A parent who pulled his daughter from an elite, $54,000-per-year all-girls school in Manhattan after he had enough of its “antiracism” instruction says that the school pressured families to advocate for Black Lives Matter or potentially face being maligned as racists, Fox News reported.
Andrew Gutmann appeared on Fox News to reveal what he described as a pressure campaign by The Brearley School to get parents to participate in Black Lives Matter activism. If entire families didn’t go along with the activism, that could have consequences.
Gutmann exposed The Brearley School’s “antiracist” curriculum, which he compared to the Chinese Cultural Revolution, in an April post on Bari Weiss’s blog. He lambasted the school for teaching young girls to judge people by the color of their skin, and for teaching students that “Blacks should forever be regarded as helpless victims, and are incapable of success regardless of their skills, talents, or hard work,” he wrote. (RELATED: Some Of The Country’s Most Elite, Expensive Private Schools Are Embracing ‘Antiracism’)
A father at Brearley pulled his daughter out of the school and sent this absolute barn-burner of a letter to every family in the school. Is the dam starting to break? https://t.co/sJj2h3SrXj
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) April 16, 2021
“It’s more than just a curriculum, they advocated for Black Lives Matter, they want families to advocate for Black Lives Matter,” he said in the Fox News video.
Gutmann said that whether you agree with Black Lives Matter’s ideas or not, the school’s attempt to place students in a dilemma — where they either participate in prescribed activism or risk being called a racist — is wrong.
“For them to say we want your daughter, from kindergarten to 12th grade, we want your family to be an activist, it is not ok,” he continued. “This is the antiracism principle, where they say if you’re not antiracist, you’re racist. It’s more even than that. If you just stay silent, you’re a racist.”
“Antiracism,” and Critical Race Theory — which is the foundation for a lot of “antiracist” instruction — holds that America is fundamentally racist, yet teaches individuals to view every social interaction and person in terms of race. Its adherents pursue “antiracism” through the end of merit, objective truth and the adoption of race-based policies.
“You have to be an activist for that,” he added. “If you are not an activist for this antiracism initiative, Black Lives Matter for example, you are racist, you are a bad person, you are an oppressor, you’re not doing the right thing,” Gutmann said in the video.
He also suggested in the video that “antiracist” education will only make history instruction at schools “ten times worse” than it already is by teaching students to “hate their country and their history.”
In the blog post, Gutmann rebuked Brearley for pushing a definition of “systemic racism” that implied “any educational, professional, or societal outcome where Blacks are underrepresented is prima facie evidence of the aforementioned systemic racism, or of white supremacy and oppression.”
Gutman previously claimed the school held “mandatory antiracism” training for parents, and called Black Lives Matter “a Marxist, anti family, heterophobic, anti-Asian and anti-Semitic organization that neither speaks for the majority of the Black community in this country, nor in any way, shape or form, represents their best interests.”
In response to Gutmann’s post, the head of Brearley, Jane Fried, called Gutmann’s opinions “deeply offensive and harmful,” Newsweek reported.
Numerous other elite private schools have reportedly implemented “antiracist” initiatives at their schools. Days before Gutmann’s polemic about Brearley was published, Paul Rossi, a teacher at Grace Church High School in Manhattan, wrote that the school held mandatory whites-only student and faculty meetings, and aligned characteristics like “objectivity, individualism,” and “fear of open conflict” with white supremacy. (RELATED: ‘I Refuse To Stand By’: Teacher Speaks Out Against ‘Antiracist’ School As Peddling ‘The Opposite Of Truth’)
Rossi claimed that students at the school said they were concerned about challenging the premises of CRT and “antiracism.” Instead, students were pressured to stick to “a narrow script of acceptable responses” that teachers praised.