TEAM Westport steps up its efforts to turn our children against core American ideals
T he TEAM Westport essay contest has been announced for 2022. The contest is explicitly targeting “students attending high school in Westport,” which of course means Staples High School, one of three high schools in Westport alongside the two much smaller private schools. The essay prompt is unsurprising given this organization’s ongoing efforts to impose its neoracist ideology (to borrow a term used by the African-American Columbia linguistics professor John McWhorter) on nearly every part of our town.
This year’s topic — essentially asking our children to deconstruct a “colorblind” approach to race — only represents an escalation of its campaign to discredit basic Constitutional principles that have defined and united Americans from our founding. What TEAM is doing here is not only morally wrong, it is a blatant violation of adopted Westport Board of Education policy on essay contests which prohibits contests “that tend to promote or advertise a product or an ideology.” We call upon Town leaders and the Board of Education in particular to take immediate action.
Formed with the seemingly benign mission of “achieving and celebrating ‘a more welcoming, multicultural community’,” TEAM now fluidly operates as a sort of amorphous auxiliary unit within Westport municipal government. TEAM is formally housed within the Selectman’s office but is composed of numerous elected officials, ordinary townsfolk and even residents of Weston. For reasons one can only speculate upon, TEAM seems to have carte blanche to intervene in our schools and numerous other areas of Town government. TEAM’s unelected leadership appears to be accountable to no one, while playing a role in nearly every facet of Westport civic life, from our schools to the library to the police force to the art work that appears in Town Hall.
We do not object in the least to TEAM’s mission of celebrating diversity or the existence of a properly regulated body that would pursue such a straightforward mission. Our objection is to how TEAM’s philosophy has evolved into a sort of militant “wokeness,” aggressively pushing a single (and in our view toxic) narrative around racial issues. This ideology has manifested itself through the concept of “equity” that has been pushed across Town government. As we await the Superintendent’s recommendations following the equity study conducted by the NYU Metro Center, equity is perhaps weeks away from becoming the official dogma of our public schools.
The choice to target a “colorblind” approach cuts to the heart of the ideological cliff over which TEAM seeks to push our wonderful diverse community. As anyone with a basic understanding of anti-discrimination law understands, because of our country’s dark history with segregation, we have wide-ranging prohibitions against consideration of race or skin color. The new “woke” mentality, which has clearly been embraced by TEAM, is to reinsert consideration of race or skin color into everyday life, as a form of “good” segregation.
Ibram X. Kendi, one of the foremost advocates of this so-called “antiracist” perspective, explains it succinctly:
Since the 1960s, racist power has commandeered the term “racial discrimination,” transforming the act of discriminating on the basis of race into an inherently racist act. But if racial discrimination is defined as treating, considering, or making a distinction in favor or against an individual based on that person’s race, then racial discrimination is not inherently racist. The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity. If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist… The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination [Emphasis added].
TEAM’s new mission appears to be a revival of racial discrimination in Westport. Presumably, it will fall upon the unelected leadership of TEAM to decide how and when such racial discrimination takes place to achieve the antiracist equitable outcomes they desire.
Westport as a community, and its elected leadership in particular, must stand against this paradigm shift in racial understanding which so plainly disrespects the principle of equality embedded in our Constitution and so many of our laws.
As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in 2007, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Racial discrimination is unlawful, unconstitutional and wrong, even if it is packaged as a way to achieve supposedly positive social ends. When they were inaugurated, every single one of Westport’s elected officials swore an oath to support the Constitution of the United States. We ask them all to live up to that oath and denounce TEAM’s relentless efforts to undermine the principle of racial equality and equal treatment under the law. We ask the Board of Education in particular to enforce its own policies and take immediate action to sever any link between Staples High School and the new TEAM essay contest.
We urge parents of high school students in Westport to discourage their children from participating in this odious attempt to use financial incentives to impress a severely defective ideology upon them.