Last week, the HSE school district held a two-day training for staff on racial issues. The training was called Interrupting Racism for Children. The program is run by Child Advocates and headed by Jill English. According to public records, the district has paid this organization at least $96,000 for various services since February 2019. The district is going to hold another two-day training for HSE staff this week; I expect them to pay another $7500 or so for this week’s event.
I’ve written about this training before. Ms. English and the other facilitators for this program are also facilitators for a different organization called the “Soul Focused Group,” which is notable for making a breathtakingly racist comparison between being white and having a dangerous virus.
In addition to this, Ms. English and Child Advocates also recommend the following resources on their own webpage:
A podcast called Scene on Radio: Seeing White, which asks “when was whiteness good?” and goes on to compare whiteness to a “cult” and says that whiteness is “understood to be evil” and “exploitative”
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me: “the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white” (p. 42)
Ibram Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist, in which Kendi calls for racial discrimination, writing “racial discrimination is not inherently racist” and “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination” (p. 19)
Despite the perpetuation of these outrageous and overtly racist ideas on the Child Advocates website, Dr. Stokes decided to go ahead with last week’s training. Nevertheless, she told me she planned to discuss these things with Ms. English when they met the next day.
Flash forward to Wednesday, July 14, one day after the first training was held. Dr. Stokes emailed me to tell me what she learned in her meeting with Ms. English. According to Dr. Stokes, Ms. English said that she had not been aware of any of the comments I highlighted in her recommended resources, and had not been aware of the “virus of whiteness” remark from the Soul Focused Group.
This is ridiculous. Ms. English directs the program. She and Child Advocates are obviously responsible for the content on their own website. So I responded to Dr. Stokes that ignorance is not an excuse here, and that they have disqualified themselves as providers of “Interrupting Racism” trainings. I believe that Ms. English needs to get busy interrupting the racism on her own website and her own organizations before she presumes to teach others how to interrupt racism. This is not a difficult point.
It has been five days since I sent that response to Dr. Stokes. I have not heard back from her, but it appears that this week’s training—to be held for two days starting tomorrow, Tuesday, July 20—will go forward. Meanwhile, all the materials that I flagged are still recommended on Ms. English’s website. Here’s a screenshot:
Moreover, she is still listed as a facilitator for the Soul Focused Group. Indeed, at the time of this writing, her picture appears on the Soul Focused Group website right next to one of the guys who said whiteness is a virus. Ignorance is certainly no excuse nearly a week after the facts have been brought to your attention!
In addition, more troubling information has emerged about the district’s involvement with racist ideology. For example, Dr. Matt Kegley, the Assistant Superintendent, also decided to “highly recommend” the book How to be an Antiracist by Ibram Kendi:
This is the book mentioned above, which explicitly endorses racial discrimination. I reached out to Dr. Kegley on Saturday, July 17 to ask for a clarification on whether he really endorses a book that calls for racial discrimination, but so far he has not responded.
Finally, I want to bring it to your attention that the district has paid $6666.67 to a group called Favorite Part of My Day to provide a “cultural competency audit” for the district. Dr. Kegley says that the group has not provided any services as of yet. But here is a taste of some of the things that this group—and their President Cassandra Porter—stand for:
There’s a lot more of this sort of thing, but you get the idea. Ms. Porter is also an explicit proponent of Critical Race Theory. So I guess although the district says that they do not promote CRT, they nevertheless hire Critical Race Theorists and pay them thousands of dollars to advise them about racial issues.
I provided all these and other statements from this organization and from Ms. Porter to Dr. Stokes and Dr. Kegley, so they know about it. I subsequently asked Dr. Kegley whether this organization will be receiving more payments from the district, and whether they will be going ahead with a “cultural competency audit” given the information I provided. No answer yet.
All of this stuff has to stop, Dr. Stokes. As a community, we need to stand together and let Dr. Stokes know (ystokes@hse.k12.in.us) that we do not believe in this kind of racist nonsense. Dr. Stokes should find someone else to provide trainings and other services related to racial issues—someone who can bring the community together and move us toward realizing Dr. King’s dream, and the Beloved Community that he envisioned, where this kind of hate has no place.