"Libraries need to be a site of socialist organizing"
Undercover work at the Socialism 2023 Conference by Karlyn Borysenko catches ALA President's comments
A few weeks ago, More To The Story covered the American Library Association’s (ALA) new president Emily Drabinski, and her socialist leanings.
Catch up on that article here:
Drabinski, for all her backtracking following her “Marxist lesbian” post on X, formerly known as Twitter, appears to be undeterred behind the scenes per the undercover work at the Socialism 2023 Conference by Karlyn Borysenko.
Boysenko, who notes Drabinksi was supposed to be a featured speaker at “Socialism 2023,” captured Drabinkski’s comments during one of the sessions.
“I just want to say thank you for bringing up libraries, and classroom libraries, but also school libraries of all kind, public libraries and higher education library who have been under attack in similar ways,” Drabinksi said. “I think your point that public education needs to be a site of socialist organizing, I think libraries really do too.”
“I haven't seen that, working in libraries, but I think there’s a real opportunity here to both connect with what’s happening in public education, what’s happening in libraries, but also we need some help with libraries,” said Drabinksi. “We need to be on the agenda of socialist organizing.”
According to Boryensko, Drabinski’s remarks were during a Sept. 2 in session called Freedom to Learn: Black And Asian American Solidarity Against Attacks on Antiracist Education.
The Socialism 2023 conference was held in Chicago and its video playlists are worth a look.
Read Borysenko’s Substack on Drabinski’s comments, which includes the audio file, here:
More To The Story
Among the dozens of “partners” listed for the Socialism 2023 conference are three with direct ties to K-12 education nationally and in North Carolina.
Per its website, Dream Defenders is "fighting for a world without prisons, policing, surveillance and punishment."
Groups in North Carolina that have recruited children into the activism of Dream Defenders include the Youth Organizing Institute, NC HEAT, and the North Carolina Student Power Union. In 2013, these groups made up of K-12 school kids “organized a caravan to Florida to join the Dream Defenders,” with the intent of “occupying the state capital building!”
For some backstory on Youth Organizing Institute and NC Heat, check out my past articles, “Young Radicals Address Wake County School Board,” and “Complaint Against WCPSS Has Blueprint NC Fingerprints.”
Abolitionist Teaching Network (ATN)
"Abolitionist Teaching Network's mission is to develop and support those in the struggle for educational liberation by utilizing the intellectual work and direct action of Abolitionists in many forms,” according to its website.
The board TN includes Bettina Love, a Critical Race Theorist and "anti-racist educator" who believes CRT belongs in K-12 classrooms. She's also the author of "Dear White Teachers: You Can't Love Your Black Students If You Don't Know Them."
In 2020, Love also penned an Op-Ed at Education Week extolling the inherent racism of white teachers teaching black students titled, "White Teachers Need Anti-Racist Therapy."
Love was (and likely still is) featured in mandatory CRT training for teachers in North Carolina’s largest K-12 school district of Wake County. That training was conducted by staffers from the district’s Office of Equity Affairs. One of the past staffers who conducted this training was Christina Spears. She has since left that office and is now the president of the Wake County affiliate of the N.C. Association of Educators (NCAE).
Of note, in August 2020 ATN released a guide for “racial justice and abolitionist social and emotional learning.”
One of the themes of the guide is that "SEL can be a covert form of policing used to punish, criminalize, and control Black, Brown, and Indigenous children and communities to adhere to White norms," and the “practice of Abolitionist SEL is critical, healing centered, reciprocal in nature, culturally responsive, transformative, and dialogical."
The 12-page SEL guide tells teachers to “disrupt whiteness and other forms of oppression.”
ATN’s website boasts that it has been “downloaded thousands of times and used in hundreds of schools already.”
Well, of course, it has because the Biden administration cited and linked to it as a resource in its COVID-19 school reopening instruction guide:
ATN also recruits Activists in Residence, which ATN describes as a “local organizer with a current or prospective focus on educational liberation,” that organize through a “Black queer feminist lens," and are "paid for their work."
Rethinking Schools (RS)
Per its website, Rethinking Schools is a “nonprofit publisher and advocacy organization dedicated to sustaining and strengthening public education through social justice teaching and education activism."
"Rethinking Schools began in 1986, when a group of Milwaukee education activists — teachers, teacher educators, and community members — met to talk about how they could bring more critical voices into the conversation about public schools and libraries,” the RS website states. “These founding Rethinking Schools editors saw a school curriculum that was conservative, dumbed-down, and dominated by corporate-produced textbooks. Inappropriate standardized testing was rampant. Racial bias infected every level of schooling."
Racial Bias? Here's the racial bias one gets for signing up to their email list:
The Teaching for Black Lives Starter Pack
Get the free Teaching for Black Lives Starter Pack when you sign up today for email updates from Rethinking Schools.
RS is the creator and operator of the "Zinn Education Project,” and claims to have “more than 100,000 educators who have registered to access our “people’s history” materials." For the uninitiated, the Zinn Education Project is named after the late Howard Zinn, a socialist and communist known for his book called “A People’s History of the United States.” The book is a severely revisionist look at historical events in the U.S., which has been debunked by scores of scholars over the years and most recently deconstructed by Mary Grabar’s 2019 book, “Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America.”
Folks should browse RS’ staff, with special attention to Bill Bigelow, the "curriculum editor," at the bottom of the page.
Bigelow has been an annual proponent of abolishing Columbus Day and runs RS' Zinn Project. He also was one of the many professors who wrote a support letter for Weather Underground domestic terrorist Bill Ayers who was outed as having helped launch Barack Obama's first election.
For extra credit, search "North Carolina" on the RS website.
One item stands out: “It’s Not Magic. It’s Organizing!” The Powerful Journey of North Carolina Teachers
The article is a rather rose-colored glasses write-up of the progressive protests known as Moral Monday and the activities of Organize2020, the far-left "progressive racial and social justice caucus" of the N.C. Association of Educators.
Organize2020 was formerly led by the NCAE's current President Tamika Walker Kelly and Vice President, Bryan Proffitt, a self-described socialist.