Judicial Watch: Montgomery County Public Schools Spent $454,000 on ‘Anti-racist System Audit’

Taught Students that ‘Make America Great Again’ was ‘Covert White Supremacy’ and ‘Socially Unacceptable’

(Washington, DC) Judicial Watch announced today it received 685 pages of heavily redacted records from Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) including documents related to their “Anti-racist system audit” and critical race theory classes.

The documents, obtained under the Maryland Public Information Act, reveal that students of “Maryland’s Largest School District” who attended Thomas Pyle Middle School’s social justice class were taught that the phrase “Make America Great Again” was an example of “covert white supremacy” that is “socially unacceptable.” The phrase is ranked on a pyramid just below, “lynching,” “hate crimes,” “the N-word” and “racial slurs.” They were also taught that “white privilege” means being favored by school authorities and having a positive relationship with the police.

Additionally, the documents show that Montgomery County Public Schools allocated over $454,000 for an “Anti-racist system audit” by The Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium, a company that claims that their “expertise in using intersectionality as part of its theory of change makes us uniquely positioned to conduct the Anti-Racist Audit and mitigate the root causes of systemic barriers.”

In Thomas Pyle Middle School’s “social justice” class course curriculum, there is a slide titled “What is systemic racism?” in which students are shown a pyramid slide depicting “Differences between overt and covert hateful white supremacy.” According to the pyramid, “Make America Great Again” is an example of “covert white supremacy” that is “socially unacceptable.” The phrase is ranked on a pyramid just below “racial slurs.”

Examples of other unacceptable covert “white supremacy” include thinking “but we’re just one human family,” “colorblindness,” “cultural appropriation,” “celebration of Columbus Day,” “police murdering POC [people of color],” and “bootstrap theory.”

A separate pyramid begins with the term “genocide.” 

The documents include Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium’s “anti-racist system audit” proposal, which describes intersectional theory as “people are often disadvantaged by multiple sources of oppression: their race, class, gender identity, native language, sexual orientation, religion, and other identity markers. Intersectionality recognizes that identity markers (e.g. “female” and “Black”) do not exist independently of each other, and that each informs the others, often creating a complex merging of oppression.”

Records regarding Montgomery County Public School’s Thomas Pyle Middle School’s social justice class include a cover letter, noting that the class in question was a one-week “Summer Boost” class called “Reading and Taking Action for Social Justice” offered from July 13-17, 2020, and that “no grades were given and no actual work due.” The class material includes a push for students to fill out a form letter with contact information addressed to federal, state and county education officials asking for more critical race theory classes in schools.

In a slide titled “What is Intersectionality?” the students are told it is defined as:

Exposing [one’s] multiple identities can help clarify the ways in which a person can simultaneously experience privilege and oppression….

Per [critical race theory scholar] Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, ‘Intersectionality is simply a prism to see the Interactive effects of various forms of discrimination and disempowerment. It looks at the way that racism, many times, interacts with patriarchy, heterosexism, classism, xenophobia – seeing that the overlapping vulnerabilities created by these systems actually create specific kinds of challenges.’

A class slide titled “Implicit Bias, Structural Racism” states:

Race is created to justify enslaving people from Africa (economic engine of country).

National narrative (ideology, belief system) about people of color being ‘less than’ human (and less than white) justifies mistreatment and inequality (white supremacy).

Dominant narratives about race (family, media, society) coupled with racialized structural arrangements and differential outcomes by race all prime us to believe that people of color are inferior to white people … 

The students are asked: “What is White Privilege?” and are instructed that white privilege includes, among other things: having “a positive relationship with the police, generally;” “soaking in media blatantly biased toward my race;” and “living ignorant of the dire state of racism today.”

The students are suggested to view a Ted Talk interview with Patrisse Cullors, a founder of Black Lives Matter. The class is provided “definitions” created by www.racialequitytools.org. The terms that are defined include:

• “Black Lives Matter,” which is defined as “A political movement to address systemic and state violence against African Americans.” It claims that “Black Lives Matter is an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise.”
• “Power,” defined among other things as: “Wealth, whiteness, citizenship, patriarchy, heterosexism, and education are a few key social mechanisms through which power operates.”
• “Racist policies,” is defined with the statement, “There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy.”
• “White Privilege,” which is defined as “to the unquestioned and unearned set of advantages, entitlements, benefits and choices bestowed on people solely because they are white.” And “Structure white privilege” is described as “A system of white domination that creates and maintains belief systems that make current racial advantages and disadvantages seem normal.”
• Under the heading “White Supremacy,” “White supremacy culture,” is defined as referring, “to the dominant, unquestioned standards of behavior and ways of functioning embodied by the vast majority of institutions in the United States.” White supremacy culture is further defined as “the glue that binds together white-controlled institutions into systems and white-controlled systems into the global white supremacy system.”
• Other defined terms include: “Anti-black” “colonization” “racial recognition” “racialization” “structural racism” and “whiteness”

Judicial Watch also received records relating to Montgomery County Public School’s Greenwood Elementary School’s “Dual Pandemic” of ‘Covid-19/systemic racism’ class presentation.

“The racist, revolutionary claptrap in these documents should be nowhere near a school classroom,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “These documents show that extremists have access to our schools and are willing to abuse this access to children in order to advance a dangerous, divisive, and likely illegal agenda.”

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