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School district pulls Web site after examples of racism spark controversy


An outpouring of criticism forced Seattle Public Schools on Thursday to pull a Web site that viewed planning for the future, emphasizing individualism and defining standard English as examples of cultural racism.

The message had appeared under an "equity and race relations" section of the district's Web site and was mentioned Thursday in an opinion piece by a Libertarian writer in the Seattle P-I. Criticism of the site has been building in the world of blogs for weeks.

In its place Thursday was a message that the site will be revised to "provide more context to reader around the work that Seattle Public Schools is doing to address institutional racism."

That message, written by Caprice Hollins, the district's director of equity and race relations, said the site wasn't intended to "develop an 'us against them' mind-set."

But she may have stepped into a second controversy by saying the site also wasn't intended "to hold onto unsuccessful concepts such as melting pot or colorblind mentality."

Andrew Coulson, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom, was the author of Thursday's opinion piece. Among other things, he drew from the site's definition of cultural racism.

"Those aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value and normality to white people and whiteness, and devalue, stereotype, and label people of color as 'other,' different, less than, or render them invisible. Examples of these norms include defining white skin tones as nude or flesh colored, having a future time orientation, emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology, defining one form of English as standard, and identifying only Whites as great writers or composers," the definition said.

"It was very ideologically charged," Coulson said Thursday. "It was left of center by definition, criticizing individualism as racism and advocating a collective ideology. You can't get much more red versus blue than that; it's incredibly polarizing. That everyone who thinks in terms of individualism is racist?"

Coulson's piece was only the latest criticism of the site, and he said he tracked many others in the blogosphere. So even before his opinion piece appeared, the district had been "dealing with calls and e-mails for the last three weeks," said Peter Daniels, school district spokesman.

"It did not have enough context for people not working on this issue, and it was poorly written," Daniels said. "... It's about institutional racism, particularly in an educational setting. There are particular structures and practices in place that disadvantage other students who are not of the Caucasian or white majority. It's really examining our own practices and education, but that wasn't very clear."

So Hollins' memo appeared Thursday, saying that "the intended purpose of our work in the area of race and social justice is to bring communities together through open dialogue and honest reflection around what is meant by racism."

"It's a non-apology apology," said Coulson, an education history scholar and author of "Market Education: The Unknown History."

"My sense was that the definition was extremely offensive, but there was not much sympathy for those who were offended ...," he said. "The harm that can come from the Web site is the tarring of the ideal of individualism as racist, while the ideal of individualism is a central principle on which our nation was founded. Liberty is individual, not collective. So for our school district -- our official school organ of the state -- to tell children it's racist to believe in a principle on which our nation was founded -- is troubling."