Earlier: SLATE’S “Care And Feeding” Column: Helping Woke Parents Drive Themselves Mad About Race Since 2019
White parents who seek help from the so-called experts from SLATE’s Care and Feeding section are masochists and fools. I was glad to see Revolver has joined the ranks of the sane with a recent analysis of the degeneracy it promotes [White Liberal Mother Regrets Offering Daughter as Ritual Sacrifice to Diversity Gods of the Globalist American Empire, May 24, 2021].
A recent letter and Care and Feeding ’s Jamiliah Lemieux’s reply capture “the end stages of liberal brain rot,” as Revolver says.
A “liberal, White, upper-middle-class" mother pulled her daughter from her public high school in a gentrifying neighborhood after suffering severe harassment at the hands of her Black peers. Lemieux’s response preyed on culturally-induced white guilt and desperation for conformity.
I am a liberal, White, upper-middle-class parent, and we live in a mixed-income, racially integrated urban neighborhood. When it came time to enroll our daughter in high school, we selected a school that was majority Black because it was close by, and we rejected the notion of getting caught up in which magnet school was most prestigious. Our daughter had a horrible time there—she was harassed so much that we had to pull her out, and other non-Black students there were victimized because of their race. I am struggling to make sense of the experience. I think she’s managed it well and hasn’t let it affect her general views on race, and I believe I’m doing the same, but mostly I am just so angry that our daughter had to endure this, and I feel guilty that I put her in this position. I also feel caught between friends who seem to want to say, “I told you so,” and those who seem to think that saying that she was the victim of racial harassment somehow makes me seem racist since it was at the hands of Black students. Maybe I should just chalk it up to bad luck, but how can I let go of the guilt and anger and all the other awful reactions I’m having to this?
—Hoping I’m Not a Karen
Lemieux’s obvious intent in her response is to have the inquiring mother assume blame for damaging a black neighborhood and school because of the “devastating” impact of gentrification caused by intruding white families. She shows no real concern for the teenage girl, or her non-Black peers.
Lemieux, [Tweet her] minimized the teenage girl’s experience at her high school. She writes that “bullying, regardless of the bully’s background, is not OK, but you asked about the larger context here.”
Did you catch that? She manipulates the language—changing “harassment” from the mother’s original statement to “bullying.”
According to Tennessee's Department of Education, a fundamental difference exists between these two terms. The organization says bullying “involves unwanted, aggressive behavior that results in an imbalance of power." Examples might be name-calling, publicly embarrassing another student, or intentionally tripping someone. Harassment, in contrast, “is any unwelcome conduct based on a protected class under the federal civil rights laws that is severe, pervasive, or persistent and creates a hostile environment.”
Tennessee's teachers’ handbook goes on to note that
harassment creates a hostile environment when the conduct is sufficiently severe, pervasive, or persistent so as to interfere with or limit a student’s ability to participate in or benefit from the services, activities, or opportunities offered by a school.
This distinction between terms is echoed by the Canadian Red Cross, which states that “bullying turns into harassment when the [behavior] goes against Canada’s Human Rights Laws” which includes age, ability, family status, sexual orientation, and race.
Jargon and pronouns and labels are essential tricks to propagandists with Lemieux ‘s ideology. There is no way this rephrase was not intentional. By avoiding the accurate term clearly used by “Hoping I’m Not a Karen,” Lemieux places her political ideology before an ethical response to this parent’s inquiry.
Using the word harassment would acknowledge that the black students were racially motivated. In turn, Lemieux would be agreeing that black people can be racist, which has been long denied by the Left. Better she misleads her audience and blame the real victims that deviate from the political line.
This type of Woke helpline is not for the benefit of safer, better reared children. Its mission is the advancement of biased Anti-Racism ideology—one parenting nightmare at a time.
