Lehman: I think there are a couple of answers to that, and you can talk about what sort of ideas it’s spreading. I think that there are derogatory features of it.

If you look at responses to DiAngelo’s book, if you look at some of the more extreme instances, frankly, the accounts of race that they give are startling and disturbing.

There’s a controversy because the National Museum of American History I think over the summer released an info sheet about the norms of white culture, which implied that non-White people aren’t on time to stuff and that that’s a white norm and non-white people don’t work hard so white people are willing to work hard.

No, I believe that everyone is able to work hard. That’s an important tenant of racial equality, is that we believe that people are equal in common decency and dignity.

But I think that the other thing to highlight is that a lot of this stuff doesn’t appear to work. It doesn’t appear to have a major impact.

I think everyone can reasonably agree that if we have tools that reduce racial animosity and tension, those are good. All else equal, we want that. But there’s a reasonably strong research finding at the corporate level that the corporate diversity trainings, their primary effect is not to reduce inequality in either experience or in hiring, but actually increase racial animosity and to have no effect otherwise on who ends up in top positions.

It seems like it mostly takes some extreme example of Robin DiAngelo, if you pay somebody $20,000 to spend two hours screaming at your employees about how all of their problems are caused by racial animosity, the effect of that will be to cause them to resent each other even more, which is not really surprising.

And then I think this plays out—I highlighted in the piece a couple of different stories about progressive schools that, really, their progressivism has veered into a disturbing level of anti-Semitism.

There was reporting from Tablet Magazine looking at [a] school in New York where they divided kids out by affinity groups that were based on their ethnic identity, and how all of the Jewish kids felt super targeted by being put into the Jewish group and being told that they were terrible Zionists and … the oppression of the Palestinians, that was their fault as Jews.

So that kind of division by race, especially among high schoolers, can promote bullying and destructive behavior.

Virginia Allen: Wow. No, I mean, I think on so many levels, just fundamentally the fact that, OK why are we continuing to do things that, one, we’re seeing really don’t help, and then, two, that actually have real harmful effects?

I do want to get your opinion on something that you reference in your article. That’s the 1619 Project. We’ve talked a lot about the 1619 Project on this show, the flaws with the curriculum, but we are seeing it continue to be implemented in schools across the country.

I want to get your perspective, as a journalist, and specifically how the media reports on the 1619 Project, because we know that there flaws. The New York Times themselves, they published a major correction to the project central piece.

So why do you think so much of mainstream media just looks the other way at something that’s being so promulgated but is so clearly flawed?

Lehman: I think I want to answer that question pretty generally and then focus in on the particular example, which is that there were lots of institutions in American society today, whether it’s the Pulitzer Prize, or The New York Times, or it’s who gets the Nobel Peace Prize, which has historical legitimacy, which it did.

Their authority derives from a past treatment of authority, and which today have been more or less co-opted by partisan liberal interests. They use the stamp of their legitimacy to approve things which are ideologically correct if they’re not factually correct.

And so this is how you end up in situations, and this is when you talk with journalists specifically, where journalists are happy to pat themselves on the back with things that are factually inaccurate or which don’t set an accurate picture, but which served the ideological ends that they want them to serve. You have a laundering of legitimacy that goes on.

So I think something like 1619, the question is not, is it right? Is it presenting an accurate picture? I don’t know a huge amount about the details, but for I think your reporting on it, the question is, is this how we imagined history really looks in this Howard Zinn sense of? Is this the untold secret story of history that confirms our ideological priors?

And if the answer’s yes, then they’re going to go, “OK, this is good. And we’re going to put our stamp of approval on it, and we’re going to help advance this thing having influence in society.” That tool set is apparent across American elite society, and it’s so apparent in that case too.

Virginia Allen: Interesting. I want to dive in a little bit more into some of these examples that you give in your piece about what is happening at some of these schools.

I was really fascinated, and then I did some extra homework on it, because I was really interested, that in San Diego, their public schools have actually overhauled their traditional grading system because of racism.

So they’ve changed the way that they grade as a way to combat racism. It’s a little unclear how one plus one, not sure. They didn’t seem to draw a super direct link for how changing the grading system then will help to defeat racism in that school district. Do you know more about that situation?

Lehman: Yeah. I mean, I think, basically, one of the enduring problems in American education policy over the past 40, 50 years is that there are large and persistent gaps along race on any standardized tests that you care to name, which is to say Asian students and then white students consistently and significantly outperform Latino students and then black students, and this is called the achievement gap.

And the why is a really complicated question and there are lots of different debates about how we can address this, and I think it’s important to ask, what are the underlying causes? That might be whether there [is] socioeconomic inequality, or lack of access to resources, or lack of school choice.

There any given number of factors at play, but having observed this disparity and from beating their heads against it for the past 50 years, I think many of the most progressive figures in education policy and in teaching theory have basically said, “It’s no longer relevant to ask, ‘What is the cause of this disparity?’ We should just choose the disparities, ipso facto, racists.”

This is the … logic, “If there is a disparity, then racism is what causes it. There’s no other plausible explanation. And therefore … we should address the disparity at the level of metric.” Which is to say, “If being graded poorly on homework is the thing that is leading to the achievement gap, the measure of achievement gap on homework between black kids and white kids, then the solution is to change how we grade homework until the achievement gap goes away.”

In other words, I think their contention is that the measures are hopelessly racist and so we should change the measures.

I think my contention might be, maybe not homework, but certainly standardized testing is a reasonably good measure of something like academic ability.

And so whatever the underlying causes of the disparities, again, with racists, you can argue inequality, whatever the underlying causes of the disparities are, changing the measure to make that measured disparity go away, changing what your measure is, doesn’t actually address the inequalities or issues that are causing the disparity to emerge in the first place. But I think that’s the thinking that’s going on there.

Virginia Allen: Yeah. That seems so dangerous and obviously so not helpful to those students that are struggling that need the extra help.