



In celebration of Black History Month, the entire student population of a Virginia high school was assembled together in early February and forced to endure the collective guilt-whipping of a four-minute cartoon called “Structural Discrimination: The Unequal Opportunity Race.”

Produced by the African American Policy Forum”which is not a racist organization, because, duh, African Americans cannot possibly be racist”the crudely animated propaganda piece depicts four runners pitted against one another in a track race. A white male, a white female, a brownish male, and a full-blown coal-black dreadlocked female poise crouched at the starting line.

But when the starting gun goes off, the Sprinters of Color are kept at the starting line by a red light while terms such as SLAVERY, BROKEN TREATIES, GENOCIDE, MANIFEST DESTINY, TRAIL OF TEARS, DRED SCOTT, SEGREGATION, CHINESE EXCLUSION ACT, and JAPANESE INTERNMENT fly by their heads.

The nonwhite runners get lapped at least twice before they are allowed to start, but the moment they begin running, dark storm clouds form over their heads to impede their progress. Again they face injustices such as DISCRIMINATION, POOR SCHOOLING, and UNDEREMPLOYMENT.

Unlike the white runners, they are forced to make their way through a shark-infested moat titled STANDARDIZED TESTS. Even though the brownish male survives the life-threatening ordeal of standardized testing, he is suddenly ensnared by the SCHOOL TO PRISON PIPELINE, which captures him in a cage and whisks him away”even though he didn’t commit any crime, which is, like, totally unfair!

“From preschool all the way through to grad school, American academia is no longer a world of education, but of indoctrination.”

The dreadlocked black girl soldiers nobly onward until she finally hits a brick wall marked DEAD END as the result of SHORTENED LIFESPAN. This is a curious alibi for the black woman’s failure considering that in America, black women outlive white men.

The only two runners who complete the race are, but of course, the white male and female, the latter of whom comes in second because the male speeds by her on a conveyor belt due to CONNECTIONS and PRIVILEGE and WEALTH and the OLD BOY NETWORK.

The final message that splashes on the screen is AFFIRMATIVE ACTION HELPS LEVEL THE PLAYING FIELD.

The film does not bother to attempt explaining why, despite the Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese internment, Asian Americans outperform white Americans both on standardized tests and in terms of per-capita income, but let’s not get carried away and allow facts to undermine what is otherwise a carefully crafted propaganda piece designed to provide alibis for seemingly intractable black underperformance in these areas.

The screening of this white-bashing video is hardly an aberration. At times it seems as if the White Guilt Industrial Complex is more firmly entrenched in American academia than are trivialities such as reading, writing, and arithmetic.

You will now kindly purge from your mind the idea that this may in some way be related to the fact that American test scores are falling. You must also restrain yourself from pausing to consider that the general thrust of American education these days is not to fill minds with new ideas, but to cleanse them of all unacceptable ideas, no matter how logical, natural, and instinctual those ideas may be.

From preschool all the way through to grad school, American academia is no longer a world of education, but of indoctrination.

It’s where seventh-graders are required to read “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.”

Where a Common Core-endorsed book called The Jacket explains to fourth-graders how a racist white boy named Phil wrongly assumes that it was a black kid who stole his brother’s jacket, even though, if you want to get all racist and technical, black Americans are statistically overrepresented in property crime.

It is a magical world where crude, pseudoreligious parables of collective guilt and intergenerational racial karma substitute for math and verbal skills.

It’s where everything is the fault of whites and nothing is the fault of nonwhites. Low black test scores and high black dropout rates? Blame white racism. High suspension rates for black grade schoolers and high schoolers? It can’t possibly be linked to disproportionate black misbehavior”blame it on white racism again.