Website Slams TEAM Westport Diversity Essay Contest

TEAM Westport announced its 9th annual Teen Diversity Essay topic.

“Westport Parents 06880” are not pleased.

The prompt — “describe what you would like to explain to people in your community who avoid or struggle with talking about race, or acknowledging systemic racism, or who apply a ‘color blind’ approach to issues” — prompted the anonymous website formed out of “concerns about the increasing focus on assertions of racism in our community,” and which fights “political activism and moralizing intrusions in the classroom” to issue a lengthy statement opposing the contest.

It begins: “The contest is explicitly targeting ‘students attending high school in Westport,’ which of course means Staples High School, one of three high schools in Westport alongside the two much smaller private schools.” (In fact, previous essay winners have come from Choate and Hopkins, as well as Greens Farms Academy.)

The statement continues:

The essay prompt is unsurprising given this organization’s ongoing efforts to impose its neoracist ideology (to borrow a term used by the African-American Columbia linguistics professor John McWhorter) on nearly every part of our town.

This year’s topic — essentially asking our children to deconstruct a “colorblind” approach to race — only represents an escalation of its campaign to discredit basic Constitutional principles that have defined and united Americans from our founding. What TEAM is doing here is not only morally wrong, it is a blatant violation of adopted Westport Board of Education policy on essay contests which prohibits contests “that tend to promote or advertise a product or an ideology.” We call upon Town leaders and the Board of Education in particular to take immediate action.

Formed with the seemingly benign mission of “achieving and celebrating ‘a more welcoming, multicultural community’,” TEAM now fluidly operates as a sort of amorphous auxiliary unit within Westport municipal government. TEAM is formally housed within the Selectman’s office but is composed of numerous elected officials, ordinary townsfolk and even residents of Weston. For reasons one can only speculate upon, TEAM seems to have carte blanche to intervene in our schools and numerous other areas of Town government. TEAM’s unelected leadership appears to be accountable to no one, while playing a role in nearly every facet of Westport civic life, from our schools to the library to the police force to the art work that appears in Town Hall.

The parents in the group “do not object in the least to TEAM’s mission of celebrating diversity or the existence of a properly regulated body that would pursue such a straightforward mission,” they say.

They do object, however, to

how TEAM’s philosophy has evolved into a sort of militant “wokeness,” aggressively pushing a single (and in our view toxic) narrative around racial issues. This ideology has manifested itself through the concept of ‘equity’ that has been pushed across Town government. As we await the Superintendent’s recommendations following the equity study conducted by the NYU Metro Center, equity is perhaps weeks away from becoming the official dogma of our public schools.

The choice to target a “colorblind” approach cuts to the heart of the ideological cliff over which TEAM seeks to push our wonderful diverse community. As anyone with a basic understanding of anti-discrimination law understands, because of our country’s dark history with segregation, we have wide-ranging prohibitions against consideration of race or skin color. The new “woke” mentality, which has clearly been embraced by TEAM, is to reinsert consideration of race or skin color into everyday life, as a form of “good” segregation.

After quoting Ibram X. Kendi — the National Book Award for Nonfiction who was the 2018 Martin Luther King Day keynote speaker here, and has since worked on anti-racism training in Westport — the website says:

TEAM’s new mission appears to be a revival of racial discrimination in Westport. Presumably, it will fall upon the unelected leadership of TEAM to decide how and when such racial discrimination takes place to achieve the antiracist equitable outcomes they desire.

Westport as a community, and its elected leadership in particular, must stand against this paradigm shift in racial understanding which so plainly disrespects the principle of equality embedded in our Constitution and so many of our laws.

The statement concludes:

When they were inaugurated, every single one of Westport’s elected officials swore an oath to support the Constitution of the United States. We ask them all to live up to that oath and denounce TEAM’s relentless efforts to undermine the principle of racial equality and equal treatment under the law. We ask the Board of Education in particular to enforce its own policies and take immediate action to sever any link between Staples High School and the new TEAM essay contest.

We urge parents of high school students in Westport to discourage their children from participating in this odious attempt to use financial incentives to impress a severely defective ideology upon them.

NOTE: It is an “06880” rule that all commenters must use full, real names. Last night, I removed several comments from a previous story about TEAM Westport. The comments — all condemning the committee and its essay contest — were posted using fake names and false email addresses. If you have an opinion, we’d love to hear it. But we must know who stands behind it. Thank you for abiding by “06880” rules.