It seems that in today’s woke landscape, no one wins, least of all schoolchildren. Liberal ideology has become so entrenched that academic research is no longer based on the time-tested scientific method, which was described in the January 2024 issue of Education Reporter. While the scientific method typically refers to research conducted in the physical world, the same principle should apply when researching concepts such as race, gender, and identity.

But James L. Nuzzo, Ph.D. of Reality’s Last Stand and author of The Nuzzo Letter on Substack, shows how woke researchers “are rigging research methods to support their ideology.” Nuzzo writes that many academic studies “no longer aim to explore open questions, but instead begin with ideological conclusions and then work backwards.” He adds that this procedure is especially used in research “on race, gender, and identity—where scholars increasingly interpret participants’ responses not on their own terms, but through the lens of critical theory or feminist ideology.”

Nuzzo cites as one example a study published in January of this year by the Society for Research in Child Development, led by Brandon Dull of the University of Chicago’s Department of Comparative Human Development. The study was funded by a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Research Project (R01) grant, which NIH states on its website represents commonly used funds that support “discrete, specified, circumscribed project[s]....”

Titled Learning (Not) to Know: Examining How White Ignorance Manifests and Functions in White Adolescents’ Racial Identity Narratives, the Dull study begins summarizing its findings with this statement: “The authors do not capitalize ‘white’ in this manuscript (unless quoting from other authors or if it appears in headers). The decision to not capitalize white is to mark the distinct and oppressive history of whiteness.”

With a lead-in like that, how could any reasonable person expect an unbiased accounting of the study results? No matter the white high school students’ responses to the study questions, the results were predetermined to show white supremacy and privilege. The fact that the students demonstrated a lack of bigotry served as proof for the “researchers” that they were suffering from “white ignorance.”

Inverted findings

The study asked 69 white teens questions such as:

• “What are some of the good things about being white?”
• “What are some of the things that are hard about being white?”
• “Can you think of a time when you were treated differently because of your race?”
• “Do you ever feel like people expect you to act a certain way or do certain things just because you are white?”

The study report includes a table with the header “Themes of white ignorance” and presents a handful of excerpts that purportedly prove that point but which instead indicate a lack of racism on the part of the respondents, but which are interpreted by the researchers to show that the students were exhibiting “white ignorance.” The researchers’ premises are shown below in bold, followed by a sampling of the actual student responses they received.

Constructing White as Disadvantaged: 24 percent of students said they had been discriminated against because they are white. One student summed it up by saying, “I feel like normally you’re treated better because you’re white; that’s what the stereotype is, but from what I’ve experienced, the pendulum—I think is the expression—[has] swung the other way. I feel like since everyone is trying to be correct that it’s more negative. Another student said, “I think people always think of white people as being more racist. I like a lot of people, so somebody calling me a racist is not correct.”

Framing Racism as Unimportant and Elsewhere: 21 percent of students said they were not aware of racism in their circles, while 33 percent said they do not “see race” in others. One student said, “I don’t see anybody else as different at all. Like I don’t really care what your skin, what your race is; you’re still the same person on the inside even if you look different on the outside....” Another conceded that, “while not [common] around here, there might be people in other places that hate you just for no reason [other than] because of your race or ethnicity....”

Active Refusal to Know or Imagine Racial Oppression: 21 percent of students said they “didn’t care” [about race] or engage in or care about race, while 26 percent couldn’t imagine themselves as “racialized,” nor could they see how they themselves benefit from, and contribute to, the racial system.” When asked about racial oppression, one student said [presumably referring to his or others’ skin color], “that’s just how it is, so I don’t really super know the difference I guess....”

These examples were all interpreted by the researchers to prove “white ignorance,” obviously because their woke narrative simply refused to allow for anything else. As Nuzzo observed, the students’ responses in the study “are striking not for their bigotry, but for their total absence of it. The adolescents rejected racial prejudice and expressed a desire to treat others as individuals. This would ordinarily be seen as a positive result. Yet rather than acknowledging this, the researchers concluded that the students were exhibiting ‘White ignorance.’”

According to the study’s authors:

• White ignorance is an epistemic practice rooted in histories of racial domination and violence, which continually serves to disregard and dehumanize people of color by holding white supremacy in place. In the present study, we name and show how white children’s racial development is intertwined with white ignorance...Moving forward...it is imperative that we reimagine and divorce what it means to be(come) white from the confines of white ignorance and white supremacy, only then might we move resistance from the periphery to the center in white adolescents’ emerging racial identities.

Many observers might discern this language to mean that if the false interpretations of these responses and others like them are incorporated into already woke curricula, it will only serve to increase the suspicion, hostility, and angst among students. Against the backdrop of the relentless propaganda and wedge-driving so common in education today, animosity which might otherwise fade away is likely to grow into a more contentious and unnecessary division among students.

As Nuzzo wrote:

• One might argue that researchers are entitled to interpret participants’ responses through their own theoretical frameworks. But that defense fails when the research is disingenuous from the outset. These interviews were never meant to be a neutral inquiry—they were a setup. The researchers had no intention of discovering anything other than “white ignorance” and “white supremacy.”

Nuzzo’s article cites several other instances of “research” that exploits study participants by reinterpreting their responses “to serve a predetermined narrative,” in areas such as feminism. These studies begin from “the false premise that men are inherently privileged across all dimensions of society.” If, for example, “a respondent disagrees—perhaps because they recognize areas where men face disadvantage—their answers are simply interpreted as a lack of ‘awareness.’ In other words, the only valid responses are those that affirm the researcher’s worldview. Disagreement becomes a diagnostic category rather than a legitimate perspective.”

Socialism opposes choice

Conducting research for the sole purpose of achieving radical goals is part and parcel of the woke/leftist/progressive agenda that has infiltrated our culture for decades. The steady push for increasingly radical curricula most recently manifested itself in the bold admission by the NEA that its teachers don’t have time for reading and writing, but instead must “fight [President] Trump.”

Particularly since the pandemic, increasing numbers of parents have awakened to the dangers posed by the public-school system, and have sought to remove their children. It may be logical to assume, therefore, that the attacks on alternative education options will only increase, as exemplified by the sustained assault on school choice.

Just this month, the Democrat socialist candidate for mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, vowed to declare war on charter schools if he is elected. Charter schools may be a logical opening target for radicals like Mamdani, since they are in effect public schools, albeit with a degree of freedom that traditional public schools lack. Mamdani’s mayoral quest already has the support of New York City’s powerful United Federation of Teachers (UFT).

In Minnesota, several Democratic socialists serve on the Minneapolis City Council, and two serve on the St. Paul City Council. According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Democratic Socialists of America have “over 80,000 members and chapters in all 50 states.” While the organization is not a political party but rather “a political and activist organization,” it appears to be successfully wielding power on behalf of radical Democrats. For example, it supports Minnesota state senator, Omar Fateh, a Democratic socialist who is running for Mayor of Minneapolis and who has been compared to Mamdani.

A religious struggle

Christian Americans in particular have pointed out that the destabilization and ultimate destruction of faith and family—the foundations of our Western culture—are ultimate goals of the radical left. The Christian Research Institute defines what it calls the “dogmas of wokeism” as representing the left’s “path to authoritarianism.”

These dogmas include (1) tribal identity over the dignity of the human person; (2) human will over reason (reality); (3) human power over higher authority, e.g. God. Most observers of today’s culture, both Christian and non-Christian, would recognize these tenets playing out both in the education system and in the wider culture.

Instances of how woke ideology undermines the culture could include the use of race in the flawed research described above. The Christian Research article describes a “stark” departure from “the Civil Rights arguments of old [compared to] today’s woke movement.” The authors write that the desire to be viewed as a human being “bestowed with universal human dignity that comes with a common humanity” has been replaced with the necessity that “each person must be viewed first and foremost in terms of a political identity. Becoming woke is having a consciousness that has made this fundamental transition to centering oppression as the core human experience.”

The University of Chicago researchers’ manipulation of student responses to questions posed in the Learning (Not) to Know survey demonstrates this metamorphosis: White students must be convinced of their racism and it must always be in the forefront of their awareness, regardless of their actual attitudes and beliefs to the contrary. In this way, the false stereotypes of victim and oppressor are perpetuated, negatively impacting students of all races and colors.

The Christian Research Institute notes, as have many others in recent decades, that it’s “a religious struggle,” whereby “specific incidents of injustice are used to reinforce the larger goal of a Leftist ideology ... that seeks to train citizens to see all systems, institutions, interactions, and relationships as defined by power. New horizons of grievances must be continually sought, for outrage is both the sustenance and currency of the movement, and the fuel that feeds revolution.”

The article encourages Christians to be “constructive” in dealing with the crisis, “to remember and restore a positive and meaningful vision of family—both human and divine—to which each person is called,” in order to ultimately defeat the cult of evil that currently prevails.

“Rather than a power contest of political identities and individual wills seeking self-expression, every person is invited to the cooperation reflected in a vision of family life that is both ennobling and humbling because it is a vision grounded in reality and reverence.”

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