This time, though, the people who cry racism have shouted the accusation one time too many. Folks out here in the real world—that is, not the ones on academia or in the press—are rolling their eyes at the latest assault on their basic human decency. And it’s not just the irritating fact that 50 years of seeking to right the wrongs imposed by racism have gotten us nowhere in the eyes of the Carters and Clintons of the world. It’s that this time the evidence so clearly contradicts the accusers.

As President Obama himself noted, Americans voted for him in decisive numbers, a detail Carter and Clinton seem to have forgotten. If America is so racist, how did this guy get elected in the first place? Common sense dictates that without the overwhelming support of whites, the entire Civil Rights agenda from, say, 1960 on, would have gone nowhere fast. Most Americans are fundamentally fair people, and the idea that criticism of the same president they elected is racist is nothing short of outrageous.

We may all have elements of racism, sexism, ageism, and all kinds of other isms deep in our souls, but it’s the way in which those prejudices drive our behavior that’s important—and the truth is no one knows exactly how our prejudices interact with other life experiences to shape what we do. That’s why anyone can accuse anybody of racism and leave the accused defenseless against the charge. It’s impossible to prove that someone isn’t racist. Once we start peering into what “really” drives behavior, we might conclude that Carter and Clinton see racism everywhere because of their Southern backgrounds.

But this kind of speculation is better left to spiritual counselors and psychiatric professionals. The rest of us must judge by what we see and hear, not by what we imagine could be true. And to a lot of us, Barak Obama is proving to be a terrible president on all fronts. Everywhere we look we find evidence of disaster or impending disaster, from the president’s dangerous vacillation on Afghanistan to his courting the approval of outlaws at the United Nations to his domestic policies, which are driving down his approval ratings daily.

Attempts to silence criticism of the president by calling it racist are at best misguided and at worst, chilling. A robust debate is fundamental to a democracy. And that’s not racist—that’s the truth.

No surprise that press coverage of the Tea Party protest on September 12 bears little resemblance to the actual event. The blitz is on among the Fourth Estate: Distort the protest by refracting it through the skewed lens held by the liberal elite. Take it from one who attended this amazing, grass-roots protest: The press, as usual, has just about everything dead wrong.

Who’s Counting?

First, the numbers. The huge waves of humanity flowing into Washington, DC, on Saturday morning were nothing short of overwhelming. People arrived by train, by car, by bus—45 busloads in fact—and by plane. Some came in wheelchairs and on crutches to register their dismay at massive government spending, absurd bailouts, Cap and Trade, the proposed overhaul of healthcare, and the general rush to bigger and bigger government that has occurred under both Republican and Democratic administrations. By 9:30 Saturday morning the size of the crowd exceeded all expectations, and we had to migrate from the mall to Capitol Hill two hours ahead of schedule.

By noon the District of Columbia police estimated the swell of protesters at 1.2 million—far more than the “tens of thousands” reported by the networks and even Fox News. Crowd numbers are notoriously difficult to estimate, but there’s a distinct upward drift in the counting when the spirit of an event happens to coincide with the leftward leanings of the press.  In the 1960s anti-Vietnam protests of 1000 people morphed to 10,000 in the bedazzled eyes of an adoring media. The Million-Man March may have drawn 100,000 people, if that, but the numbers were generally reported as “close to one million.”  The British news asserted that Tea Party protestors outnumbered attendees at the Obama Inauguration, a clear affront to an American press corps that has done so much to aid and abet its man. Don’t look for the numbers to appear accurately in the US media anytime soon.

That Old Standby, Racism

And how about that “dark undercurrent of racism” detected by the super sleuths at CNN? Absolute nonsense. True, the crowd was mostly white, but the protest had nothing to do with race and everything to do with dissatisfaction with government leadership, white, black, and Hispanic. I stood next to black protesters and listened to black speakers, one of whom declared that she “refuse[d] to be a hyphenated American.” The media, which bends over backwards to find articulate protestors armed with benign signs at ACORN rallies and anti-war demonstrations, managed to ferret out some over-the-top folks on Saturday. But I talked to lots of people and didn’t find a kook among them. Like any protest, this one may have attracted some nut jobs, but they were few and far between. If anyone suggests to you that this march had a racist component to it, don’t buy it.

 Who Are These People Anyway?

Most disturbing of all is the arrogance of a media that can’t decide whether to dismiss the protest as a cultural anomaly with all the importance of the Flat Earth Society or demonize it as an emblem of evil in our culture. It’s just too, too puzzling for the press. “What do you make of this?” the Sunday talk show hosts asked “expert” panels, as though spaceships had landed on the White House lawn.  When Cokie Roberts mentioned that she’d been in Washington on Saturday, one of her fellow panelists on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos growled contemptuously, “Oh, were you at the protest?” The very idea was enough to generate chuckles among the group. How perfectly absurd! Cokie hanging out all those little people? C’mon. The contempt in her response—a great big No!—made it clear that she would rather be caught shoplifting in at Macy’s than rub elbows with the riff-raff in Washington on Saturday.

The kings and queens of the press and the lords and ladies of Congress look down their noses at the people who do the work, pay the taxes, and vote in this country. But here’s a breaking news flash for them: We don’t care. Most thinking people in America today don’t believe the media, with good reason, and the numbers around Congressional approval are so small as to be invisible. So be as scornful as you like, my friends, while the people out here turn off the networks and organize challenges to incumbents’ Congressional seats. By the fall of 2010, the laugh is very likely to be on you.

 

Critical thinking involves applying a disciplined approach to ideas, testing arguments against knowledge and experience to decide whether they are sound. This kind of thinking is in short supply in our public schools today, where the lack of “critical thinking skills” is periodically bemoaned by parents and teachers, who continue to do nothing about it.

Now critical thinking is about to be dealt another blow by the bureaucrats at the Department of Education, who labor at your expense to turn out reams of educational aids that are largely ignored by almost everyone. But now the folks at DOE finally—finally!—have come up with something that answers the decades-old question, “What do they do at DOE, anyway?”   

The DOE website (ED.gov, and no, I’m not kidding) has put forward activities that teachers can conduct before, during, and after President Obama’s September 8 speech to public school students. Ever eager to help, DOE divides its lesson plans into Pre-K through 6^th grade and 7^th through 12 grades. Set aside the absurdity of expecting a

Pre-K child to participate in the recommended “brainstorming” and consider DOE suggestions for the kids: “Sharing” around the inspirational qualities of the speech, thoughts on what the president is asking kids to do, ideas around personal responsibility, and the like. Teachers are also exhorted to develop posters with key phrases from President Obama’s past speeches and place them around the room for students to ponder. Think classrooms in China under Chairman Mao.

These are exactly the kind of mind-numbing, eyes-glazed-over activities that pass for education today. They’re dangerous to developing intellects because they’re aimed entirely at telling kids what to think rather than teaching them how to think. The underlying assumption at DOE is that students will ingest every word issuing from the mouth of the president with uncritical acceptance—challenges and tests of logic need not apply.  And this is what is wrong with so much of so-called “learning” in public schools—it’s boring, politically correct, and without a shred of substance to engage the learner in higher-order thinking.

No doubt many members of the NEA and AFT—organizations that overwhelmingly support the president—will find nothing wrong with the DOE materials. Hey, we’re all on board for education, right? What’s to argue about? But for those who want to develop students’ thinking skills, here are some alternative questions that could be posed: What was the president saying? Did he make his case? Why or why not? What was the most compelling argument? Least compelling? Why? Did the president say anything that will make any difference in your life?  What was it? Did you support the president before the speech? If so, does that color your thinking? If you didn’t support the president, does that make you more critical of what he was saying?  

Great teachers challenge students’ assumptions and arguments and make them clear thinkers. Here’s an opportunity to do just that.