Stupid Wealthy People
Bellevue, Washington, is predominately wealthy, educated (in years of schooling), white, and Asian. As with similar wealthy and educated enclaves in America, it embraces ludicrous woke dogma and allows it to be taught to children in the local school district.
That makes the residents stupid.
One resident is an exception. She wrote the following letter to the Wall Street Journal, in response to a recent op-ed titled, “How Teachers Are Secretly Taught Critical Race Theory.”
The Bellevue School District, east of Seattle, is considered one of the best in Washington. Yet, in recent years, divisive ideology has taken root.
My daughter’s sophomore English class replaced its unit on Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” with a two-month-long unit on cultural identity in which students read articles about “whiteness,” “queerness” and “cultural assimilation.” The same year, she experienced cultural- or racial-identity units in three other subjects: world history, health, and even band.
Since middle school, her core subjects have routinely been interrupted for discussions of microaggressions, and she has been asked to create her ethnic and racial family tree five times. My younger daughter’s middle-school history teacher scrapped the required curriculum (the events leading to World War II) in favor of reading newspaper articles pushing for open borders and illegal immigration.
In my daughters’ history classes, essay prompts are no longer thought-provoking questions but slogans such as “No Human is Illegal” and “Decolonize Your Curriculum.” The slogan “Black Lives Matter” currently appears on the facades of our school buildings and on clothing worn by teachers.
Yet when parents express concern about CRT in the classroom, educators in our district deny its use or inundate us with psychobabble.
Bellevue’s politicization of the classroom can be explained by its key demographics, which are displayed in the table below. To show the sharp contrast between Bellevue and other cities, demographics are also listed for my adopted home of Tucson.
| Bellevue | Tucson | |
| Non-Hispanic Whites | 52.0% | 43.3% |
| Asians | 37.5% | 3.2% |
| Total Whites & Asians | 89.5% | 46.9% |
| Hispanics | 7.4% | 44.2% |
| Blacks | 2.6% | 4.9% |
| Residents with a Bachelor’s or Higher | 69.1% | 28.2% |
| Median Household Income | $129,497 | $55,023 |
| Poverty Rate | 6.8% | 20.8% |
The above reflects the fact that cities with a high percentage of Asians, especially Han Chinese, East Indians, and Filipinos, tend to be wealthier, because, collectively, these groups are at the top in income and education in the US. By contrast, cities with a high percentage of Hispanics, especially recent immigrants from Mexico and other parts of Latin America, tend to be poorer.
Generally, the wealthier a locale, the more that the residents have an obsession with race, a need to virtue signal, and an infliction of cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy.
For example, the Bellevue school district advocates for open borders, and it doesn’t mean the Canadian border. Yet it has few Mexican students and is far from the Mexican border, unlike Tucson and the Tucson school district.
Talk is cheap.
Don’t take this as a slam against Mexicans, other emigrants from Latin America, or immigration in general; but, again, the fact is that migrants who cross the southern border are typically poor, poorly educated, and unskilled. If large numbers of them were to migrate to Bellevue, the city’s household income and test scores would fall.
As I’ve detailed elsewhere, there are other cities like Bellevue in terms of being predominately wealthy, educated, white, Asian, and woke. One of them is Arlington, Virginia, where companies that espouse diversity and inclusion have established their headquarters, or are in the process of doing so, including Amazon, Boeing, and Raytheon.
Judging by where they chose to locate their headquarters, their definition of diversity is different from mine. To them, it means a locale dominated by the wealthy and college-educated. It doesn’t mean Tucson. Nor does it mean my wife’s hometown of Bradford, Pa., which is in the northwestern part of the state, in the Allegheny Mountains about 70 miles southeast of Erie.
Bradford was settled by impoverished Swedes, Scots-Irish, and Italians, and it was bypassed by the great migration of blacks from the South, because they settled in the large industrial cities of Buffalo, Erie, and Pittsburgh. Consequently, non-Hispanic whites comprise 93.2% of the population; Asians, .3%, Hispanics, 2.9%; and blacks, .4%.
Nearby is the community of Kane, which is named after Civil War General Thomas L. Kane, who led Pennsylvania’s Bucktail Regiment and was wounded and taken prisoner in the war. That leads me to ask, What was Bellevue’s contribution to the Civil War and the freeing of slaves?
With its high percentage of whites, Bradford must be wealthy and privileged. Far from it. Suffering from offshoring and deindustrialization, Bradford’s median household income is only 29% of Bellevue’s income, its poverty rate is 4.6 times higher than Bellevue’s rate, and its percentage of college graduates is only one-fourth of Bellevue’s percent.
If there were ever a town that needed social justice, Bradford is it. Yet the town isn’t fixated on social justice, unlike Bellevue. Nor is it fixated on race, although it probably was 100 years ago, when Swedes, Scots-Irish, and Italians were seen as different races.
Speaking of Italians, as this grandson of poor Italian immigrants knows, for much of the twentieth century Italians were not seen as white by the Anglo-Saxon-Protestant establishment. Instead, they were seen as wops, dagos, greasers, and mobsters. In the South, they were seen as being on a par with African Americans or maybe one small step above. Many were consigned to black schools, and eleven of them were lynched in New Orleans.
The source of much-woke stupidity is the government’s mumbo-jumbo classification system of race, ethnicity, skin color, and geography, as exemplified by the labels of White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, Pacific Islander, and Native American. The rich diversity of America and the world was reduced to these six categories primarily for political purposes. In the process, hundreds of unique ethnocultural groups lost their identity, including the hundred or so in the White category, the hundred or so in the Asian category, and the hundred or so in the Hispanic category.
Being a contrarian, I still see myself as Italian, not white. It helps that according to the Sherwin-Williams color chart, my skin shade is Accessible Beige, or SW 7036.
Similarly, my Mexican friends in college referred to themselves as Mexican, not Hispanic or Latino or Latinx. The same for my former Mexican neighbors in the barrio of San Antonio, including the stripper and good friend who lived in the adjoining duplex. She had the stage name Candy Kisses but referred to herself as Mexican. And today, working-class Mexicans in Tucson still tend to see themselves as Mexican, not Hispanic.
The residents of Bellevue and other wealthy cloisters apparently believe that each of the six official government categories is homogenous and discrete. They don’t acknowledge any ethnic diversity within each, any socioeconomic diversity within each, any differences in political power within each, or any overlap or intermarriage between the six categories. Nor do they acknowledge that throughout world history, the six categories have included victors and the vanquished, victimizers and victims, and oppressors and the oppressed.
This leads the stupid people to see everyone in the White category as benefiting from privilege, racism, colonialism, oppression, and injustice; and at the same time, to see everyone in the other five categories as victims of whites—as if Japan didn’t colonize Manchuria and Korea, as if the Mongols didn’t colonize China, as if Pol Pot didn’t murder millions of his fellow Cambodians, as if Mao didn’t starve millions, as if the Han Chinese value diversity as if India doesn’t have a caste system and a hatred of Muslims, as if Hispanics didn’t enslave more Africans than the English and Dutch did as if the Comanche didn’t brutalize other tribes, as if Shia and Sunni Muslims haven’t been killing each other for centuries, and as if all of the inter-tribal butcheries in sub-Saharan Africa would never have happened if it were not for European colonization and the creation of artificial borders.
I could continue the “as ifs” for pages, but you get the point.
The people of Bellevue are probably incapable of getting the point, because they’ve been taught not to get the point, and because they live in a socioeconomic bubble. Judging by what is taught in the Bellevue school district, they don’t want their children to get the point, either.
Stupid, indeed.
