The NEA Ignores Obama’s Advice On Race

Ex-President Obama recently gave a speech in which he said,

Democracy demands getting inside "the reality of people who are different than us."

"You can't do it if you insist that those who aren't like you because they're white, or because they're male...that somehow they lack standing to speak on certain matters."

This bit of obvious advice seems to have escaped the mandarins at the NEA, who recently published their 2018 statement of resolutions, which includes this howler:

White Supremacy Culture
The National Education Association believes that, in order to achieve racial and social justice, educators must acknowledge the existence of White supremacy culture as a primary root cause of institutional racism, structural racism, and White privilege. Additionally, the Association believes that the norms, standards, and organizational structures manifested in White supremacy culture perpetually exploit and oppress people of color and serve as detriments to racial justice. Further, the invisible racial benefits of White privilege, which are automatically conferred irrespective of wealth, gender, and other factors, severely limit opportunities for people of color and impede full achievement of racial and social justice. Therefore, the Association will actively advocate for social and educational strategies fostering the eradication of institutional racism and White privilege perpetuated by White supremacy culture.

Of course, no evidence is given for this, but none ever is; the power and ubiquity of racism is taken as axiomatic, and unstoppable. Even if Obama — or, if you have that limber an imagination, Hillary Clinton — had said something to this effect in 2016 (as some of the commenters in the thead in Cathy Young’s tweet suggested), it’s hard to imagine how those words wouldn’t be drowned out by “deplorables” and the sheer mass of the diversity-industrial complex within the Democratic Party.