How We Fight
How We Fight
Self-defense, word battles, and DEI in schools
Towards the end of an interview with Kara Dansky, Peter Boghossian asked her why she didn’t learn self-defense to protect herself from the potential violence of trans-identified men who enter women’s spaces under the guise of being women. The question seemed to catch Kara off guard and he became relentless in pursuing an answer to his question.
As a black belt in mixed martial arts, I had long ago wrestled with this question. The very idea that my freedom was curtailed, due to my sex being a target of male violence, had made me mad enough to pursue this training for 30 years. I learned to break limbs, choke someone out, poke a thumb deep into an eye socket, and shove a nose bone into the brain with the palm of my hand among other visceral techniques of dispatch that horrified my mother and offended my peace-loving friends.
In the first year of my training, I asked a female elder at work what would happen if I dispatched a man who was sexually harassing me on the job, with a karate move. She said we’d probably both be fired. Hmmph. How then to disguise any such defense as an accident as in “so sorry did I hurt you?” More importantly, would a 5’ 3” woman averaging 110 lbs, even be a match for a man much larger and heavier than me? Not likely, but at least training had given me an awareness of my surroundings and thus a better chance at getting away or staying calm when struck. So I, too, was a proponent of teaching girls martial arts. Still, it was a bandaid on a bigger problem. What Peter was implying challenged the price of female independence in a world of male violence targeting women.
Kara, herself, provided the answer, in the aftermath of the interview. On her Twitter account she said a woman dispatching a man using self-defense techniques would simply be accused of assault. Right, if we want a law-abiding society where everyone is safer it would not do to force women to man up, as it were, while continuing to tolerate violent behavior from men.
My martial arts training had, however, given me a much more important training, that of defending myself with words, a skill I sorely needed given my upbringing in two reserved and non-confrontational cultures. The reserved English one where one rarely so much as interrupted another in a conversation, and the Thai one of a collective Asian culture where people simply shut up at the first sign of conflict. Meanwhile the American culture, I found myself in as an immigrant, favored arguing for sport. Friends with a passel of siblings with whom they had long years of practice being particularly contentious.
It was through the physical demands of martial arts practice that I was forced to react in real-time, bringing with me my mind and voice through the use of the karate yell, the Kiai. As it turned out this training had a direct impact on my ability to respond when verbally attacked at first with gibberish and then gradually with more refined sentences. I further built up fighting chops by memorizing supporting facts and arguments on all my pet topics. Once discussion moved online, I gained an advantage in that there was now a little more time to respond, look up things, and refer to my notes of pivotal books while still being considered in “real-time”.
The Battle of Schools
The next battle I wished to approach of the liberal canon of untouchable subjects was DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) and anti-racism training. Gender-critical comrades had begun to see the connection between DEI and Queer theory as two peas in the same ideological pod. Three members of our local terven met up, in early March, to go to the premiere showing of “Killing America: Can The Nation’s Schools Be Saved?” In a packed house, in the suburban town of my youth, we watched a film that I felt proved that ideology was being taught in schools. I wrote up my review as follows.
“I was joined by two of my gender heretic mates for the premiere of the documentary film KILLING AMERICA: CAN THE NATION'S SCHOOLS BE SAVED which was inspired by the anti-semitism that sprung forth at local high schools after the terrorist events of October 7th, specifically Menlo Atherton High School, as expressed through epitaphs, anti-Semitic jokes referencing incineration and the drawing of swastikas on school pavement.
Producers of this independently made documentary hired out the Guild Theatre in Menlo Park for their premiere which allowed me to appreciate its transformation into a live music venue that could still be used to show movies. The 200 hundred-seat capacity was sold out, at $36 ($18 for students), to a crowd eager to meet like-minded patrons so there was much eye contact and smiles exchanged in anticipation of this community event.
Those featured in the film were chosen for their activism at local school boards and for their general willingness to speak out. The panel discussion after the screening of the 38-minute film was part of the draw. Filmmakers and cast were impressively credentialed and included two doctors and two leaders of anti-semitism and anti-bigotry organizations. Nearly all were immigrants who have seen what happens when a country ignites polarization and hatred among its people.
The film could just as easily have been titled THE WAR ON SMART PEOPLE as the story begins with the elimination of AP (advanced placement) classes and honors classes. This was done to minimize the stigma for those who didn’t make the cut who were largely Black and brown students from elementary schools of poorer districts that failed to educate their students in basic reading and math.
Under cover of the ideology of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) these classes were eliminated because they were considered discriminatory. It was also said that they were attractive to Asian students who now dominated these schools, and, in an effort to diversify the student body, it was a strategy to get Asian students to leave in search of AP classes in other schools. Policies were put in place to lower grading standards and to cease suspending Black and brown students (as punishment for bad behavior). Meritocracy was replaced with equity (equality of outcome).
Also mentioned was the mainstreaming of developmentally disabled kids who then took up much of a teacher’s attention.
Dumbing down the curriculum and inflationary grading was just the beginning. The focus then turned to the remaking of Ethnic Studies courses from cultural and historical lessons teaching tolerance of others to defining relationships between ethnic groups in terms of those who are seen as oppressors and those who are oppressed. This is where the anti-semitism comes in. Students are taught the concepts of settler colonialism, and how racism must be examined by asking students what their skin color is and what that might mean in terms of privilege. No one is allowed to disagree because that would be racist.
There was then a case study of a teacher (female and Black) who was teaching erroneous facts about Israel being an illegal country and how the entire Middle Eastern peninsula was once nearly all Palestinian. Thus primed students then applied these settler colonialist values to the Hamas/Israel conflict by turning on their Jewish students. Footage showed students in Palestinian scarves marching through the halls chanting the now infamous “river to the sea” chant.
In the panel discussion, the most salient comment in answer to the question of why was this happening was incompetence. Administrators in charge cannot figure out how to keep the AP classes staffed with properly credentialed teachers. DEI was the handy excuse to eliminate these classes while the categorizing of certain achievement-oriented values was characterized as being too white i.e. being on time, striving to make better grades, and wanting to be academically challenged.
Teachers in my group can attest to the dumbing down of curriculum, lax standards, excusing kids from assignments they find too challenging, et al. The rest of what this movie brings up will be food for further discussion.”
When the film became available to stream for free I again urged people to see it adding a few more words about the film.
The teaching of the theory that all history can be seen through the lens of the oppressor vs the oppressed is race-based and lays at the door of white people the label that white people are the oppressor which now includes Jews.
This theory, as reported by various students, is now being taught everywhere including in England in a psychology course that spent very little time on psychology and a large part on how clients might be behaving due to their being in either the oppressor or oppressed class.
It is being taught in other schools in the Bay Area as one of my mom-friends reported. When she asked her high school-aged son why he didn't tell her of this teaching, he said "I thought you knew".
Be in the know. Watch this film and decide for yourself if we should be concerned.
This last post brought one of the most scathing and condescending personal attacks from someone in my LGB community. A lesbian who left this comment: “What a bunch of conflated nonsense. both your confirmation bias-laced intro and the film itself. Up there with Hillary Clinton's pizza parlor kiddie traffic gate. What's going on for you, Amanda? And what's next? Voting for Trump?”
This kind of language stunned me coming from a friend. I feared she was echoing the sentiments of our entire friend group that I had known for over 30 years. She was clearly spoiling for a fight. I knew she loved an opportunity to school me as an elder a handful of years older than me. I gave the comment a laughing emoji and sat for a few hours with my feelings of having been so publicly shamed as a bad liberal. I decided I had to stick up for myself even at the risk of being characterized as a conservative. So be it. At least they would see that I would not tolerate being talked down to no matter what they thought of my stance, assuring myself that my confidence would give them pause as the one person of color among them.
It reminded me of our strategy when fag bashing was prevalent in the Castro, the gay district of San Francisco. Always yell back we coached one another. That way we would not be perceived as a victim too filled with shame and fear to speak up when someone yelled “faggot”. I formed my response posted my comment and immediately felt better for tossing back the accusation of confirmation bias.
“Thank you for your summation of both the film, my introduction to it, and your concern for my state of mind. You are perhaps the fourth person to use such vitriolic language to address me on various political matters.
I have come to the conclusion, from these experiences, that there is no better indication of confirmation bias than someone who has been emotionally inspired to use such language to condemn me with such moral superiority likely out of surprise at finding that someone they have known for so long and who they respected as intelligent has been swayed by evidence that may conflict with everything they have been so far willing to take in. I take sustenance from this confirmation.”
She did not respond. How could she without feeding my rebellion further with such “sustenance”?
What puzzled me, though, was why the film did not stand as evidence for these friends. Hadn’t it shown that teachings based on stereotypes about race were being dispensed to students? I consulted with two of my support people. The first was a lesbian lawyer who had been a sitting judge and a professor of law. She had helped me to understand critical race theory when it was first being discussed among my peers as “teaching the truth of history”, which sounded so bogus to me. Why did race have to be the vehicle for teaching the truth? Wasn’t slavery already a part of US history taught in schools? We concluded that for my friends anti-racism training was so important to them, they didn’t see it as an ideology. How this change came about explained in this clear presentation by Dr. Lyell Asher.
My second support person was also a lawyer, a mixed-race woman of Black and Jewish parentage. Per the premises of critical race theory, she was born of both an oppressor race and an oppressed race much like myself. She had experienced rejection from both sides of her family and had put her faith in being the best student, the best person she could be. She had not found either affirmative action or equity to be productive measures for helping Black people. It just made one question one’s achievements and merit. This was the emotional support I needed to stand strong in my stance that anti-racist training was counterproductive and divisive for the very people it was supposed to help.
The issue of critical race theory also brought up feelings of my own as a member of the race that had been characterized as the model minority. When I first heard this phrase it was both a complement and a way of weaponizing our cultural traits against us as assimilationists. If success and achievement were really the goals of American society, why, then, didn’t society study “the seven habits” of this highly successful group?
The assumption that we were assimilationists also made me laugh for nothing could be further from the truth if you actually listened to a Thai or went to a Thai temple where our beliefs, cultural markers, and social protocol were not even remotely similar to a Christian nation. The only assimilationist trait we shared with this capitalist nation was a skilled approach to money. No one ever pointed this out, preferring to say that Asian people were good at math. Money would have been too much of a criticism of capitalism and it was easy to see why the leaders of capitalism wanted to keep people divided on the basis of race and not class in order to exploit us further as docile workers and consumers.
Asian people had also been politically grouped with POC, People Of Color. This was meant to highlight that American society was largely represented as white. As a result, positive moves were made to upgrade representation to include people of all races which I enjoyed. But then came the acronym BIPOC, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. The intention of this acronym was to insert a hierarchy to indicate that some races had it worse off than others, particularly Black and Native Americans.
Around the same time, the ceremonial declaration known as land acknowledgments was becoming more prevalent to honor the Native people whose lands white Europeans had usurped. Said declaration was given at progressive conferences and events in a ritualistic almost religious way as it came at the most energetic part of a gathering, the opening ceremonies. At first, it felt inclusive to recognize this history as part of the human story of the land, but then as the phrase “white supremacy” began to gain traction, it began to feel accusatory to group all white people as criminals who had stolen these lands. What outcome was expected? How were Native people being helped with this symbolic gesture?
As an immigrant, my family and I had to wait for three years to be granted papers to immigrate to the U.S. in 1968 by which time I was ten. I loved the idea that we were joining a nation of all different people all living together in this grand experiment of self-rule, cross-pollinating and collaborating in a continued history of sharing the best the world had to offer. I felt welcomed to the United States with the song I learned in fifth grade, “This Land Is Your Land”.
I was born of parents from two different nations, raised with the values of peace and cooperation imparted by the United Nations, a prominent symbol of my international childhood. My Thai grandmother was head of the government committee to welcome visiting dignitaries from other nations including the Queen. So proud was I of this monarch of my birth country visiting the royal family of my childhood country. Peace and diplomacy between nations was very important to me. I was given to understand that it was in my power to foster such peace given the proper protocol.
In my travels to states more heavily populated with Native Americans I learned that Americans of European descent were called “settlers” and non-white immigrants were called “settlers of color”. This phrase was directed at me personally in an incident that I believed to be an honest mistake for which I had attempted to apologize, but my apology was not accepted. Instead, I was being grouped as the oppressor in a victim narrative I had nothing to do with. What chance did I have to express my diplomacy and goodwill as a representative of my country?
In my recovery from this moniker, I decided to never again apologize for my race or any acts of cultural appropriation and other slights perceived as microaggressions. I could sense that this trend towards victimhood had an appetite for wrongs done that could never be satisfied. Better to just say no. Sod off. Stop blaming others and writing me into your victim narrative.
The phrase settler of color was also a little too close to the old “yellow peril” for my taste, referencing as it did the influx of people of a particular race.
The final epithet was to classify Asian people as “white adjacent” particularly prominent after the death of George Floyd because an Asian cop was standing next to the white cop who had choked him out. This was the last straw. I had had enough of this game. “I beg your pardon” I wanted to say “I’m royal adjacent.” We had now been ignored completely for the achievements of Asian people as immigrants whose stories of personal sacrifice and collective cooperation I had listened to with interest watching these immigrants from southeast Asia build their lives from scratch following the Vietnam War.
I, who came from privilege, had also benefited from a cultural respect for education and family that characterized Asian culture. Why would American society want to tear that down? Together with my studies of gender ideology claiming that gender identity was innate, I knew that all of this victim narrative of identity politics was cultural bullshit being foisted on children. Children in a culture of such diversity needed to be welcomed into adulthood as contributing members of society, not as racially demarcated characters in a passion play of an ongoing war between people. It ignited in me a passion to read up on how different cultures raised their children particularly. How did those producing smart children do it? How did a collective culture foster peace between siblings?
Thus having trained my algorithms with all my research, I was presented with another Peter Boghossian interview this time with Katherine Birbalsingh who had earned the title of the strictest headmistress, having created an inner city school for kids of all races, in London, that by all measures was a success. Her methods, however, were deemed controversial because, as a minority, she had thoroughly betrayed all the sacred cows of liberal beliefs in anti-racism training, child-centered everything, gender ideology, and identity politics in favor of what her critics wanted to call authoritarian.
She explained how she had modeled her school after the Asian model of discipline and respect for teachers while demanding that her students follow the rules and put forth their best effort. Watching this attractive, articulate, mixed-race Black immigrant explain, in practical terms, what she had found to work that both calmed children and provided them with a collective experience of working together, was so reassuring and sensible that it gave me hope that all was not lost and all of us whether Asian, Black, brown, Muslim, Hindi or white could indeed cross-pollinate and collaborate on a project to better society. If this was what was meant by little “c” conservative, as she called herself, I was all in.
The documentary “Britian’s Strictest Headmistress: Monster or Miracle Worker?” can be seen here for $5.50.