Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, sponsored a virtual event that asked students: “Is Professionalism a Racist Construct?” before providing one-sided information to suggest that it is.
Fox News reported that the event will be held virtually on February 1 and claims the term professionalism “has at times been used to silence and marginalize people of color, when attributes of appearance, language or interactions that have nothing to do with job knowledge or constructive collegial relationships are labeled as ‘unprofessional.’”
Thus, the event description insists, professionalism is part of white supremacy.
“In this context, so-called professionalism is coded language, a construct that upholds institutional racist policies and excluding practices,” the description says.
The event is yet another college effort aimed at allegedly “dismantling white supremacy and privilege in varied contexts while upholding social justice and advancing effective workplaces in which all contributors can bring their full selves to the job site.”
As Fox noted, this is the same school that received national attention in September after a student stole the American flags from a 9/11 tribute and put them in trash bags.
“Professionalism” joins a growing list of behaviors race activists claim support white supremacy. As The Daily Wire previously reported in February 2021, the Oregon Department of Education (ODE) promoted a program for teachers that sought to “disman[tle] racism in mathematics,” alleging that focusing on finding the right answer is a symbol of white supremacy. The event also insisted “objectivity” was a tool of white supremacy.
Fox News reported that the ODE sent out a newsletter that mentioned a “Pathway to Math Equity Micro-Course” for an event that occurred last February The course, according to Fox, was designed for middle school teachers to make use of a toolkit for “dismantling racism in mathematics.”
The newsletter encouraged teachers to sign up for the training, which the New York Post previously reported included a section with 14 things associated with “White Supremacy Culture,” including perfectionism, objectivity, and individualism.
Objectivity was described in the workbook accompanying the training as “the belief that there is such a thing as being objective or ‘neutral.’” The program’s toolkit also encouraged teachers not to focus on a single correct answer, but to “come up with at least two answers that might solve this problem” and to “Challenge standardized test questions by getting the ‘right’ answer, but justify other answers by unpacking the assumptions that are made in the problem.”
The toolkit also asks instructors to “center ethnomathematics” in multiple ways, one of which is to “identify and challenge the ways that math is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views.”
The toolkit also claimed that “white supremacy culture” allegedly “infiltrates math classrooms.”
As The Daily Wire also has documented, San Francisco was intently focused on race in early 2021 instead of the growing number of student suicides and mental health crises caused by the continuous closure of schools.
While students suffered, the school district seemed more concerned with tackling race perceptions, focusing on renaming schools based on historically inaccurate information and debating the racial makeup of an all-female volunteer council. As The Daily Wire reported, the San Francisco school board spent two hours debating whether the gay father of a mixed-race child was diverse enough to sit on a parent advisory council that was currently made up of only women and had additional open seats. The school board also spent time renaming numerous public schools based on a historically inaccurate Google Doc and claiming acronyms are a “symptom of white supremacy culture” while replacing one acronym with another.