Privilege, affinity and equity: How DEI is playing out in Illinois schools – Wirepoints

By: Ted Dabrowski

I continue to run into parents across the state who don’t know what to think about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in their children’s schools. They haven’t educated themselves on the issue and don’t know just how pervasive it is. Most think DEI is benevolent or at worst, just a minor distraction. 

But an increasing number of parents are starting to wake up to how divisive DEI has become. 

That’s especially true after the U.S. Supreme Court limited the scope of permissible affirmative action for higher education admissions, and congressional testimonies by the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT revealed anti-Semitic behavior hiding behind DEI policies. DEI, while still prominent and growing in many areas, is finally getting the pushback it deserves.

Unfortunately, that pushback isn’t slowing down efforts in Illinois – not if what’s going on in Chicago’s progressive North Shore is any indication. In Evanston, the city’s high school recently made attempts to segregate its students in various AP classes. At New Trier High School in Winnetka, affinity groups divide students by racialized and politicized identities. And municipalities in Wilmette, Glencoe and Highland Park are looking to further embed DEI into their city policies. 

To parents that haven’t paid attention: the spread of DEI matters. Here’s why that’s a problem:

DEI creeps in

The first time I got wind of the depth of DEI was in 2017 when I read an Equity Audit by Evanston’s School District 65, written to determine why the district had persistent gaps in its black vs. white student outcomes. The district has long struggled to educate its black children even though Evanston has been among the most progressive in the country for decades. Today, more than 60% of its elementary white students can read at grade level, while just 19% of black students can.

It didn’t take me long to find the audit’s excuse for the district’s woes: Institutional Racism and White Supremacy. There it was, right in the first paragraph of the report. 

“There is a persistent and unacceptable opportunity gap for students of color in District 65. The District’s leadership team attributes the racial predictability of achievement and disciplinary outcomes to institutional racism, a huge problem that can only start to be solved by acknowledging the history of white supremacy in Evanston/Skokie Schools.”

White supremacy in 2017? In Evanston? In one of the nation’s most progressive school districts?

The district’s report – and the subsequent segregation of teacher meetings as a result of the report – received national pushback, including a rebuke from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission’s Peter Kirsanow, who wrote, in part:

“[The report]… also encourages a binary view of society that, depending on your perspective, is either, “whites against everyone else” or “everyone else against whites.” It may even foster a sense among both groups that they are threatened by the other…

…The racially-conscious efforts you and District 65 have undertaken will foster racial division instead of racial understanding. Sending teachers to racially separate meetings is a stark picture of the future you are sowing. You are encouraging students and teachers to view each other as members of groups, not as individuals.”

Many parents haven’t heard such criticisms. Instead, they’re only exposed to the surface-level DEI marketing used by education officials: that it’s about discussing racial issues and encouraging the safety and wellbeing of students. 

Who could be against that? 

But scratch beneath the surface and you see exactly what Kirsanow warned of: students being taught to see others as members of a racial or social group, not as individuals. 

Take the “affinity” groups that New Trier High School, just five miles from Evanston High School, created a couple of years ago. It’s one thing for students to come together under shared interests and backgrounds. But it’s another thing for a school district to sanction and promote numerous affiliate groups under the DEI umbrella.

“Black and Brown Club.” “Young Asians with Power.” “White Anti-racist.” “Black Student Alliance.” All were listed during a presentation on the district’s DEI efforts.

These aren’t groups based on common interests, but rather on racialized and politicized “shared identities.”

Contrast the objectives of the POC and Anti-White Racist affinity groups: “Bi-weekly meetings focus on social connection sharing struggles…building a positive racial identity through creative expression.” vs. “Understanding Whiteness…exploring white culture and white racial identity…learning about anti-racist equity work.” 

How can such groups create a healthy dialogue when students are divided up based on purported grievance and guilt?

Despite the national move against equity as reported by the WSJ and most recently in Crains, New Trier shows no sign of slowing down its affinity group efforts – the school district has a new LinkedIn job posting for a Black and Brown Club Affinity Group Sponsor.

And note the language listed under Qualifications: “Preference will be given to applicants who identify as Black, African-American, Hispanic and/or Latinx and/or have personal experience with or knowledge of the needs of this population.” Interesting, considering the recent ruling against affirmative action. 

Negative impact

“Big deal,” I’ve heard some parents say. “It’s good for schools to have open discussions where children can speak up about their concerns without fear.” 

If it were only that simple. A recent New Trier 9th-grade assignment shows how DEI can negatively impact students. A student I know was asked to measure his level of “privilege” through a series of questions in his freshman English class.

The activity is not a problem in and of itself, but look at how “privilege” is framed by the material below and you can understand the student’s concern. 

“Privilege operates on personal, intrapersonal, cultural and institutional levels and gives advantages…to members of dominant groups to the expense of members of target groups…invisible to people who have it…privileges are unearned and they are granted to people whether they want those privileges or not.”

In sum: If you are part of a dominant group you are privileged, you don’t need to work hard for success… things are handed to you. Whereas, if you aren’t privileged in these ways, even hard work won’t get you there.

Examples of automatic privilege, as listed below, include “white” “male” “heterosexual” “middle class” “English-speaking” and more. It’s no wonder such language made a 9th-grader who can circle most of those areas “feel bad about himself.”

I was told: “He was totally caught in the middle – very uncomfortable answering the questions and thinking the goal was to make him feel guilty, but at the same time he didn’t want to rock the boat and anger the teacher.” That doesn’t sound like a classroom that’s conducive to open discussions.

DEI becomes particularly divisive when privilege is equated with oppression or racism, as is often done, and as you can see in some of the examples above. You’re either the oppressor or the oppressed, a bigot or a victim. Few claims could be more divisive or untrue. It should be obvious that many who might be called privileged are not racists or oppressors, and declaring them as such invites disharmony if not outright hatred between groups.

Segregation as solution

Coming back to Evanston, the city’s school district attracted national attention last year when it implemented “affinity classes” for a series of AP courses that separated minority students from white students.

Officials said their goal was to make minority “students feel more comfortable in class,” ignoring the fact that they were segregating students. The classes were described as “restricted to students who identify as Latinx or black” in the district’s course catalog.

It’s telling that the district’s solution to the white/minority achievement gap was to fully embrace the bigotry of low expectations. Rather than promote integration and obsess about literacy for the area’s minority children, the district instead focused on separating students along racial lines.

Evanston’s reaction to the national attention it attracted was also telling. The district backtracked, declaring the classes were “open to all students” but were still “intended to support students who identify as Black.”

If DEI policies like segregated affinity classes are so important, why wouldn’t the district continue to support them despite the national scrutiny? Probably to “avoid a civil-rights lawsuit since the Supreme Court ruled…a “separate but equal” education policy based on race is unconstitutional,” the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board opined.

That raises a question: just how many other DEI programs would be changed or removed if they all faced the same scrutiny as Evanston’s?

DEI marches on

Every level of government is getting in on the DEI action to various degrees. The cities of Wilmette, Glencoe and Highland Park, for example, are now looking to hire a DEI consultant to complete a review of their “policies, processes, and initiatives and to provide actionable recommendations.” 

And if the recent piece in Crain’s Chicago is any indication, DEI in Illinois is only going to get bigger, for now. Businesses and governments in the Chicagoland area are bucking the nationwide pushback against DEI – doubling down on their commitment to racialized and equitable policies even as organizations outside of Illinois abandon them in droves.

The only good news is the worse it gets here, the more Illinoisans will wake up to the damage that DEI does.

Read more from Wirepoints:

• The failures beyond Evanston High School’s segregated AP classes
• DEI continues to flourish at the University of Illinois even as universities across the country scale back programs
• Universities better get ahead of surging anti-woke backlash. The University of Illinois should go first.
• The costs of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Illinois universities