Tense partisanship and leering tabloid coverage have turned the idea of systemic racism and the lesson plans that address it into the latest terrifying problem facing the nation – just when we thought peace and normalcy were upon us. She doesn’t oppose the school’s overhaul of its humanities reading lists and announced equity-aimed admission reforms – both moves that spurred intense backlash from parents. And she’s quick to point out that she hasn’t worked there since 2018, when she left after 15 years as an art teacher – years which crystallized her perspective on the internal tensions that work against these schools’ earnest efforts at awokening. “That entitled attitude of parents predates the George Floyd murder,” she says. “A lot of these parents also went to Brentwood themselves or to similar schools, so they balk at the changes.” Of course, schools aim to be forward-looking for a reason. “They’re supposed to keep up with the times and educate young people for the future, the world they’re inheriting,” she says. Savage sees these private schools struggling with controversy as victims of their own attempt to serve two masters. “They’re on the record and have her picture taken. Savage was surprised to be such a central source in the story. But her former colleagues, even those who’ve also moved on, were afraid to speak out.
publish articles and host conferences and raise money for institutes, and in order to charge tens of thousands of dollars for Zoom lectures, it helps to dress it up in technical-sounding terms and make it look new. (Our society is, of course, host to a well-funded woke industry as well as a correspondingly well-funded anti-woke industry.) But “systemic,” in most contexts, can be another less illustrative word for “coded.” Hierarchical societies live by restrictive and debasing codes, encoded in such a way that they linger long after they’ve fallen out of conscious everyday use. And, in my experience, eighth graders hold to be self-evident that “systems” and “codes” that diminish anyone’s humanity diminish everyone’s humanity. They really do – they come like that, prepackaged. All a teacher has to do is pass around the Dover Thrift Edition paperbacks. It probably helped that by the time they got to my classroom, they’d noticed how racially segregated their world was – they’d all noticed, and yet they’d almost never talked about it. RETROFITTING DIVERSITY Art teacher Kate Savage’s classroom used to be one place her students talked openly about thorny topics. Unlike her co-travelers in the cause, the last thing Savage – who is also a mindfulness coach – ever wanted in life was to be an anti-woke spokeswoman. She isn’t one really... But she did agree to be interviewed for an in-depth article about her former longtime employer, the Brentwood School in Los Angeles, not realizing she would be the only one brave enough to talk
American Consequences
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