Vol. 2, No. 6: March 19, 1998

San Francisco, CA — San Francisco’s Board of Education has taken diversity dogma to new heights with a proposal to require high-school reading lists with at least four of every ten books by minority authors. Even in San Francisco, the proposal has created a furor.

Curriculum quotas for kids are a new front in the culture wars. The identity politics crowd — those committed to the politics of race, ethnicity and sex — have conquered the universities and moved on to younger prey. Consequently, school boards across the country have adopted “multicultural policies” which encourage reading authors from diverse backgrounds at the expense of the classics. San Francisco would be the first to implement explicit quotas based on an author’s ethnicity, sex or skin color.

San Francisco’s proposal was drafted by two African American school board members: Steve Phillips, a 33-year-old entertainment lawyer, and Keith Jackson, a former bank teller. Mr. Phillips justifies their plan with thinly veiled race baiting: “In a district that is nearly 90 percent students of color, the point is not to glorify Europe but to (let) students see themselves in the curriculum.” Mr. Jackson said “black children learn differently from other children. It’s an environmental impact. . . It’s some type of handicap.”

Identity politics in the classroom is not new — look at the recent racial attack on standardized scores. It is the inevitable agenda of a post-standards, multicultural era, and it’s coming to a classroom near you. The multicultural view holds that merit is relative, and that literature’s value is based on its relevance to the diversity trinity of race, class, and sex. It’s reading through a propaganda prism. Imagine a reading list where instead of a brief summary or a list of the author’s other works, the only information is the author’s ethnicity. In San Francisco’s case, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is suspect because of “economic bias,” as school board President Dan Kelly put it.

Regardless of the San Francisco measure’s fate, identity politics in the classroom is pernicious in its implications. Though San Francisco’s explicit quota system may be unique, the emphasis on race and sex is already entrenched in classrooms around the country. This is literary criticism reduced to sex or pigment tone. Worse, it teaches children that experience and achievement are inextricably linked to race and sex. Put simply, the message is that kids can only learn from people who look like them. This sews the seeds of racism in young minds, a poison they could carry with them throughout their lives.

Holding children hostage to the vagaries of identity politics constitutes a real handicap for these children. It sends them into the world ill-prepared to compete and weighted with a heavy racial chip on their shoulders. High school and its lessons should be about individual achievement and high standards, not ethnic social experiments. As one veteran, African-American English teacher at San Francisco’s magnet high school pointed out in the San Francisco Examiner, “The beauty of literature is that it speaks in universal themes about the human condition. Great literature is color blind.” Now there’s a lesson worth learning.

—Katherine Post, Director of the Center for Enterprise and Opportunity