Anger as school board pays for Minnesota teachers to attend 'White Privilege' conference despite massive budget cuts



Worth the money?: Right-wing critics have attacked the White Privilege Conference, founded by Eddie Moore

Just two months ago it announced swathing budget cuts of $7million, which will cost 94 teachers their jobs and force the closure of one elementary school.

But now the Lakeville School Board in Minnesota has found the money to send a delegation of teachers to the annual White Privilege Conference at the Bloomington Sheraton Hotel, Minneapolis

It's paying $160 for each teacher to attend the event, which aims to address ideas of white supremacy - but has been attacked by right-wing commentators as a 'white guilt' festival.

According to the Minnesota Star Tribune, the board is also shelling out $125 a day of taxpayers' money for substitute teachers to cover the missing staff.

In February, it announced next year's schools budget would be cut by $6.8million, with more cuts expected the following year to cope with a $15.8million budget gap over two years.

It expects 94 teachers to lose their jobs, while one of the district's nine elementary schools will have to be closed. Funding for art projects will also be cut.

The three-day White Privilege Conference of workshops and speeches, which starts today, is 'built on the premise that the U.S. was started by white people, for white people'.

Now in its 12th year, it is expected more than 1,500 students, teachers, activists and social workers from across America will attend.

School trip: Lakeville School Board in Minnesota is sending a delegation of teachers to this three-day conference at a hotel in Minneapolis

Although the website explicitly states it is not designed to attack or degrade 'white folks', right-wing commentators have condemned it as a 'white guilt' festival and a waste of money.



On its website, it explains the conference 'examines challenging concepts of privilege and oppression and offers solutions and team-building strategies to work toward a more equitable world.'

It describes white privilege as being able to 'assume that most of the people you or your children study in history classes and textbooks will be of the same race, gender, or sexual orientation as you are'.

And in an interview with the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder, the event's founder, Eddie Moore, said he wanted it to teach people of colour: 'That White supremacy, White privilege, racism and other forms of oppression are designed for your destruction - designed to kill you.

Facing the axe? Oak Hills Elementary School in Lakeville, Minnesota, could be shut in swathing cuts to the education budget

'So what I want this conference to help people of color to understand is how that system works. How it can create little bitty things that add up, that cause hypertension…that cause you to maybe eat unhealthy or not exercise.'

In the conference's keynote speech from 2009, social justice educator Paul Kivel lectured on how: 'Our school system has been set up ... to perpetuate white supremacy and white privilege.'

According to the conference programme, this year's speakers include Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, an expert on capitalism and imperialism who spent time in revolutionary Cuba, and Ruth King, 'a recognised authority on emotional wisdom'.

Speaking to Sean Hannity on Fox, Niger Innis, national spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), said: 'It's absurd, it's disgusting, it's outrageous and it's a mis-education of our children...

'In Minnesota the African-American graduation rate is one of the worst in the U.S., and they can't think of anything better to do than to mis-educate and to create a phenomenon of victimisation?'











