Missouri diversity session tells teachers 'all lives matter' r forms of white Supremacy

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Newly released materials shed light on a training session in which Missouri middle school teachers were pressured to endorse certain ideas about race and told that "covert" white supremacy included things like "colorblindness." Handouts leaked to Discovery Institute researcher Chris Rufo showed an "oppression matrix" with an effective hierarchy of social groups, along with a handout delineating between various forms of white supremacy. Under "covert," the handout listed "all lives matter," "white silence," "claiming reverse-racism," "calling the police on Black people," and "treating kids of color as adults." It seems to compare these things to "lynching," "hate crimes," and "burning crosses" which it classified as overt and socially unacceptable forms of white supremacy. The event, reported by Rufo on Wednesday, was hosted by Springfield Public School employees who indicated that not speaking out about these issues was problematic. Leaked audio reviewed by Fox News includes one of the trainers, Jeremy Sullivan, saying that it wasn't okay for someone to just be against racism. When one man said he was afraid to say anything, Sullivan asked: "What might an underrepresented or underresourced student say in regards to our fear of speaking up?" The audio featured a female voice referencing the idea that "silence is violence" and not speaking up as allies for Black Lives Matter meant you were against the movement.

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So, there's a saying -- go back with me to high school -- I was a high school debater," Sullivan responded. "We had a saying, if someone dropped one of your arguments, like you would always say, well silence is compliance, because if someone doesn't address, then they must be actually going along with it. And truth be told, right now, the stance of Springfield Public Schools is we do address it. We don't stay silent when we see underrepresented or underresourced students or staff members experiencing any of this stuff." "And it's going to be uncomfortable, and we're going to get into a little bit more of that here in a little bit when we talk about what does it mean to be an anti-racist educator, but Springfield is taking the stance that it's no longer okay to just be against racism. We have to all actively be working to take a stand against racism within our schools and within our communities." At one point in the audio, a man asks whether the goal of the training was to make teachers "Marxists." "Is the district saying that we should be Marxists?" he asked. "And the reason I'm asking is that while I think there’s not a person in the room that doesn’t agree that this is an important topic and should be dealt with, the way that it is being framed comes from Herbert Marcuse who took and stripped all of the economic policies out of Marxist theory and turned it into critical race theory."  The problem with that is that it silences anybody who has any kind of disagreement or other ideas. It pushes a narrative that like, for example, you said that this country was founded on racism. That's not true," he told another trainer Myki Williamson. "It was founded on religious freedoms from the pilgrims ... and then racism was a part of it." The man went on to claim that he "grew up the son of a black man. He raised me to believe in Dr. King’s teachings" -- an apparent reference to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. "Dr. King did not teach the kind of vitriol that we see out of Marxism. Marxism has a long replete history of countries being bigoted and prejudiced against others and then murdering millions as a result of it."

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