The City Journal reported this week that the California Department of Education will vote next week on a proposed “ethnic studies” course that would require students to chant to Aztec gods who accepted human sacrifices and ate people, and to “fight genocide” against white Christians.
City Journal is a public policy magazine and website published by the conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.
According to City Journal, the new curriculum, called the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, aims to extend the left’s 50-year cultural domination of California’s public university system to the state’s elementary and secondary education system, which includes 10,000 public schools and serves 6 million students.
The original co-chair of the curriculum, R. Tolteka Cuauhtin, claimed that white Christians had committed a “holocaust” against indigenous tribes, killing their gods and replacing them with Christianity. The solution is to take a stance of “transformative resistance” to “name, give voice to, resist and transform the condition of Eurocentric neocolonial hegemony. The ultimate goal is the “decolonization” of American society and the creation of a “counter-genocidal” and “counter-hegemonic” new system that will replace white Christian Culture and lead to “the regeneration of indigenous epistemologies and cultural futures.
The curriculum suggests that teachers lead students in a series of indigenous songs, chants and affirmations, including affirmations that directly address the Aztec gods. Students begin by applauding and chanting to the Aztec gods who accept human sacrifice and cannibalism, asking for strength to be “warriors” for “social justice. Next, the students chanted to a series of gods seeking “healing epistemology” and a “revolutionary spirit. Of particular note is the fact that one of them is the Aztec god of war, who inspired hundreds of thousands of sacrifices during the Aztecs’ reign.
According to the City Journal, the clear meaning of the chant was to displace the Christian gods and restore the indigenous gods to their rightful place in the social justice universe. In a philosophical sense, it was a divine revenge.
City Journal suggests that California Parents should pay attention to this curriculum, given the reality that activists in the public education system are using the radical new curriculum under the guise of “equity” and “empowerment” to turn California schools into factories for left-wing political activism, and that political deconstruction and subversion are necessary to reshape America into a nation of oppressors.
The religious elements of the curriculum, which directly implore the Aztec gods, are surely a violation of the First Amendment, City Journal said. Public schools have already banned state-sanctioned Christian prayers; chanting to Aztec gods would likewise be banned.
The California State Board of Education will vote on this curriculum next week. Any sane governing body would have rejected the curriculum in its entirety. But given the nature of California politics, the board will likely pass it.
The best hope for opponents is to weed out some of the most offensive material, such as the chanting of Aztec gods, and then develop a long-term strategy to fight back against the public education establishment. The current state of affairs is that the radicals are pushing their narrative and will not stop until their “counter-hegemony” is consolidated.
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