One of the original child integrators of New
Orleans public schools, Leona Tate, is drumming up support to memorialize and
educate about that process. She has a plan, through her Leona Tate Foundation for
Change, to refurbish
the abandoned McDonogh 19 school that she helped to integrate into a museum
about the history surrounding that which also will have senior citizen housing
and a facility for a local group to conduct workshops.
Therein lies the problem. That group teaming up
with Tate’s foundation to bring McDonogh 19 back into new service, termed the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond,
propagates the myth of “institutional racism,” or that all sectors of society –
government, economic, cultural, etc. – have ingrained racism that favors the
numerical majority with a “white privilege.”
It’s poppycock, of course, unless you believe in absurdities such as a meritocratic system built upon removing impediments to equal opportunity inherently discriminates (and a whole cottage industry in academia has sprung up to try to produce, predictably unsuccessfully, valid indicators to tie racist attitudes to this). And as for nonwhites who point out this belief system’s shortcomings, they purportedly suffer from false consciousness (the whole thing essentially substitutes race for class in a repackaged Marxism).
But it’s profitable scam. The group runs
reeducation seminars for those seeking this new consciousness, with the recent price of
$270 a pop. And it can work, as evidenced by the experience
of one skull full of mush a few years back.
Tate would do a service by keeping her history alive
through this project. Stunningly, some children white and black have
no idea about the segregationist century in American education history,
which this could help inform about.
Unfortunately, she seems taken in by the anti-intellectual
Pablum served by the group, which surely would infest the entire presentation.
As such, thinking people must shun this, and mourn a lost opportunity.
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