Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Tolerance run amok

Ever read a speech code? Exhausting, and frightening. According to the Seattle public schools guide, there are 15 different types of racism. Pardon me for sounding O'Reilly-ian here, but much of the text reads like a communist manifesto:

Cultural Racism:

Those aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value and normality to white people and Whiteness, and devalue, stereotype, and label people of color as "other," different, less than, or render them invisible.

Fine so far, but read the rest --

Examples of these norms include defining white skin tones as nude or flesh colored, having a future time orientation, emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology, defining one form of English as standard, and identifying only Whites as great writers or composers.

So individualism = racism? Somewhere, Ayn Rand is retching. And how many forms of English are there?

Assimilation is also racist, according to the Seattle public school system. So they're actually discouraging "the process of giving up connections to and aspects of one's culture of origin and blending in with the host/dominant culture."

I've detailed several incidents of fundamentalism on the right, but it's just as dangerous coming from the other side. Andrew Sullivan sums it up well:

The secular religion of multiculturalism has the same tropes as a real religion. It constructs an abstract devil and posits one completely virtuous state of being. There can be no compromise between them.

Time for the sensible middle to reclaim our institutions from zealots left and right. We're half past paranoia at this point.

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