Take Back Our Schools: Men of Steele

Good Sunday to you all,

Los Angeles is finally getting wet with three days of non-stop rain. I know people east of us are unimpressed. :)

My father and I had the honor of being on the “Take Back Our Schools” podcast hosted by Andrew Gutmann and Beth Feeley for Ricochet.

A little backstory. I’ve known Beth for almost ten years. She may just be the first parent to stand up to DEI before it was known by that name. It was around 2016 when she organized a protest along with other Chicago parents against New Trier High School’s program to feature only leftist writers like Kendi. She argued that viewpoint diversity was a necessary part of education and drew the attention of Bob Woodson and the Wall Street Journal, just to name a few. When the school refused to bend, she hosted my film, How Jack Became Black, as part of the counter-programming. (BTW, this is where I met Pastor Corey Brooks of Project H.O.O.D. for the first time and the rest is history.)

I met Andrew Gutmann while I was at Fox. Some of you may remember him as the father who pulled his daughter out of New York’s The Brearley School and wrote a devastating letter where he demanded that the school stop its “obsession with race.” In doing so, he knew that he and his family risked being ostracized from the Upper East Side society and they were. Andrew now lives in Florida with his family where he is running for Congress to reform our education policies. What drew me to Andrew initially is that he has no white guilt, no fear of being stigmatized as a racist. In fact, he told my father and I — when we interviewed him last summer for the White Guilt documentary — that “White Guilt” inspired him and that he was tempted to include copies of the book along with the famous letter he sent to every Brearley family.

I hope you take time to listen to this podcast.

As a teaser, I’m copying and pasting some quotes from my father from this interview on various subjects:

On DEI in education:

I think the white liberals have become exasperated with the sort of the regime of identity and so forth as the way as the way ahead in American education. And so I think that that's that's played a very important role. But in my book, “White Guilt,” I talk a good deal about that, that America's history of race of racial conflict weighs on our culture and our society in a way that I think wears us down and has caused white Americans in many cases to step back and sort of presume that people with good intentions were handling education. And I think what we're beginning to see now is that there's a breakdown there. The white Americans are beginning to really understand that their vulnerability as whites makes them more open to really ideas that have more to do with power and aggression. And that serve teaches unions, for example, more than the actual people that you're supposed to clientele that you're supposed to be educating.

The white liberal problem:

What bothers me, what frankly, angers me is that white liberals, whites who I think have been under the sway of white guilt, are stealing our problem away from us. And since the sixties, the civil rights bill and so forth, white America has looked for its own redemption much, much more than for toward the development of blacks who were held down for so long and it's this this white preoccupation with its own racial innocence that I think has tainted, corrupted race relations in America and made it much more difficult for us to come together and actually deal with the real problems.

Number one, the among them is the fact that if you come from a people who've been oppressed for four centuries, you are not going to have the same skill levels, those same levels of education, the same things to bring to bear in the in this highly competitive society we live in. And that's where we that's where we need to begin to pursue equality, not through some sort of jerry-built social engineering, but through the actual skill development, the academic development of minorities that have been, as the word has it now, marginalized.

That's what we need to overcome. I don’t, I don't need you to give me a racial preference. I need you to say you're going to compete with me, and I need to tell myself I'm going to compete with them and I'm going to prepare myself as my own father used to say to me when I would, complaining, going to college and he'd say, You have to be a think of yourself as a pirate.

You are just ravaging, taking everything you can get from that, that is your four years of college education. Don't complain that you're there's somebody called you a name. Don't worry about that. Develop. Get really good at something that hopefully that you love doing. Well, when you take the responsibility away from blacks for that and you say we're going to intervene and we're going to engineer diversity and we're going to set up a world that looks as though it's always had equality.

You oppressed blacks all over again. We suffer today from the oppression of goodwill. A thoughtless goodwill.

On Hamas:

Hamas interests me. I mean, they sort of in this international stage are like blacks, or are identifying themselves in that way. Everything is religion, everything is identity. There is no focus on individualism at all. Individualism is to be loathed and held in contempt and, so forth…

Their victimhood is a way of covering, as a way of explaining away — let me just be really cold about it, because reality is cold, but it is explaining — it's a way of explaining away their inferiority.

Their failure to have competed on an equal level, achieved equal levels of excellence and so forth, as others. And so they say excellence doesn't count, merit doesn't count. The only thing that counts is your color. Well, my color isn’t — I got that covered. I'm going to be the same color when I wake up tomorrow as I am today. But in terms of my development as an individual, I hope I'm on a kind of a larger curve, I’m moving forward.

Well, we cut out Hamas, you see that, all of that ingenuity and creativity goes into what? Digging tunnels in the ground. You're going to get somewhere that way? Well, we blacks done the same sort of thing. We think the way I had an afro that was out to here — if I do that, I'll be … no! You have to earn that. You have to put yourself in the competition with everybody, with the best of the best. And so, this war and Israel is in many ways a battle of the low self-esteemed people, people who history has left behind, who couldn't keep up.

Thank you,

Eli