Community, Diversity, Sustainability and other Overused Words
Community, Diversity, Sustainability and other Overused Words
Sorted by date Results 101 - 115 of 115
The California State Legislature passed AB 331 in September, a bill requiring a semester of ethnic studies for high school graduation. A model curriculum, hundreds of pages long, is available for public comment and will be approved in March of next year if the governor signs the bill into law. 80 groups, spearheaded by the Amcha Initiative, an organization opposing anti-Semitism on campuses, signed a letter urging the governor to veto the bill. While the authors of AB 331, which includes Santa...
The Santa Monica City Council on Tuesday will be presented with suggestions from The Black Agenda for ways to spend the $200,000 already earmarked in June for efforts to support racial justice. The Black Agenda is comprised of a group of the city's Black community leaders (capital letters are theirs) whose steering committee includes Barry Snell, a former SMMUSD Board member and current Santa Monica College Board Trustee. Also on the steering committee are Dr. Karen Gunn, a retired SMC...
Santa Monica lost its progressive cred as the state surpassed the school district in shoving radical left indoctrination down our students' throats by passing AB 331, a law requiring a semester of ethnic studies for high school graduation, together with a model curriculum that sounds more like a Marxist manifesto than a public school resource. This summer, SMMUSD approved embedding "antiracist" elements in the K-12 curriculum and revised the 11th grade U.S. History class to reflect this...
Is it Social Justice or Antiracism at SMMUSD? The top administrators at the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District presented their work on creating better student achievement and combating racism during a Special Meeting of the school board on Tuesday evening. Citing the persistent achievement gap that has existed in the district between white and Asians on the one hand and other minorities on the other, staff leapt to the conclusion that racial bias had to be the reason behind the...
Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Bonin presented a town hall on Monday night and left the agenda up to Black Lives Matter-LA and People's Budget LA with the predictable result of the dissemination of confusing and misleading data, woke scolding, and white shaming. Black Lives Matter is an organization that advocates against alleged systemic racism and promotes far-left ideology unconnected to racism, such as trans rights, the necessary breakdown of the nuclear family, and the Palestinian cause....
Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Bonin's Town Hall on "Reimagining Public Safety" provided no workable answers but plenty of insults to his constituents on the Westside. The panelists suggested reducing the police budget in LA to roughly 3 percent of what it is today and labeled immoral anyone who would call the police to handle a violently mentally ill homeless person. And that wasn't even the worst of it. Bonin held the virtual town hall on Monday night and left the agenda up to Black L...
Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District Superintendent Ben Drati sent an email to parents, students, and the public that is chilling in both its content and its wording regarding the district's new "anti-racism" enterprise. Could Drati possibly be unaware that the term "anti-racism" now goes far beyond the idea not to treat someone as inferior because they belong to a different race? Today, "anti-racism" is defined as rejecting your "whiteness" (if you are white). It means repudiating any...
Predictably, renewed lockdown orders in California are leading to new riots, usually involving associated "peaceful" protestors. A melee broke out in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday night, with protestors and police engaging in a physical brawl. On Sunday, a crowd blocked Wilshire boulevard in Westwood. These protests were stated as solidarity with the unrest in Portland, where rioters have repeatedly attacked the federal courthouse. God forbid Los Angeles not do their part in the violent...
In reading through the nine proposed laws sitting in our state legislature now, each of which would do its part to kill single-family housing and densify neighborhoods, the rationale for this concerted, ruthless effort to drastically change the very structure of our landscape and society is difficult to grasp. But we're game to try. The laws proposed are SB 902, SB 1120, SB 995, SB 1085, AB 725, AB 1279, AB 2345, AB 3040, and AB 3107. First of all, let's dispose of the idea the densification, la...
Social unrest is rearing its ugly head again in Southern California. A multi-hour protest in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday night (chirpily advertised on local radio stations as if it were the best in local entertainment) turned violent around 7 pm. Rioters threw rocks and broke windows at the federal building on North Los Angeles street. Police and "protestors" clashed on the street. Seven people were reported injured with four arrests. Today, protestors gathered outside the federal building...
During a 6-hour event on Sunday at the Venice beach handball courts, a group of regional power-broker women, dubbed "mavens" in the press release, will participate in the creation of two large canvas murals. The murals are designed by two women of color, Alyse Stone, a celebrity-commissioned artist, and Dolly Singh, a "diversity and inclusion evangelist." The collaboration is titled #THEARTOFMAKING NOISE. The first mural is to represent the "pain and persecution of the Black American...
Startling residents, the City of Santa Monica issued no new COVID-19 emergency orders for an entire week. "We were concerned when Tuesday went by, and we didn't get a new alert in our text messages," said Wanda B. Goode, a homeowner north of Montana. "We want to do everything we can, after all, to save lives. Nowadays that seems to involve either taking off or putting on masks. We're not sure which cycle we're on this week if the city won't tell us." "And then Wednesday came and went, but...
A white woman suggests we 'interrupt' our perceptions on just about everything in order to combat systemic racism; a black man suggests the opposite the black community accept its true free agency in order for the individuals who comprise it to determine their own fates. Both are accomplished and respected professors. You decide who makes more sense. A well-groomed, intellectual-appearing racial relations facilitator in her early forties, Robin DiAngelo is currently enjoying bestseller status...
Over the weekend, protesters pulled down the much loved statue of the homeless meth addict outside the former bank building at 26th and Wilshire. Chanting "F**k the Police," a group of around twenty activists swung rope over the image of the bearded panhandler and pulled it off its base and onto the plaza that once housed the statue of a healthy family cavorting in a fountain. The statue of the healthy family and the mural behind it of a beautiful California landscape were both lost to another...
That black lives matter is not a controversial opinion. In 2020 United States of America, well over 99 percent of the population agrees with this idea. Yet since March 25 and the death of African-American George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer, this slogan has been chanted, chalked on the sidewalk, spray-painted on buildings, and parroted by cowed corporations and obedient politicians as if nobody already agrees with it. There is no controversy here. Only a handful of completely irr...
