A Virginia public school teacher forced to take training based on critical race theory has written about her experience, describing it as a form of “trickle-down indoctrination.”
Monica Gill, an American history, government, and comparative politics teacher with 25 years of experience, wrote at The Federalist that the training she was forced to take recently accepts as fact systemic racism and universal “white privilege,” and any suggestion to the contrary is dismissed.
Gill described one specific training exercise where a Vogue cover photo was shown featuring NBA star LeBron James and model Gisele Bundchen. They have their arms around each other, with Bundchen smiling and James looking like he’s yelling while dribbling a basketball. Gill said that she and her colleagues were asked “What do you see?” and were told by their “trainers” that seeing the two people was “an example of a subconscious implicit bias,” because what they should have seen, was a modern-day depiction of King Kong and his female victim.
“They claimed I was really seeing a black man portrayed as an aggressive ape. The purpose of this training was not just to reveal implicit bias, but also to accuse our community of systemic racism that needed to be disrupted and dismantled to root out this type of white supremacist thinking,” Gill wrote.
She said that parents became concerned about the training and curricula in the schools, prompting Interim Superintendent Scott Ziegler to insist that Loudoun County Public Schools “has not adopted Critical Race Theory as a framework for staff to adhere to” and that the school district’s attempt to train students and staff on “equity” was “not an effort to indoctrinate students and staff into a particular philosophy or theory.”
Gill, however, says that while the training they receive may not say it’s CRT, it uses the same buzzwords and assumes that systemic racism, white supremacy, white privilege, and implicit bias are not only real, but prevalent.
Gill wrote that she tried to bring her concerns to her superior, the school board, and then-Superintendent Eric Williams, as well as others, but received no response. She questioned why students and faculty were only hearing from critical race theorists and not Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, or even Martin Luther King, Jr.
“I thought our job was to be life-long learners and examine different perspectives. But our ‘conversations’ are based on the assumption that the ‘equity’ narrative is true and unimpeachable. We are specifically told at our meetings not to direct the conversation to other factors that may inhibit student achievement like ‘economics’ or ‘family structure,’” Gill wrote. “Why shouldn’t we, particularly if those are the roots of challenges faced by minority students, as presented by thinkers like Sowell? Sowell gives empirical data rather than made up esoteric terms that only the ‘experts’ can reveal to us. None of this appears to matter to many district officials.”
Further, Gill wrote, those who question the dogma of the CRT teachings are punished:
It all began with a one-sided conversation and continued with the school board’s attempt to silence teachers’ free speech in opposition to the “equity” initiative. The tensions heightened with the LCPS Minority Student Achievement Advisory Committee’s social media posting to silence the opposition, and the Anti-Racist Facebook group creating “lists” of parents to be doxed, hacked, and bullied for questioning the “Equity” initiative.
My colleagues call parents who disagree with them “racist,” full of “evil rhetoric,” “Beetle douche,” and “people who Harriet Tubman would have shot.” I bet these same people have “Hate does not live here” signs in their front yards.
The willingness of teachers with different views to speak up is further suppressed by those in leadership hurling the very powerful false narrative that if we disagree then somehow we do not have the right heart to be teaching children and ought be dismissed.