National Review article title
"Meet the NYC Theater Teacher Who Stood Up to ‘Anti-Racist’ Activists at the Height of the Moral Panic of 2020"
Meet the teacher who ruined his life for conservative clout.
Earlier this year, while working as a visiting teaching artist at a New York City public high school, theater director Kevin Ray pitched a potential lecture about plays involving magical realism, since his students were reading a book of that genre at the time.
If he had to pitch it to someone it meant that it wasn't part of the curriculum. I never had to pitch a lesson on World War 2. I did pitch a lesson on LGBT and 9/11.
“They didn’t want that,” Ray told National Review. Instead, the teachers asked Ray to develop and teach a workshop on “Theater and Toxic Masculinity,” he said.
“I refused to do that because I believe criticizing and demonizing teenagers based on their identity is cruel bullying,” Ray said. He was transferred to a different class over his objection, and no one at the school explained to him what New York state academic standard would be fulfilled by teaching so-called toxic masculinity in an English Language Arts class.
Nobody gets transferred over one thing. I would bet a decent amount of money that this guy had issues with his directors for awhile. I would bet he probably made his views on 'woke' or whatever quite public.
The theater nonprofit that placed Ray in the high school agreed that teaching about toxic masculinity was an inappropriate use of his talents. But the teachers’ insistence that he focus his lesson on progressive grievance politics suggests the moral panic around race that followed the murder of George Floyd still holds sway in New York City’s K–12 education system, particularly in cultural spaces such as the performing arts.
Huh? He was hired by a nonprofit? Never heard of that before. The people who got him the job thought it was appropriate. What an ingrate.
When the wave of progressive racial activism crested in the summer of 2020, Ray was working with New 42, a leading performing-arts group whose mission is to get young people interested in theater. The organization leaned hard into the leftist preoccupation with diversity, equity, and inclusion that dominated cultural institutions across the country in those early months of the pandemic, demonizing “whiteness” in its communications with employees and creating a hostile workplace in the process, according to a complaint Ray filed in federal court.
Guy teaches in the most diverse school district in the country and is shocked that the people there are interested in diversity and inclusion. He should have never taken the job.
“We acknowledge how essential it is for us to re-think and dismantle white-centered practices that have been embedded in our nonprofit for decades and have caused harm and pain,” reads the “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging” page on New 42’s website.
Again, know the politics of your bosses.
This preoccupation with rooting out racism came to define Ray’s experience at New 42. For many months, he documented a hostile environment laced with insults, stereotypes, and race-based discrimination packaged as “anti-racism,” according to the complaint, first published by the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism, a nonprofit that represented Ray in the suit.
Guy opposes the existence systemic racism as a concept but also believes he was systemically racially abused. Sucks when the shoe is on the other foot doesn't it?
This preoccupation with rooting out racism came to define Ray’s experience at New 42. For many months, he documented a hostile environment laced with insults, stereotypes, and race-based discrimination packaged as “anti-racism,” according to the complaint, first published by the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism, a nonprofit that represented Ray in the suit.
In over 70 emails exchanged between staff, countless workplace training sessions, and other interactions with his colleagues, Ray watched as an obsession with race corrupted New 42’s educational mission.
As the incidents mounted, Ray sent a letter to the New 42 human-resources department, but instead of helping him navigate a difficult situation, they immediately “hired attorneys to investigate,” he said. Rather than putting a stop to what he saw as illegal discrimination, the company retaliated by refusing to give him any further work assignments, according to the complaint.
Again, I would like to hear this guy's views on the systemic racism that the blacks complained about forever.
This article goes on for longer but you get the idea. I don't doubt that the organization had little patience for conservative cultural values. But I don't need to go very far back in time when America's cultural institutions were hostile to anything not white. I would hope that this guy realized how much it sucks when it happens to you but considering he made such a big deal about it in the first place, I doubt he learned anything.
