The Child Soldiers of Portland: Public schools are training children to become race-conscious revolutionaries.

Tigard, Oregon, is a placid suburb southwest of Portland. A local shopping mall hosts a Macy's, a Dick's Sporting Goods, and a Cheesecake Factory. The city’s historic main street is a pastiche of coffeehouses, boutiques, repair shops, and restaurants. Historically, the city’s political squabbles have concerned zoning and land-use issues—in other words, the typical politics of an affluent American suburb. Demographically, Tigard is not diverse; it numbers only 636 blacks out of a total population of 52,368, making up approximately 1 percent of residents.

Nonetheless, educators at the Tigard-Tualatin School District have gone all-in on the social-justice trinity of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Last June, at the height of the nationwide unrest, Superintendent Sue Rieke-Smith and Board Chair Maureen Wolf signed a proclamation “condemning racism and committing to being an anti-racist school district.” The preamble to the document recited the names of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, and confessed that the district’s “students of color, and Black students in particular, still regularly experience racism in [their] schools.” To rectify this, the superintendent pledged to become “actively anti-racist,” “dismantle systemic racism,” implement a “collective equity framework,” establish “pillars for equity,” deploy “Equity Teams” within schools, create racially segregated “Student Affinity Groups,” and use “an equity lens for all future curriculum adoptions.”

The next month, the district announced a new Department of Equity and Inclusion and installed social-justice activist Zinnia Un as director. Un quickly created a blueprint, which I have obtained through a whistle-blower, for overhauling the pedagogy and curriculum at Tigard-Tualatin schools. The document calls for adopting the educational theories of Brazilian Marxist Paulo Freire, whose “pedagogy of the oppressed” (summarized in a 1968 book with that title) was originally designed to instill “critical consciousness” among impoverished South Americans and to forge the conditions for overthrowing the dictatorial governments of the era. (See “Pedagogy of the Oppressor,” Spring 2009.) Following Freire’s categorizations, Un writes that the Tigard-Tualatin school district must move from a state of “reading the world” to the phase of “denunciation” against the revolution’s enemies and, finally, to the state of “annunciation” of the liberated masses, who will begin “rewriting the world.”

In her blueprint, Un describes the new oppressor as an amalgamation of “whiteness,” “colorblindness,” “individualism,” and “meritocracy.” These are the values of capitalist society—but for Un, they are the values of white society, the primary impediment to social justice.

What is the solution to pathological whiteness? According to Un and the Tigard-Tualatin School District, the answer lies with a new form of “white identity development.” In a series of “antiracist resources” provided to teachers, the Department of Equity and Inclusion includes a handful of strategies for this identity transformation, intended to “facilitate growth for white folks to become allies, and eventually accomplices, for anti-racist work.” Couched in the language of professional development, the process assumes that whites are born “racist,” even if they “don’t purposely or consciously act in a racist way.” The first step in the training document is “contact,” defined as confronting whites with “active racism or real-world experiences that highlight their whiteness.” The goal is to provoke an emotional rupture that brings the subject to the next step, “disintegration,” in which he or she feels intense “white guilt” and “white shame,” and admits: “I feel bad for being white.” The training then outlines a process of moving white subjects from a state of “reintegration” to “pseudo-independence” to “immersion” to “autonomy.”