Orwellian Indoctrination In A Kiddie Gulag–Wokeness In Kindergarten

“Who Are We” was Mrs. Johnson-Ibo’s signature opening to her kindergarten class, a session meant to introduce the principle themes to be taught during the year.  

“We are all determined by the color of our skin”, she wrote in the syllabus presented for approval to the Principal of Jenkins Elementary.  “Whiteness signifies oppression, race-based autocracy, racism, and capitalist deformation.  Blackness signifies dignity, ability, beauty, and spiritual evolution.  The white race has been for far too long seduced by the propagandistic, outdated and outrageous assumptions of ‘civilization’ when descendance from Greece, Rome, and Europe is nothing more than tainted, corrupted legacy.  

“White children must be disabused of notions of cultural superiority and the permanence of Western, Christian traditions.  The legacy of Africa – its tribal roots, its naturalism, and its essential spirituality – is the historical inheritance that must be celebrated”.

The fabled notions of American exceptionalism – freedom, opportunity, challenge, and competition – are erroneous, ill-founded principles of white men, she wrote. 

The famous Enlightenment, the so-called foundation of the new American Republic, was nothing more than a self-serving document of fallacy.  Logic, reason, astuteness, and intellectual rigor were part of a philosophical smoke screen blown about to cover ‘essentiality’ – the wisdom, insight, pure spirituality, and emotional integrity of the Black man.

Capitalism, the natural outgrowth of this faulty assumption of individualism’s higher value, consolidated the White man’s control of society and facilitated his oppression of People of Color.  It is the economic system which dehumanized the Northern laborer and forced him into the inhuman conditions of the assembly line; and which enslaved the Black man in the South.

Mrs. Johnson-Ibo did not stop there, and went on to detail the moral corruption of White American Society and the need for radical, systemic reform.  The early grades of primary school were to be the educational foundation of the new, dynamic, racially-significant society.  

Children of five and six, although still under the influence of their parents, could easily become favorable to ‘exogenous’ educational principles – those stemming from the larger society into which they would eventually enter.  In other words, young children were intellectually malleable, virgin vessels into which righteous, woke principles could be introduced.

“Indoctrination!”, shouted Hiram Fellows, one of the two white members of the school board.  “Apostasy, ignorance, autocratic meddling”.  His arguments against the 1619 Project, systemic racism, and the cancel culture as a whole were roundly shouted down, dismissed as anti-progressive and cave-dwelling ignorance.  “

The people will be heard”, LaShonda Washington shouted at Fellows, rising up to her powerful six-feet-two height, glowering at him with an icy stare, pausing for breath, and then letting go with a volley of intemperance and hostility never before heard at any school board meeting.

“Unconscionable!”, she yelled, shaking her fist in the air in protest and anger. “Mr. Fellows’ remarks are outrageously out of order and out of place.  He and his kind….” Here the parents who had been invited for this open session squirmed at Ms. Washington’s thinly-veiled reference to White people, but kept their seats.  “He and his kind”, she continued, staring down the White audience, “will not prevail”. 

“Hear, hear”, murmured her colleagues on the board.  “Well said…absolutely… without a doubt”.

So the woke curriculum for the city’s kindergartens was adopted, and Lilly Thompson on her first day of school got the full bore.  Of course Ms. Washington did not use the arch-polemical defense of her theory presented to the School Board.  She was enough of a schoolteacher to know how to tame and tone down an adult lesson for little ears; but over the following weeks, she made her point.  White children had a lot to atone for.

“White people are bad”, Lilly said over dinner one night.

“Who says so?”, asked her father between bites of lamb.

“Ms. Washington”, replied Lilly; and so the Parent Revolution of 2021 began.  Harold Thompson,  conservative, independent individualist had heard enough and had had enough.  He stormed the School Board, its Chairwoman, his City Council representative, and the Office of the Mayor.  

Thompson was no right-wing rock-throwing radical, but one of the city’s most prominent trial lawyers, known for his unblemished record of courthouse victories and take-no-prisoners approach to the law.  The Board was aware of his reputation but so solidly united as a woke educational cabal and so convinced of the righteousness of their position, that they met him casually.

Of course they were unprepared not only for his oratory but for his legal threats and K Street intimidation, and he did not disappoint.  In full voice and passion, he dismantled every fallacy, called out every ignorant assumption, challenged each and every preposterous supposition, and left the Board weak, weary and uncertain.  “You will hear from me”, he said.

The Board members looked at each other, stunned.  Used to bootlickers and sycophants, they had never faced such purpose and will. They were a group of poseurs, educational pretenders, and venal politicians, who never before had encountered so determined and packed an enemy.  His last words implying lawsuits, dismissals, defunding, and political wilderness were consequential. 

The Board and city politicians were used to political tenure – walking around money, political patronage, no-show jobs, and certain re-election; and the more their jobs became sinecures, the more they believed their own phony cant.  ‘White privilege, systemic racism, capitalist greed, black empowerment, reparations, justice, and victory’ were part of their canon and their liturgy, repeated and intoned at every meaning with genuflections and amens without a scintilla of reflection.  Government at its worst, its most self-serving, and most self-righteous.

The board members, councilmen, and City officials had for so long taken entitlement for granted, and for so many decades assumed that they, as minority members deserved preferential treatment in compensation for the ills of the past and white oppression, that Thompson’s salvos were a complete surprise.   They always knew that he and his ilk were out there – right wing closet segregationists and unrepentant Robber Baron capitalists – but not one of their number had ever come before them.

It was true that White, wealthy professionals and businessmen never bothered much with city politics.  Their money and investment influence kept them far from the dirt and grime of ward politics, but after recent elections which ushered in a liberal city council and school board which intended to radicalize early primary school education, the White political calculus changed. 

The school board badly misjudged the seminal importance and centrality of the primary school.  While the White, wealthy residents of the city could remain disengaged from the mud and mire of municipal politics for most of the time, they were ready to go to the barricades once the principles of the secular, non-denominational, apolitical school were discarded. 

Speaker after speaker at a recent municipal educators conference repeated the familiar injunctions against the Whites of the city – ‘corruptors, oppressors, intellectual vandals, social troglodytes, vain and worthless demi-citizens’ and far worse; but then Harold Thompson, armed with money, political clout in Congress, Wall Street money and Federal Reserve insiders, led his raiders in as violent and uncompassionate a raid as Genghis Khan’s centuries earlier.

Thompson’s Charge went viral.  It was the energizing force behind the opposition to wokeness in the country.  It sent a clear and unequivocal message that standing up to intellectual louts and routing them from influence was not only was possible but certain.  

Most Americans had already had enough of the weakness of conservative politicians who rolled over like good doggies before their progressive masters.  They had had enough being told that they were trifles, insignificant warts and moles, descendants of White oppressive empires.  They had begun to see through the lionization of racial victimhood, recognize the significance of White European civilization and the importance of its legacy, and to realize the corrupt liberal anti-American revisionist Deconstructionism of latter day progressives for what it was.

It took only Thompson’s Charge to out this conservative frustration.  If progressives hadn’t meddled with the schools, they might have fooled many more adults into believing their fairy tales; but they were doctrinaire to the roots and knew, like Stalin and Pol Pot before them, that re-education begins with the young.

Thanks to Harold Thompson and his volunteer army – and of course thanks to his serious threats of lawsuits and endless litigation – the school board backed down; and although the curriculum was far from The Three R’s, it was academic, non-political, and serious.

Only time will tell if his Charge had gone viral enough to sensitize and energize other opponents to woke nonsense; but he at the very least provided a model for community activism.  A far cry from Saul Alinsky and Barack Obama in Chicago, it was conservative to the core.  It was not righteous like theirs, but right. 

“We learned about numbers today, Daddy”, little Lilly Thompson said to her father. “All kinds of numbers, even hard numbers”

Ahh, thought Harold, smiling, that’s something indeed.