“Thought reform” is something we might associate with Maoist China, where citizens would be forced to confess “sins” that weren’t really sins so they could be “enlightened” with state ideology. But Mao’s spirit has been resurrected — in the United States. Just ask high school senior William Clark, who shares the name of the famous explorer and is having his own adventure, of the “woke” variety. That is, his mother reports that he was failed by his teacher for refusing to confess his “white dominance.”
The kicker: Clark is identified as “bi-racial.”
The bonus: His mother also says that he was directed to “unlearn Christian principles.”
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Now he may not be able to graduate, and his mother is suing the school for violation of speech and due-process rights.
Among Clark’s “trespasses” were that he refused to categorize, label, and publicly reveal his racial, religious, and sexual identities in a critical race theory class and “then attach derogatory labels to those identities,” according to a pending lawsuit.
The suit was filed by his mother, Gabrielle Clark, last December against his school, Democracy Preparatory Academy at Agassi Campus in Las Vegas, Nevada.
William is identified as “biracial” because his mother is a light-complected black woman and his deceased father was white; the young man is described in court papers as having “green eyes and blondish hair” and is “regarded as white by his peers.”
So to put this in perspective, the school was asking a teen being raised by a single mother to identify himself as privileged and part of an oppressor class. (Of course, such indoctrination would be wrong whatever student was targeted.)
As for “white dominance,” Mrs. Clark said on Tucker Carlson Tonight on Thursday that she didn’t know what that was, but that the only thing William ever tried to dominate was ice cream in the freezer.
The course through which the students were accosted with the anti-white racism, called the “Sociology of Change,” also “taught” all the usual simple-minded left-wing canards. For example, one “of the exhibits that the lawsuit includes is a presentation slide that reads: ‘Racism = Prejudice + Power. Therefore, people of color CANNOT be racist,’” reported the Daily Mail Thursday.
Other course material reads, reported Fox & friends in December, “When a woman makes 2/3 what a man makes at the same job…. That’s institutionalized sexism.”
(Actually, it’s called different career and lifestyle choices, as I explained here.)
Another example: “When 1 out of every 4 black young men is currently in jail, on parole, or on probation…. That’s institutionalized racism.”
(Or it could be that a large number of young black men are committing crimes. Just a thought.)
But even more egregious indoctrination occurred when the students were, as the Mail further reports citing court filings, “asked to ‘undo and unlearn’ their ‘beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that stem from oppression.’”
A most striking example of this was when students were, Fox & friends also relates, “directed to ‘unlearn Christian principles.’” The Fox & friends segment in question — which featured as guests Mrs. Clark and her attorney, New York-based lawyer Jonathan O’Brien — is below.
As for the lawsuit, it “says that the Clarks are seeking ‘monetary damages, including compensatory and punitive damages, for the damage done to William Clark’s future academic and professional prospects, and for the Defendants’ deliberate and protracted harassment, emotional abuse, and violation of Plaintiffs’ Constitutional Rights,’” the Mail also tells us.
O’Brien said on Tucker Carlson Tonight that they have a “strong” First Amendment case, and winning would put Clark’s school on notice. But it won’t change a more troubling reality:
Such anti-white, anti-American, anti-Western, and anti-Christian “critical-race theory” curricula are present now in schools throughout the country. It’s “systemic,” to use a word the Left loves, and it’s child abuse.
It also has a dark precedent. Consider what CNSNews wrote in January while addressing Chinese dictator Mao Zedong’s “thought reform” programs:
[In 1961,] American professor of psychiatry Robert Jay Lifton wrote, “Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism.” It became a classic.
Lifton fingered two key elements of “thought reform.” The first was “confession, the exposure and renunciation of the past and present ‘evil.'” The second was “re-education,” or the “remaking of a man in the Communist image.” To cite one example, young Chinese students had to confess how wrong they were to respect their parents — they were forced to denounce them. That set the stage for their re-education.
And 60 years after that book’s publication (at most), thought reform has come to America. When people who couldn’t tell a sinner from a saint compel you to “confess” under pain of punishment, you can know that education has been abandoned, and reeducation has begun.
