A teacher has filed a federal discrimination suit against the elementary school district serving students in Evanston and Skokie, claiming the district’s commitment to “anti-racism” in its curriculum, policies and programs not only discriminates against white students and faculty, but actively teaches students to be racists.
On June 29, plaintiff Stacy Deemar, a middle school drama teacher at Evanston/Skokie Community Consolidated School District 65, filed suit against the district that has employed her since 2002.
She is represented in the action by attorneys Kimberly S. Hermann, B. H. Boucek, and Celia H. O’Leary, of the Southeastern Legal Foundation, of Roswell, Ga.; and by attorneys Whitman H. Brisky and Terry S. Lu, of the firm of Mauck & Baker, of Chicago.
The lawsuit also names as defendants District 65 Superintendent Devon Horton, Deputy Superintendent Latarsha Green, and Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction Stacy Bearsley.
The district operates 18 schools, serving more than 8,000 students from preschool to eighth grade.
However, the complaint said the curriculum actually violates the U.S. Constitution and federal civil rights laws, by actively discriminating against white school staff members and students.
“Throughout its curriculum and programming, District 65 promotes and reinforces a view of race essentialism that divides Americans into oppressor and oppressed based solely on their skin color,” Deemar’s complaint said. “District 65 sets up a dichotomy between white and non-white races that depicts whiteness as inherently racist and a tool of oppression.”
The teacher training and programs result in a curriculum, taught to students as young as preschool, that “whiteness” is negative and wrong, while “non-white racial identity” carries “positive traits.”
For instance, the complaint claims District 65 teaches students in the third-fifth grades that “’Black’ families and villages are ‘the best/proper way’ to have a family, and it is important to return to a family structure that ‘takes care of each other’ in contrast to the ‘Western nuclear family,’” a structure the curriculum associates with “whiteness.”
The complaint further points to lessons that District 65 distributes to students from preschool to eighth grade that asserts, among other claims: “White people have a very, very serious problem and they should start thinking about what they should do about it.”
And the curriculum asserts that “To ‘treat everybody equally’ is a colorblind message, and ‘color blindness helps racism,’” while challenging white students to ponder how they can be white without being a part of “whiteness.”
From there, the lessons demand students “sign a pledge to be anti-racist” and to “gather in affinity groups segregated by skin color.”
The complaint asserts District 65 also requires faculty and staff to segregate into racial “affinity groups,” and focuses training on encouraging “equity,” rather than “equality.”
“The District’s practices take its faculty and students further from the truth and reconciliation,” the complaint said. “Instead, the District’s practices divide them into two worlds: the oppressors and the oppressed. They teach them that their whole identity comes from the color of their skin. They teach them to hate each other.
“They teach them not only how to be racist, but that they should be racist.
“And the District does this by treating people differently because of their race,” the complaint said.
According to the complaint, Deemar filed a complaint about District 65’s policies, practices and programs with the U.S. Department of Education in 2019, notifying the federal agency “that District 65 was segregating teacher meetings by race, imposing hiring quotas based on race, hosting racial affinity groups for staff, forcing teachers and students to undergo frequent race-based programming, and maintaining general policies and practices that classified individuals based on race.”
The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights then determined District 65 was violating federal law. However, that determination was styayed after Democrat Joe Biden became president in January 2021.
The lawsuit asserts District 65’s policies, programs and practices violate the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee to equal protection, as well as discriminating on the basis of race and creating a hostile environment, in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
The lawsuit asks the court to order the district only to pay “nominal damages of $1,” while issuing orders requiring District 65 “to take all affirmative steps necessary to remedy the effects of the unconstitutional, illegal, discriminatory conduct,” and prevent it from happening in the future.