After the DEIB Committee began meeting, they created a monthly newsletter. For some reason, the newsletter was created for internal use only and not to be released to the public as indicated in this first email. This lack of transparency by the district creates feelings of distrust.
Included below is a sample of one DEIB Committee newsletter. In this edition, the DEIB Committee recommended three books. Two are quite well known for their radical ideas: Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Stamped: Racism, Antiracism and You by Ibrim X Kendi. The third book, Cultivating Genius by Goldy is less known to the general population, but I read this book so I would like to give you a brief summary.
Cultivating Genius by Gholdy Muhammad
Cultivating Genius is a “How To” book for teachers. This “How To” book teaches teachers how to teach black students. Shocking!
On January 27, 2022 the Michigan Department of Education offered teachers a webinar entitled Diversity in the Literature that We Teach. The featured speaker, Shonda Buchanan, along with facilitators also recommended the book Cultivating Genius by Gholdy Muhammad throughout the webinar.
The book Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy by Gholdy Muhammad is frequently recommended by teachers. This book manual shows teachers how to embed tenets of Critical Race Theory into the curriculum for students in elementary, middle and high school. Gholdy Muhammad ties together America’s history of slavery, racism and discrimination with black literary societies that developed during these times to create a new way of educating marginalized groups of children. She calls her method Historically Responsive Literacy (HRL) rather than Critical Race Theory.
Proponents of Critical Race Theory say that it is a college-level theory that looks at legal systems and institutions through a racial lens. Historically Responsive Literacy instructs students to define their identity and then view the books they read through a racial lens. Historically Responsive Literacy is simply an adaptation of Critical Race Theory for much younger students.
There are four pursuits in Historically Responsive Literacy (HRL) instruction:
Identity
Skills
Intellect
Criticality
The book directs teachers to have students write down their identity in their own words, but then instructs teachers to ask students questions such as: How are people like you depicted in society and in the media? How might you describe your culture or ethnicity?
Criticality is defined as the capacity to read, write, and think in ways of understanding power, privilege, social justice, and oppression, particularly for populations who have been historically marginalized in the world.
A victimhood mentality permeates Cultivating Genius as it promotes teaching differently to certain groups of students based on past injustices that no longer exist today. As many recent books coming out of academia feel a necessity to do, this book enthusiastically delivers on the Marxist ideals of I-identity, I-injustice, A-activism.
Sample DEIB Committee Newsletter
It makes me so sad and sometimes sickens me to know that this is how my educational tax dollars are being spent. The DEIB Committee does not focus on what the common person would call “belonging”, but rather attempts to make everyone involved hypersenstive about race relations.
What would happen if teachers considered an alternative point of view such as the one offered by Officer Tatum in this short video? I’m old enough to remember when all the grownups around me talked like this.