Check Out This Example from the Recommended Resources

The Eanes recommended Resources list—once so proudly displayed on the Eanes website and now, praise be, disappeared—was filled with woke, racist social-justice sources.  

Think I’m exaggerating?

Then take a look at the first recommended source on the first tab for parents.  It exemplifies the toxic message sent by the entire Resources list.  

The link was entitled Talking About Race, and it took parents to the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture.

Interlude: Important Note About This Smithsonian Museum

If you were a librarian paying attention in the summer of 2020, you’d have known that citing to this Smithsonian museum is risky business.  During that summer, the museum created a bit of an ugly bruhaha.  On their webpage, they had posted a poster entitled Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness and White Culture.   

The poster traffics in some ugly and absurd stereotypes.   It’s actually quite breathtaking in its overt racism.  One toxic assumption underlying the poster is that the values and characteristics listed on the poster are attitudes embraced only by white people.  So apparently, non-white people do not inherently value the nuclear family, the scientific method, a hard work ethic, planning for the future, delayed gratification, property rights, and politeness.  And if non-white people do hold those values, it’s only because they’ve internalized the bad dominant white culture.  

It’s so ridiculous to even have to spell it out:  those aren’t white-people values; rather, those are values embraced by any person who hopes for a life of happiness, responsibility, and success. To suggest that non-white people do not embrace these values is absurd and demeaning.

It’s also so ridiculous to have to spell it out:  this message is straight-up racism. Making broad assumptions about people based on their skin color is racist.

I mention this because if you’re an Eanes employee tasked with creating a Resources list, you might want to make sure you’ve done your homework.  How woke is the referenced organization?  Are they in the habit of promoting racist messages?  Does the organization embrace applied Critical Race Theory?  In this case, the answers are completely, evidently, and abso-freaking-lutely. These answers raise one more question: did the Eanes librarians do any research about the sources they were recommending to parents?

Now Back to the Specific Webpage Recommended by Eanes

The need for careful vetting of website recommendations is also borne out by the specific museum page recommended by the Eanes Resources page.  The District librarians thought it was a super good idea to recommend that parents consult this webpage.  And here’s the message:

In two little paragraphs, the museum manages to generalize about whiteness:  whiteness as an ideology, whiteness as power, whiteness as oppression. This is the racism that’s at the core of Critical Race Theory.   And this is what was recommended to parents by the District librarians and approved by the School Board and Dr. Gooden, the District DEI consultant.

Pro-tip, Eanes school-board members:  if you can’t tell if something was written by a racist critical theorist or by a racist white supremacist, then you probably shouldn’t endorse it on the district website.