A principal driver of unparalleled success and prosperity for all Americans has become... problematic.

I have no doubt that people behave badly and that racism and racist attitudes exist. Let's be honest about that.

But well-intentioned attempts to address genuine racism are routinely hijacked by extremists with other agendas, by either deeply guilty white liberals (guilty of what I can only imagine) or race hucksters looking to project racism and racist motivations on to others the better to obscure and/or justify their own.

And so what starts as an attempt to perhaps do some good, devolves into this.

Before you know it, rather than moving beyond race, we make everything about race, and when we define people by an immutable trait such as race, we help eliminate the mortal enemy of collectivism:

Individualism.

Having essentially weaponized race, they then direct their ire at things unrelated to it, things they really want to dismantle, such as middle-class values. Race simply serves as the medium of their attack.

And if you oppose it, that is, oppose the attack against "white middle-class norms?"

You're a racist.

Cambridge Public Schools (CPS) located in Massachusetts, offers a perfect example of this process in action:

"Many structures and practices are based on white, middle-class norms that do not support equity."

In one sentence, they redefine and racialize "middle-class norms," as "white middle-class norms."

That there is even such a thing as "white middle-class norms" is not presented as an argument or theory, but rather a fact.

And just like that you've successfully made something that was about American culture into something race-based, and if you challenge that, you end up being the one called a racist.

The real target here is not people who are white, it's people who potentially oppose them regardless of race. It's important to understand this. The perpetrators of this hoax would like nothing more than to manufacture as much animosity among the races as possible.

But it isn't a racial thing, that's a convenience, that's a tool. Don't fall for it.

The real target is American culture, American values, or if you will, American exceptionalism.

How do I know it's not really about race? Because they go on to define exactly what that culture is, and that's when they show their hand.

I'm going to break this next paragraph up into three parts. (Emphasis mine.)

CPS shows "characteristics of what Jones and Okun call ‘white supremacy culture,'" including: avoidance of discomfort; paternalism; unrealistic timelines and work plans; and a focus on quantity over quality.

These are the "characteristics" of "white supremacy culture."

• avoidance of discomfort
• paternalism
• unrealistic timelines and work plans
• focus on quantity over quality.

This is an odd grab bag, and I hope to do a deep dive into what Jones and Okun wrote about "White Supremacy Culture" in a future piece, but for these purposes, I'll pull out two:

unrealistic timelines and work plans

Consider how awful it is that they want to tell black and brown children that doing challenging work, or trying to meet "unrealistic timelines and work plans" is either beyond their capabilities or that they shouldn't even try because it's a part of white supremacy.

focus on quantity over quality

According to Jones and Okun, in white supremacy culture,

"things that can be measured are more highly valued than things that cannot, for example, numbers of people attending a meeting, newsletter circulation, money spent are valued more than quality of relationships, democratic decision-making, ability to constructively deal with conflict."

Again, here they are telling black and brown children that they should dismiss the value of measured success and quantifiable goals like "newsletter circulation," and instead focus on how well they got along with everyone producing a newsletter no one wants to read.

Now let's move on and shame the parents of black and brown people into silence.

As Jones and Okun write, "we all live in a white supremacy culture, [so] these characteristics show up in… of all of us -- people of color and white people…

They are saying that people of color are being infected as well. This is their way of neutering opposition from those very people, people like Candace Owens or Larry Elder, or Bob Smith, or Shelby Steele. It simultaneously tells them their voices don't count, and that they are essentially not acting like a member of their race should.

As a result... while [we say] we want to be multi-cultural, [we] really only allow other people and cultures to come in if they adapt or conform to already existing cultural norms."

This is a sleight-of-hand. You want, no, you need, a cohesive "meta" culture otherwise your nation atomizes. Within that meta culture, which in the United States is a focus on accomplishment, hard work, the rule of law, and private property, you can have any number of multi-cultural expressions and interpretations of that. That's how you entertain multi-culturalism while still having a country.

You even have the freedom to create your own separate culture if you really want to such as Hasidic Jews, the Amish, and Portland.

Instead, they demonize it, make it about race, and condemn the black and brown children of Cambridge Public Schools to mediocrity.

It's also how you end up with graphic art like this:

These appear just like that, side by side, on the CPS "Building Equity Bridges" website.

Let's take them one at a time.

The resolution isn't great here, but you get the gist. A downtrodden person of color surrounded by stern white people, including what looks like a jury to the left although there are only 11 of them.

There's a document of some kind with a quill pen so I'm guessing the Constitution or some similar document with "blah blah blah" written on it. Bags of money (because of course) and a columned building in the background.

The central figure here is a triumphant person of color holding up a diploma, but it goes downhill from there.

There's a megaphone with "Listen" coming out of it.

I mean, okay.

A paper airplane? Perhaps from the earlier document? A white person being thrown on his head, and an eerie orange glow where once a building stood.

What kind of a message is this? Why does success have to be at the expense of someone else?

You know why. They see the pie as static, spoils to be divvied up, and if one gets more, another must get less.

This is not building equity bridges. This is burning them down.

The site includes (about halfway down) possibly one of the saddest videos I've ever seen explaining all of this, or really, not explaining it, just a lot of lecturing at you.

You tell me, but most of the people, including this poor soul at the beginning, look like Taliban prisoners reading off a list of kidnapping demands.

Don't forget, this isn't about race. They want to make it about race. Race is a tool, it's a chimera. They want us at each other's throats. Don't give them the satisfaction. This is about the pursuit of power.