Woketopia, Massachusetts, Where the Left Eats Its Own

This week the New Yorker published a lengthy story about the meltdown taking place at a Middle School in Amherst, Massachusetts. Amherst is described as a town where there are more BLM signs than there are black people. The city is 70% white and about 12% black and Hispanic, but the public schools have a higher percentage of minorities because many well off white and Asian families send their kids to private schools. 

Ben Herrington, a former member of the school committee at Amherst Regional Middle School (ARMS) said of Amherst, “Amherst is a town that loves to bill itself as being a woketopia. We have this Berkeley East persona that we put out. We aren’t really like that, though.”

Actually, it sounds to me like they are really like that, at least many of the white people in town are. But the black and Hispanic kids and adults seem to be part of an earlier edition of progressivism, one in which black people were considered the most oppressed group and therefore at the top of the invisible but widely understood pyramid of oppression. 

Under the new rules, trans kids (most of whom are white) are claiming space as the most oppressed group and that sets up a conflict which can’t easily be solved. The problems seem to have started when the black superintendent took over and created a new DEI assistant job.

Morris introduced a new administrative position, assistant superintendent of diversity, equity, and human resources… [In 2017] he selected Cunningham, then an assistant principal in Connecticut, for the job. “There was a lot of racism in the district,” Cunningham told me recently…

Under Cunningham, Amherst instituted a two-step hiring process, intended to root out implicit bias: one committee chose candidates and another asked the applicants a uniform set of questions. The interviewers did not see the applicants’ résumés ahead of time and were largely kept from talking to one another about the candidates. Cunningham told me that she “trained everyone—anyone who was going to be part of the committees was trained to look at their bias.” But multiple district employees told me that Cunningham often screened the candidates herself and made final decisions, even overruling principals at times. She denied this: “I’m not the one who hired anyone.”

Some of the people who were hired were allegedly relatives of Cunningham. She hired two school counselors, Dykes and Santos, who were later accused of bringing religion into the school and of being hostile to trans students.

Many people I spoke to alleged that both Dykes and Santos brought religion into the school. Dykes told colleagues and students that she would pray for them or, if they were facing some dilemma, ask if they had prayed on it. According to the Title IX investigation, Santos brought up the Bible and Jesus when speaking with students…Often, the counsellors did not call gender-nonconforming students by their preferred pronouns…

Dykes’s sincerity in trying to “get it right” on behalf of trans kids would ultimately come into serious doubt. But there were other regrettable incidents in which the culprit may have been simple human error and the ordinary bureaucratic disarray of any sizable public school. Jo changed their name twice in middle school, and the district was slow to correct their name in its databases. As a result, Jo’s mother said, Jo “spent most class periods that had substitute teachers in the Student Support Center, because they could not deal with the constant misgendering and deadnaming.”

So some of this sounds like a case of trans students being special snowflakes who expect the entire world to jump every time they create a new identity for themselves. On the other hand, no one should have to put up with bullying at school and some of that was happening. But here again there was a problem for woketopia. Most of the bullies were minority kids.

Jo and their mother continued to report incidents of alleged bullying and harassment to various staffers at ARMS. Although one boy received a suspension, Jo and their mother were dismayed that the school did not mete out more consequences. Like many other progressive school districts, Amherst uses restorative-justice practices, which prioritize mediation and reconciliation over punishment, as part of an effort to redress racial disparities in the disciplinary process. “What’s unique about Amherst is that there are racial and class dynamics that layer on top of the gender dynamics, and those have certain demographic tendencies,” a longtime administrator in Amherst told me. Jo and Casey are white; the boys accused of bullying them and other trans students at arms were mostly Black and Latino…

“I’m not saying that some of these students don’t cause problems,” an ARMS staff member said, of the kids who were frequently disciplined at the school, “but they are the ones who face the most social ills in society. They’re the ones with a single mom working two jobs. They’re taking care of their younger siblings.” Herrington described a divide between families as, on one side, kids who live in spacious single-family homes, and, on the other, kids who live in apartment complexes, many of whom use Section 8 vouchers. “The kids from the apartments—they’re those kids, whether people will say it that way or not,” Herrington said.

So there are white, well off trans kids being bullied by less well-off black and brown kids. Thanks to the adoption of restorative justice policies, these kids are supposed to meet face to face to work out their differences. But what actually happened is one Latino boy told Jo he believed there were only two genders. Jo’s father responded by suggesting the boy should be removed from the school or even sent “to Mars.”

Ultimately, Jo’s family demanded a Title IX investigation which found that Dykes and Santos, the two counsellors, “engaged in severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive unwelcome conduct.” As for Cunningham, the DEI coordinator who had set the hiring practice under which both of them were hired, the report said she frequently accused colleagues of racism. That’s supposed to be a surprise I guess but from my perspective isn’t accusing people of racism the job description for a DEI coordinator?

Another finding in the report: People were afraid to speak up about problems with minority staffers for fear of being called racist.

The investigation described a “culture of fear and intimidation” at arms. Some staffers were frightened into silence by a “fear of being labeled a racist.” Mayfield agreed with this assessment. “The worst thing you can be called in Amherst is racist, and it keeps people stuck,” she told me. “That is what kept Doreen, Delinda, and Hector in their positions much longer than they should have been.” Almost everyone I spoke to believed that Morris failed to confront the problems at arms sooner out of precisely this fear. “The sense I got was that, once Mike realized that he didn’t have the right person”—meaning Cunningham—“he didn’t want to be perceived as being racist for dealing with her or having her removed,” Ben Herrington said, “which, if we’re being honest, is actually kind of a racist viewpoint.”

The battles at ARMS have continued even after most of the kids and adults involved in the Title IX investigation have moved on. The Middle School now has a new group called People Opposed to Sexual Harassment (POSH) which recently complained about a black teacher.

…members of posh, the anti-sexual-harassment club, brought complaints that one of their teachers was commenting inappropriately in class about students’ race, weight, and clothing. A district investigation found that the claims were unsubstantiated; the teacher, who is Black, filed a formal complaint against the club’s faculty adviser, who is white, alleging that she “used her power as the Advisor of POSH to commit racist and sexist attacks on me.” The adviser was briefly placed on paid leave, then moved to a new role at the high school. In January, members of the union filed a grievance asking, among other things, that posh stop meeting; they also proposed “appropriate consequences and further education for students who have engaged in bullying of staff.”

Anyone who is surprised by this doesn’t understand the foundational ethos of wokeness. Identity politics intentionally divides everyone into essential racial and sexual camps, all of whom are fighting for control of the environment. Woketopia is a place where every faction is at war with every other faction. The conflict will never go away because the identity categories are sacrosanct. And it’s not just one Middle School where this is happening. As woke ideology spreads, so does the constant internal conflict. One anonymous person told the New Yorker, “The left is eating its own all over the country—it’s not just Amherst.”