Third graders at Silicon Valley elementary school asked to deconstruct their racial, sexual identities, documents reveal
Not even elementary schools are safe from social justice ideology, as an elementary school in Cupertino, CA, the heart of Silicon Valley, recently forced a class of third graders to rank themselves according to their “power and privilege.” The grade-schoolers were also asked to deconstruct their racial identities.
New whistleblower documents obtained by writer Christopher Rufo, and backed up by testimony from parents familiar with the class, reveal that a third grade teacher at R.I. Meyerholz Elementary School asked students to perform the exercise during a math class.
According to the documents, the teacher instructed the children to create an “identity map,” including their race, class, gender, religion, family structure and other characteristics. The teacher explained that the students are privileged and live in a “dominant culture” of “white, middle class, cisgender, educated, able-bodied, Christian, English speaker[s].”
According to the lesson, their privileges are “created and maintained” by said privileged individuals in order to “hold power and stay in power.”
The classroom was then forced to read This Book is Anti-Racist by Tiffany Jewell. According to the book, “those with privilege have power over others,” and that “folx who do not benefit from their social identities, who are in the subordinate culture, have little to no privilege and power.”
The reading states that “a white, cisgender man, who is able-bodied, heterosexual, considered handsome and speaks English has more privilege than a Black transgender woman.” The book argues that due to the principle of intersectionality, “there are parts of us that hold some power and other parts that are oppressed,” even as individuals.
According to Rufo, the teacher asked students to deconstruct their own intersectional identities and “circle the identities that hold power and privilege” on their identity maps. The students were asked to rank their traits according to a hierarchy. Students were also assigned to write short essays describing which aspects of their identities “hold power and privilege” and which do not, with at least one full page of writing.
The teacher asked students to create an “identity map,” listing their race, class, gender, religion, family structure, and other characteristics. They were told to “circle the identities that hold power and privilege." pic.twitter.com/pENBJeZ3cF
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) January 13, 2021
The presentation also used a short paragraph about transgenderism and non-binary sexuality as an example to the third graders, who have not yet taken sex education.
“They were basically teaching racism to my eight-year-old,” said a shocked parent to Rufo. The parent was among half a dozen parents who protested the school’s intersectionality curriculum. The parents met with the school principal and demanded an end to the instruction.
Rufo said that the principal of Meyerholz Elementary maintained that the training was not part of the “formal curricula, but the process of daily learning facilitated by a certified teacher.”
As described by Rufo, Meyerholz Elementary is 94 per cent non-white, and is one of the most privileged schools in America.
“The median household income in Cupertino is $172,000, and nearly 80 percent of residents have a bachelor’s degree or higher. At the school, where the majority of families are Asian-American, the students have exceptionally high rates of academic achievement and the school consistently ranks in the top 1 percent of all elementary schools statewide. In short, nobody at Meyerholz is oppressed, and the school’s high-achieving parents know that teaching intersectionality instead of math is a waste of time—and potentially dangerous,” wrote Rufo.
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