Latest news with #Whiteness
Daily Mail
01-05-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Trump targets major 'woke' public school in push to rip apart 'racially charged' programs
President Donald Trump 's Department of Education is ramping up investigations into public schools in order to weed out any attempts to target students by their race. The Department's Office for Civil Rights is preparing to announce a Title VI investigation into Evanston-Skokie School District 65 in Evanston, Illinois, according to the Trump administration. A Department of Education official confirmed that the Office of Civil Rights sent the letter to District officials. 'The policies and practices to which the District allegedly subjects students and teachers shocks the conscience. Amid a dismal academic achievement record, the District appears to focus on unlawfully segregating students by race, instructing students to step forward and others to step back on the basis of race, and associating 'whiteness' with the devil. If true, how is this conceivable in America today?,' Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor told the Daily Mail. The complaints were raised by Dr. Stacy Deemar, a drama teacher teaching in the district represented by the Southern Legal Foundation. Deemar sued District 65 on the grounds of racial discrimination and creating an 'ongoing racially hostile environment' due to their 'race based programming' but it was dismissed by a federal judge in August. Deemar first raised the complaints to the civil rights division in 2019, but the investigation was suspended days after President Joe Biden took office and dismissed in September 2024. The complaint, obtained by the Daily Mail, was refiled on April 24th in a memo to the Department of Education and contains multiple examples of training, teaching, and organizing students and faculty by singling them out according to their race. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act (1964) prohibits discrimination in schools on the bases of race, color, and national origin in education programs. If found guilty of a Title VI violation, schools face a loss of federal funding. The school district was accused of pursuing race-based discriminatory programs for public school students for years, according to the complaint. In one incident, the school district required staff to acknowledge their racial identity in especially if they were white and treated them accordingly, even physically separating them for training based on their race. Part of the training programs included 'The Courageous Conversations' program which aggressively pursued the idea of 'white privilege' in the education system. 'Educators must acknowledge White skin privilege and work to develop a deeper understanding of this reality in order to fully examine the cultural implications of Whiteness in schools,' the district wrote. During staff meetings and trainings, the school district would segregate staff by race in order to address different equity practices based the color of their skin. The investigation also includes materials and lesson plans describing the idea of the nuclear family as 'whiteness/white supremacy.' 'It [is] important to disrupt the Western nuclear family dynamics as the best/proper way to have a family[.]' one example included in the report reads. Evidence displayed in the southeastern Legal Foundation complaint Other documents urged teachers to practice 'equity' while disciplining students to make sure that 'students of color, students with disabilities, LGBTQ+ students, and students with limited English proficiency' were not 'marginalized' in schools. Evidence displayed in the southeastern Legal Foundation complaint One elementary school separated students by race into 'racial affinity' meetings twice a month to discuss 'white privilege, internalized dominance, [and] microaggressions,' the complaint noted. At another event, students were required to take two steps forward if they were white and non-white student were directed to take two steps back to help teach the concept of 'colorism privilege.' One lesson instruction book pictured in the report, described 'Whiteness' was a 'bad deal' with the devil. Whiteness, the image detailed, allowed white people to get 'stolen land, stolen riches, special favors.' Other materials in the district featured an article warning that even 5-year-old children were 'racially biased' and needed to be reconstructed about racial behavior. The announcement of the investigation symbolizes President Trump's goal of eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion materials in public schools which became widely implemented after the Black Lives Matter riots in 2019. The carefully constructed Southeastern Legal Foundation report features 18 pages of material documenting incidents they feel breaking Title VI laws. 'SLF is thankful that the Trump Administration recognizes that enough is enough and, following Dr. Deemar's new OCR complaint, has launched an investigation into unconscionable racial discrimination in District 65 - Evanston, IL,' said Southeastern Legal Foundation Executive Director Kimberly Hermann to the Daily Mail.
Fox News
31-03-2025
- Sport
- Fox News
UConn star Paige Bueckers' lack of popularity in tourney has racial component to it, ex-NBA player suggests
UConn Huskies women's basketball star Paige Bueckers has performed at a high level during the NCAA Tournament and most recently scored 40 points in a Sweet 16 game against Oklahoma. Anyone who had been following Bueckers since the beginning of her collegiate career knows that games like the one against the Sooners were par for the course. She dropped 34 points against South Dakota State in the second round as well. But her popularity has yet to skyrocket like Caitlin Clark's when the sharpshooter was winning games at Iowa and setting NCAA records in scoring. Former NBA center Etan Thomas suggested in a column for The Guardian last week there were a few reasons for that. Thomas wrote that Bueckers' associations with Black people and the lack of a so-called "Black villain" to contend with in the NCAA Tournament affected how White people saw the Huskies guard. He pointed to Bueckers' decision to shoutout Black women during her ESPYs speech in 2021 as the start of it. "Meanwhile, there has been no Black villain for Bueckers to compete against," Thomas wrote, alluding to Clark's on-court rivalry with LSU standout Angel Reese. "The fact that that has meant she has gained less attention and adoration from middle America says a lot about the state of the country." Thomas claimed people who didn't have an interest in women's basketball all of a sudden became fans for all the "worst reasons," adding that "they were there to cheer Clark's Whiteness, and attack Reese's Blackness, not their talent." He then wrote that Bueckers' decision to cook for her Muslim teammates during Ramadan, sing gospel songs and has a Black stepmother and stepsiblings supposedly "simply doesn't sit well with 'that certain demographic,' who embraced Clark and championed her for the "wrong reasons." Bueckers is averaging 19.8 points, 4.7 assists and 4.4 rebounds per game. She's a part of a sorority of legendary Huskies players who have come before her, though she's missing the one thing great alumni like Sue Bird, Diana Taurasi and Breanna Stewart have – a national title. It's likely that Bueckers will be the No. 1 pick of the WNBA Draft and it will be fun to watch her go up against Clark, Reese, Cameron Brink, Arike Ogunbowale, Jonquel Jones, Sabrina Ionescu and others when she takes the court in the pros. Follow Fox News Digital's sports coverage on X and subscribe to the Fox News Sports Huddle newsletter.
