Louisiana State Representative Barbara Norton (Democrat-Shreveport) has joined the Social Justice Warrior field team after she publicly opposed a bill filed by fellow State Representative Valarie Hodges (Republican-Denham Springs) that would require students in grades four, five and six to recite portions of the Declaration of Independence each day in class. Norton argued that the Declaration of Independence should not be read because it was written during a time when African-Americans were not free.
“For the Declaration of Independence only Caucasians (were) free, and for you to bring a bill to require that our children will recite the Declaration of Independence, I think it’s a little bit unfair,” Norton said on the floor of the Louisiana House of Representatives.
Norton and another Representative, Patricia Haynes Smith (Democrat-Baton Rouge), further suggested that the bill bore the hallmarks of Jim Crow era literacy tests that were used to disenfranchise African-Americans.
As an alternative, Norton and several others suggested students recite portions of Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a dream” speech.
It was not the only time King’s name was invoked during the debate; “In 1776, Dr. King was not even born. African-Americans were in slavery, so since they were in slavery, in the Declaration of Independence say [sic], we were all treated eq — we were all created equal. we were not created equal because in 1776, July the 4th, I, nor you, nor any of us were born, nor was Dr. King born, so, we were in slavery. And to have our children to repeat, to repeat again and again documents that was not even validated [sic], I don’t think that that’s fair because we’re teaching them a lie.”
Social Justice Warriors have launched an all-out assault on our culture, history and language in order to turn us into stuttering zombies who are too afraid to talk to one another without fear of being called a “racist” or “sexist.”
Mattel’s Thomas the Tank Engine could not escape the wrath of social justice warriors, who have regularly accused the show of being racist and sexist. Even as Mattel has produced a modern re-mastering of the show in which Thomas receives a number of friends across a wide-range of nationalities, some on the left such as Paula Young Lee of Salon.com have found fault with their “ghostly white masks.” “Under the bourgeois aegis of globalization, Thomas’ expanded universe is fostering the assimilation of the rest of the world into structural whiteness,” she continues.
Mary Creagh, a Labour MP from Wakefield and the former Shadow Secretary of State for Transport, called out Thomas the Tank Engine for its lack of female characters and the supposed message it sends to females who wish to work in the transportation industry. “There is a preponderance of men in the transport industry,” she said, “and I am very keen to unpack some of the myths that stop women from taking up what are often highly paid and highly skilled jobs.”
Apparently, even pointing out someone’s grammatical mistake could be interpreted as racist. The Guardian’s Mona Chalabi has suggested only white people care about grammatical correctness because grammatical rules were made by white people in the first place. “The people pointing out the mistakes are more likely to be older, wealthier, whiter, or just plain academic than the people they’re treating with condescension,” she says. “All too often, it’s a way to silence people and that’s particularly offensive when it’s someone who might already be struggling to speak up,” Chalabi continues.
MTV News host Franchesca Ramsey produced a video in October, 2015 calling out people who use phrases such as “peanut gallery,” “no can do,” “long time no see,” “sold down the river,” and “gypped” for their perceived historically racist overtones.
One would be hard-pressed to not mention a well-documented directive from the city of Seattle, Washington back in 2013 which called on all municipal employees to cease using the phrases “brown bag” and “citizen” as they could be deemed offensive to some. “The term ‘brown bag’ doesn’t bother everybody, but . . . there is a history behind the use of it,” said Elliott Bronstein of Seattle’s Office for Civil Rights.
