Posted by SeaDuck79 at 5/10/08 5:40 p.m.

Wow. I never thought I would agree with Horsey on anything, but he's spot on here. There's far too much indoctrination that goes on in our schools, which would be a warning sign that the trolley's slipped the tracks, except that the people running the trolley don't see it that way, because indoctrination is the (barely) unstated goal.

And they wonder why home schooling is growing...

Posted by unregistered user at 5/10/08 7:01 p.m.

Yes, I agree with Horsey as well.

Good job to speak out, Mr. H.

And a well-written blog.

Thank you.

Posted by jirish at 5/11/08 12:28 a.m.

Thank you David Horsey. Well put!

Posted by slywhitewolf at 5/11/08 3:37 a.m.

How I wish that this blog could appear in the printed newspaper. Or at least be more directly and obviously linked to the related PI article on this subject.

Horsey manages to summarize the whole foolish affair quite eloquently, exposing this well-meaning but hopelessly misguided enterprise as a payday for a few education "specialists" who deal in a special sort of snake oil. Hollins and her crew accomplished little. In fact they exacerbated racial tensions rather than healing them.

I agree in principle that conversation has to be a major part of bridging the deep racial divides in our society. But what Hollins and her department engaged in was not conversation: It was divisive, dogmatic lecturing that avoided the most crucial issues and substituted one sort of racism for another.

Posted by camai at 5/11/08 8:05 a.m.

Dave,

I usually skim over your editorial stuff, since we don't agree on many things, but your artwork keeps me coming back. This article, however, is right on target. Nice work.

Roger M.

Posted by unregistered user at 5/11/08 2:14 p.m.

Dave,
I enjoy your cartoons a great deal, even if I don't agree with you. However, after reading your blog, I agree with your perspective regarding the Office of Race, etc., what is next for the Seattle schools, the Ministry of Propaganda and Enlightenment, whose head is a clubfoot? The process of propagandizing happens in Eastern Washington as well, but instead of martyring African-Americans, it is the Mexican who is held to be eternally oppressed by "the Man" and that enforcing the borders is racism against them, even though, in Mexico, illegal aliens from their southern border are by no means welcome in their country.
What many people are forgetting, is that education is about learning skills and facts to provide choices that young people can use to improve their lots in life, not about learning that they are being held down by a nonexistent conspiracy.
This obsession about ethnicity and race is the way to destroy a great nation, as people group together by how they look, perceiving the greater world with suspicion and contempt.
Thanks for presenting a refreshing perspective.

Posted by Green Party at 5/11/08 2:30 p.m.

RALPH NADER SPEAKS IN SEATTLE

This Wednesday, May 14
7:00 PM
University of Washington, Seattle Campus
Kane Hall Room 120
Online map: http://www.washington.edu/home/maps/?KNE
Contributions: $10. Student/Low-Income: $5 (No one turned away)

Posted by Ballard Pimp at 5/11/08 10:35 p.m.

Green Party, quit spamming. Don't you have some sand that needs pounding?

Posted by Green Party at 5/12/08 5:20 a.m.

So, you would say that the article on the front page announcing Obama's or McCain's rally is NOT spam?

Posted by Onyotaka Lukwe at 5/12/08 6:07 p.m.

Looks like Jews, Blacks, and Indians all share a Horsey commonality now.

Posted by jazzer at 5/12/08 8:41 p.m.

It really doesn't matter if this wonderful Horsey piece is not in the daily paper....middle and upper class people have fled the schools...many that haven't merely don't have the money avail. to do it.....yet.

What do you call "minorities" when they make up 60% of Seattle students?..... What happens when that number goes up to 70%?

Let's ask disgraced "Office of Equity" boss Caprice Hollins for some ideas!

Posted by Onyotaka Lukwe at 5/13/08 11:39 a.m.

Maybe you should ask the Office of Minority Affairs at the University of Washington, instead. Or, the Professor at UW whom told me, after I shared part of my life story with him, that it showed him "they were letting in just anybody these days"

Posted by James1 at 5/13/08 2:40 p.m.

David Horsey has spoken the truth here, and I do not know whether to cheer or cry, because it is so rare to see this in Seattle's usually politically correct papers. The constant drumbeat from some people who tell us that American society is deeply racist has the effect of discouraging some blacks from trying to succeed. Instead we get wacky ideas like those esposed by Wright, Ebonics, or the suggestion that black people are somehow fundamentally different from whites. And this is coming from people who say they are against racism? How is this different from what the KKK has been telling us for over 100 years?

Right on Horsey, keep it up!

Posted by whatshername at 5/14/08 10:46 a.m.

The only 'good' outcome of the dismantling of the program and Hollin's firing is the gross exposure of usually hidden liberal white supremacism it has evoked.

Such deeply embedded, often unconscious, racism, only sees the world through the lens of white supremacy on which this america was built and fattened through genocide, slavery and imperialist wars for global supremacy.

"Color-blindness" is the disengenuous liberal desire to save the status quo by those whose privilege is based on class and 'race' cannot exist for the majority in this world, and soon this country, on whose backs that privilege has been acquired and whose lives are dominated by its institutionalization.

The palpable fear , like Horsey's and his cheerleaders, of those desperately clinging to the lies and crimes that girding national oppression and its ideological engine racism, exposes the ruling political determination to protect the racist status quo as well as to the urgent need to disrupt its deadly consequences.

liz burbank

Posted by sbessho at 5/14/08 12:40 p.m.

I am a white male, and unlike David Horsey and his compatriots, I don't feel threatened by the prospect of having an honest discussion of race that crosses the barrier we usually honor and actually addresses white people as racial beings. Like Horsey, I was raised to think of myself as a person, not as a white person. Our culture allows for that in the case of white people, who are regarded as the "default" identity in the US.

I have taken part in the Courageous Conversations that so abhor Mr. Horsey, and I have not been "made" to feel anything that was not my own personal response. Have I felt guilt? Why, yes, I have. I think it's a natural emotion, and one that can lead to real examination of one's own culture and one's own role in that culture. But I do not revel in guilt as Mr. Horsey thinks the programs in Seattle schools and elsewhere intend. One cannot look at US history from a white perspective and not feel some guilt or shame. I don't know how a white person can learn about, for example, the incarceration of Japanese Americans during the 1940s without feeling some degree of guilt by association with the government and the culture that allowed such an injustice.

And for white people learning about the long legacy of racial injustices in this country, that's just the beginning. But that's assuming that we actually do learn about that legacy. I wasn't taught about it in public school; I was taught the feel-good version of US history that passed as complete in those days, and that many white people understandably want desperately to believe in. For to realize that one's own racial legacy is one of injustice and imperialism is to realize that one has an obligation to act to right that legacy for future generations--not to censor it for one's own comfort. I suggest that Mr. Horsey look at the work of another cartoonist, Barry Deutsch at amptoons, who has a more realistic view of what it means to be white in the US today.

Posted by Onyotaka Lukwe at 5/14/08 3:45 p.m.

Heh- they always runaway from a legitimate critique: marxist/ feminista or anything else sourced in an unlike yet good mind, one not their own. Thusly, the gist of the original content has been thereby exhumed to greener pastures, with a remarkable increase in production.

Hola, Compañera. "lena hunka yelo"

Posted by Ed Logan at 5/14/08 7:01 p.m.

I agree with you. I read very carefully what you wrote, and I think you have carefully presented the case for the closure of this mis-education. "Sbessho" which must be text for "Should be so!" thinks guilt is a reality everyone should wallow in and wear with pride. Guilt is an emotion, and just like you should never discipline kids when your angry, shop when your hungry, or drive when your drunk. You should not evaluate history by teleporting past guilt onto your current scales. Anyone who says they are going to atone for the enslavement and mistreatment of blacks in America is delusional. Anyone who says they will wipe away the injustice of internment of Japanese Americans during World War II is bordering on a God-complex.

We were friends with a black family: The Washington's in Walla Walla, WA. When I was 10 years old I received a dressing down about how white people think they can go into a black mans house anytime they want to from Mr. Washington. It was unexpected, it was real, and it would bring dishonor to the abuse Richard Washington lived through, and overcame, for me to heap guilt on myself and say I know what he went through. Mr. Washington never "lost it" again in my presence. He treated me just the way he always had before that just like one of his own kids. The truth of common respect and friendship from "white folks" he knew overrode the pain of burning crosses in his yard put their by 'white folks' who were fools. My mother told me that had happened before I was born. I didn't ask Mr. Washington to share that, relive it, or help me feel his pain. I had seen it in his eyes, and heard it in his voice and heart.

The singular experience of human beings shapes all of us. I, a 50 year old white male, will never know the helplessness thrust upon the black man. I hope that my character and friendship will build up enough credits that when I rip a scab off a deep scar like I did with Mr. Washington, that when the scream down and the vision clears that trust and friendship resurfaces. And that individuality is what this pseudo-education was trying to root up, tramp down, or simply kill.

Posted by jazzer at 5/16/08 10:03 a.m.

Some of the definitions here about white domination are are merely political twists on the fact that many middle class people simply want their schools to match the quality of the suburban Bellevue's or Mercer Islands.

Lower economic or social groups and PC school admin.'s are ALWAYS going to lower the levels of achievement and use whatever brute force they can muster to do social engineering.

The entire Fed. Govt. and National Guard haven't accomplished much in 40 years...are we expecting a pathetic, inept, underfunded local school system to reinvent the whole world?

Posted by gitano1 at 5/17/08 8:36 a.m.

My exposure to these little race-baiting junkets began in the early 1970s when the Human Relations Task Force came to Asa Mercer Middle School and created havoc after a trimester of morning sessions. By the time the Task Force left half the faculty was unable to talk to the other half. This lasted for more than a year. The divisive language and accusations and forced confessions were, as David states, more like a reeducation camp than a meaningful attempt to achieve understanding.
Years later I was forced to remain in a workshop taught be a then professor at the University of Washington on the origins of Western Civilization. The "professor" held forth that the Greeks were, in fact, Blacks. He based this on the fact that Greek sculptures show men with curly hair. I kid you not! My African-American friends on the faculty and I exchanged glances of total hilarity and disbelief.
Since that time I have been through several of the Courageous Conversations in which an African American man whose suit cost more than the combined value of all of the wardrobes of all of the attendees told us about how he was discriminated against because of his color. He regaled us with a story of a White man on a airplane who had been rude and, therefore, was a perfect paradigm of White society.
At all of these meeting I saw nodding heads of the sheeple who feared for their jobs because they were White and, therefore, suspect. If that wasn't the grossest form of racism short of lynching ever perpetrated on a race I can not imagine one. We, the White teachers, were made to take responsibility to every insult ever used against a person of color. We were personally responsible for the acts of people and a government that existed more than 100 years before our own forebears came to this country, many to escape death and persecution in Europe.
I applaud David Horsey's comments and the end of the Districts Office or Equity, Race and Learning Support for whatever reason, it is go riddance to bad rubbish.

Posted by gitano1 at 5/17/08 9:16 a.m.

I received this this morning. I pass it along without further comment:
THIS WORK MUST CONTINUE

AS#1's Equity Committee is coordinating a collective response

to the elimination of the

Department of Equity, Race, and Learning Support.

All are invited to an organizing meeting Wednesday, May 21st from 5 to 7 at Alternative School #1, 11530 12th Ave NE, Seattle, WA 98125.

Guiding Questions:
- How can we, together, honor and celebrate the impact of this department?
- How does this elimination impact our schools?
- How can we support each other in continuing this important work (i.e. district TRI days)?
Please bring:
- Stories and examples of how the Department of Equity, Race, and Learning Support has positively influenced student learning at your school

- Concrete outcomes that you have, and hope to achieve, around equity and race