A middle school drama teacher in Illinois has filed a lawsuit against her school district, alleging that it is violating anti-discrimination laws and the U.S. Constitution through its curriculum that pits “different racial groups against each other” in the name of “anti-racism.”
Teacher Stacy Deemar, in her lawsuit (pdf) filed in federal court on June 29, alleges that since 2017, teachers in Evanston-Skokie district (District 65) have been made to under go so-called “antiracist training,” and continue to do so.
Deemar is being represented by the Southeastern Legal Foundation.
Among a number of objectives in the training, teachers are stereotyped by trainers and divided according to their race, the complaint says. Teachers are required as part of the training to accept that white individuals are “loud, authoritative … controlling” and to hold the view that “to be less white is to be less racially oppressive,” according to the lawsuit. It added that teachers were taught to modify their viewpoint to fit the theory that “White identity is inherently racist” and to denounce “white privilege.”
If teachers oppose, question, or “disengage” from the views promoted in the training, the district “blatantly calls them ‘racist,’” the lawsuit alleges.
Students in the district, meanwhile, are then taught these concepts by their teachers who are mandated according to the curriculum for Pre-K through eighth grade to impose the race-based worldview on their students, the lawsuit added. As a result, students are expected to gather by race in “affinity groups,” and to participate in “privilege walks” based on their skin color. They are also given books depicting “whiteness” as a devil that “mess[es] endlessly” with “all fellow humans of color.”
The children were also taught “whiteness is a bad deal,” white people send “overt and subliminal messages” that they are “superior” and black people are “bad, ugly, and inferior,” and that pretending not to see skin color “helps racism,” according to the complaint.