A worksheet made by a teacher and distributed to middle-class students in Northern Virginia’s Loudoun County has been pulled after parents found out it labeled the KKK as a “right-wing” group.
According to the Washington Post:
A worksheet in a Virginia middle-school civics class that identified the Ku Klux Klan as a “right wing” group was removed after complaints.
The worksheet, circulated in an eighth-grade class at Harmony Middle School in Loudoun County, was titled “Political Spectrum.” A completed, handwritten version that circulated online described different political ideologies, from “left wing” to “right wing.” It said liberals “support change or try new ideas,” for example, while conservatives are “traditional” and “cautious.”
School officials reportedly said the worksheet had been made by a teacher and wasn’t part of the school’s curriculum. But regardless of how the worksheet came to be, parents were understandably peeved to find their kids coming home with papers linking a mainstream political movement that encompasses nearly half the country with a radical racist fringe group.
Loudoun County School Board member Eric J. DeKenipp reportedly told the Washington Post, “To correlate an organization such as the KKK, which has no official affiliation to the [Republican] party . . . that’s not factual. That’s an opinion. I’m not sure that that belongs in the curriculum.”
Of course, the Washington Post couldn’t simply report the story straight without getting in a jab or two at conservatives, arguing via a liberal professor they dug up that the worksheet, while perhaps uncomfortable to many, was actually pretty accurate:
Linda Gordon, a New York University professor and author of “The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition,” reviewed the worksheet and said that it had multiple errors, but that she thought the KKK was characterized correctly.
…“Right-wing extremes are characterized above all by bigotry,” she wrote in an email. “Many of these groups can be called fascistic . . . because they respect and even elicit violent behavior. In this definition of right-wing extremism, the KKK fits of course because its basic ideology is about white supremacy.”
We’ll just pave right over the basic historical fact that the KKK was actually founded by Democrats in Democrat-controlled states and propped up by Democratic politicians – the same side of the political aisle that continues to systemically oppress minorities through government-enabled cycles of poverty, addiction and violence to this day. Nothing to see here.
But even setting that side, by Gordon’s logic – and the Washington Post’s, by insinuation – if the Right has to take ownership of the largely defunct KKK, the political Left gets to claim the fine folks over at Antifa and Black Lives Matter who regularly beat people with bats and bike locks, torch buildings and cars, and openly declare war against white people or those who voted for Donald Trump.
Let me know when you see that on a middle school worksheet.