In today’s environment of political correctness, a new service is capitalizing on American schools’ growing demand for “anti-racist” education.
Ethnic studies consultants are making a fortune in the “diversity marketplace” by providing their services to America’s schools and corporate workplaces. The training they offer, “diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs,” has become a lucrative industry in recent years.
The trend is apparent on job search platform Indeed.com. One will find thousands of pages of hiring postings when conducting a search for DEI-related jobs.
Elite Private Schools at the Forefront
The Dalton School, in the Upper East Side New York City, where tuition runs to more than $54,000 a year, hit the headlines in mainstream media in December last year when dozens of faculty members signed an “anti-racist” manifesto.
Listed as the first request of their wide-range of demands, they asked to hire 12 full-time diversity officers and multiple psychologists to support students “coping with race-based traumatic stress.”
The appeal was met with backlash from the Dalton community. A group of alumni and parents posted an open letter online in late January asking, “How else can we interpret a curriculum night where every single class, from science to social studies to physical education, must now be rewritten to embody ‘anti-racism?’ When so many of Dalton’s extraordinary faculty sign a letter that shows little interest in the education of children, the joy of learning or the kids’ intellectual development?”
The authors specifically blamed Pollyanna, a leading DEI education consultancy in Manhattan, for its “racial literacy” curriculum, which has “already permeated Dalton classes from social studies to science” and contributed to “some of the worst abuses this year,” referring to incidents like a Jewish student being forced to play the “racist cop” in a science class, and the art class talking about “decentering whiteness.”
BY HANNAH CAI