Minnesota Bills Push Discrimination With Race-Based Hiring Quotas, Punishments For Religious Colleges
Minnesota Democrats are seeking to bake racial and religious discrimination into state law with bills that would promote the racist ideology of critical race theory, deny many religious colleges the ability to offer college credit to high school students, and require teacher hiring decisions to consider applicants’ race.
HF 1269, authored by Democrat Reps. Kim Hicks and Laurie Pryor, would include a high school requirement to take “ethnic studies” — a thinly-veiled attempt to ensconce critical race theory and “intersectionality” into public school curricula. The bill describes students being taught that “race and racism have been and continue to be powerful social, cultural, and political forces” and exploring “the connection of race to the stratification of other groups, including stratification based on gender, class, sexuality, religion, and legal status.”
The legislation would also exclude colleges that require a faith statement from offering dual-credit courses to high school students, effectively giving secular, government-funded schools an unwarranted leg up in the education industry while discriminating based on religious beliefs — a textbook violation of the First Amendment.
Another bill, HF 3079, demands that skin color be a factor in hiring Minnesota teachers and removes certain testing requirements for would-be educators. “The percentage of teachers in Minnesota who are of color or who are American Indian should increase at least two percentage points per year … to ensure all students have equitable access to effective and diverse teachers by 2040,” it states.
In a recent committee hearing, Kofi Montzka, a black Minnesota attorney and parent, decried HF 1269 as essentially racist, teaching black children that they are cemented into an inferior class in a stratified society. In her testimony against the bill, she said, “I can see why you white proponents of this bill might support it. It’s not your kids being told that they can’t succeed. And you get to shed some of your white guilt in the process.”
Montzka told The Federalist that the bill’s ideology is rooted in identity politics. “People are like, ‘I need to see myself in the curriculum,’” she said. “No, you don’t need to see yourself in the curriculum. You need to read, write, and do math. You can learn about your culture at home.”
“There’s no way to teach everyone’s culture,” she continued, “and the only way to do it would be to stereotype or exclude some cultures.”
Lurking beneath the leftist buzzwords, Montzka said, the bill aims to shift power dynamics in education by making black students feel like victims. “There’s a lot of power in being a victim,” she said. “You get to have affirmative action to get into colleges. You get to have a lot of power in whatever you say is right.”
But the fundamental assumption behind such legislation is not one of empowerment and representation. “This curriculum will not help kids of color succeed,” Montzka argued in her comments before the Minnesota Education Finance Committee. “All it does is remove any reason to try.”
Spencer Dalke is an intern at The Federalist and a Journalism major at Patrick Henry College.
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