Religion is a Mental Illness

Sahar: During my junior year my school had wanted to sponsor this political organization called Erase Racism, to give a presentation to the school on systemic racism in Long Island. And they had asked for student government to fund the presentation, but i didn't really know what the presentation was going to be about and they weren't really giving me any information. And this is when I was treasurer, so i needed to sign off on these checks.

They got student government members together for a meeting and just berated us for about an hour over Zoom about how our refusal to sponsor this organization was really our refusal to oppose racism.

My two student government advisors had also brought in my social studies teacher to join them in this meeting. So it was it was really intense just having three adults, all of whom you know had authority over me and one of whom had control over my grades in my junior year of high school.

And I was also, again as a junior, not used to situations like this. I'm Jewish. They asked me if I would have done the same thing for a Holocaust presentation. So from there i realized that there were some issues in the school that definitely needed to be hashed out when it came to just intimidation and speech.

Later on in the year, a student in the school, a friend of mine actually, showed his dad a Google Slides presentation that was being taught to his English Regents class, which is a mandatory English class in the school for I think juniors... yeah it's English 11 Regents. And the contents of the presentation were again very controversial. Some of the things that were said in these slides were that America is as racist today as it was 200 years ago.

The students who were watching the presentation had harbored white fragility when it came to race and that white fragility was actually a function of white solidarity, so white people get upset at being called racist in order to fight for racism. And that we all have internalized racism and it ended with a pledge to be anti-racist, but that was anti-racist as defined by this controversial slideshow. It had some it had some recommended readings, I think one of which was maybe White Fragility.

So the contents of that presentation was released to a lot of parents who just were not happy about it. So the parents brought that to the Board of Education. Board of Education offers a public kind of discussion where you as a constituent get to talk to the Board of Education about this issue, this issue, that issue, and a lot of parents were going up saying, whoa I object to this being taught to my kids on a mandatory basis, and also I didn't know about this being taught to my kids, and also apparently this was being taught for years and the school administration knew about it so what's going on here.

So this Board of Ed meeting was was huge.

Ben: Perhaps half the parents of this of the school district here are immigrants or refugees, Jewish or Asian. Unfortunately my father learned what white supremacy was he he grew up in in Poland, in the part of Poland that's now in the Ukraine.

Having their kids being taught that they're white supremacists, it's very incongruous to the local actual felt experience, the lived experience of the people in this town.

Sahar: So i found out about this Board of Ed meeting, I think maybe the day of or the day before, and what was going to be happening and what a lot of parents in particular were coming to protest.

So I decided that this was really going to be my opportunity to speak up about other things that were happening in the school and really let the rest of the community know that there was a lot going on. That the school administration had basically been sponsoring this mandated learning of controversial ideas to the kids and was also sponsoring intimidation to get there.

So I wrote up a speech basically detailing what happened with student government and also just included this question of, really this presentation, the very controversial Google Slides presentation, it's been being taught for years. How could the people in charge here have not known about this and how could they not have been so transparent you know.

It was a problem, it's an issue that our school was enforcing ideologies with with an iron fist, rather than a gentle hand.