Civil Rights Complaint Exposes 4-Year Antiracism Training Regimen at Bay Area School District

A school classroom in a file photo. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

Commentary

How much “woke” is too much? To the Hayward Unified School District (HUSD) in northern California, the sky is the limit.

Since 2020, the Bay Area school district, where less than 20 percent of the student were proficient in math and 67 percent failed to meet the state standard in English, has forced its staff to participate in a series of “antibias/antiracism” (AB/AR) trainings. The years-long reeducation campaign consisted of five AB/AR professional development sessions, each of which proselytized a barrage of divisive and discriminatory ideological notions, such as “white privilege,” “implicit bias,” “white supremacy culture,” “intersectionality,” and “Black Lives Matter.”

In these training sessions, conducted between September 2020 and January 2024, HUSD teachers and other district employees were compelled to study a “social identity wheel,” engage in “racial affinity groups,” identify themselves by race in breakout sessions, and denounce white supremacy. The system of white supremacy, according to the training slides, is a culture that normalizes “perfectionism, sense of urgency, defensiveness, quantity over quality, worship of the written word, only one right way, paternalism, either/or thinking, power hoarding, fear of open conflict, individualism, I’m the only one, progress is bigger/more, objectivity, right to comfort.”

The system is said to be sustained by “the hierarchy of the race construct,” shown in the graph below from one training session.

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HUSD employees were not allowed to dispute these untested and contested propositions. If they were uncomfortable with the materials, they were told to check their “privileges and biases” and confront their “levels of oppression.”

After being subjugated to this continuous regimen of indoctrination, three HUSD employees provided me with all the training documents and asked me to help defend their constitutional rights to equal protection and free speech. They were fed-up, and rightfully so. To them and many of their coworkers who have not come forward in fear of retribution, these professional development programs created a hostile work environment consisting of unequal treatment based on race and attacks on their free speech.

To assist the three courageous whistleblowers in pushing back, we at the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation filed a civil rights complaint against the HUSD on their behalf, with the Alameda County Office of Education and the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights. The complaint alleges that the school district violated “the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Article I Section 31 (a) of the California Constitution, state anti discrimination laws and Board policies.” In light of a recent incident in Hayward Unified where a teacher was suspended after blowing the whistle on a $250,000 “Woke Kindergarten” training program, we decided to conceal the identities of the three employees in the complaint.

Essentially, the long overdue complaint seeks the following remedies:

• Immediately launch thorough and objective investigations into the racial discrimination complained of herein.
• Establish oversight committees to ensure the objectivity of the investigations, including delegates from the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation to represent discriminated-against HUSD employees.
• Require the Hayward Unified School District to immediately cease and desist from employing racial biases, negative stereotyping, race-based treatment and other discriminatory means in all of its employee training programs and initiatives.
• Require the Hayward Unified School District to immediately reevaluate its protocols of teaching and training Anti-bias/Anti-racism, to ensure that blatant race-based treatment and racial discrimination are eliminated from its training materials.
• Take all necessary measures to ensure that the Hayward Unified School District stop discriminating on the basis of race and imposing a hostile work environment based on race.

We believe that all public-school district employees should be treated equally without regard to their race and should be able to speak up without being afraid of retaliation if they fundamentally disagree with the philosophies and worldviews inculcated in the job training.

Ideologically focused professional development sessions, like HUSD’s AB/AR regimen, are deeply divisive and offensive to all teachers and staff and should not be implemented at taxpayers’ expense. We will continue to fight to put an end to these intrusive, illegal, and unconstitutional trainings.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.