differential outcomes by race or fail to eliminate
them.”
The presenters proposed a systemic examination of all the procedures, practices, and policies that promote racism at Rye City Schools.
Attached to the presentation was a letter from Director Zwerger entitled,
“DEAR WHITE PEOPLE: LET’S NOT BE OUR ANCESTORS. The letter states that America is the embodiment of white supremacy and that objections to this narrative are examples of “white fragility”. Zwerger exhorts white people to “support your family to wrestle with our ancestral history as colonizers and enslavers and how that history has instilled generationally ingrained notions of privilege and power.”
No video or audio recordings of Task Force Meetings are kept. A follow-up meeting of the Task Force was held this week. (The PowerPoint Presentation is attached below.)
https://ryerecord.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Rye-CSD.pdf
- Peter Jovanovich
