White Privilege Training for Edina’s Custodians and Bus Drivers? Can It Get Any Crazier?

Of the countless examples of left-wing bullying that we have received from Edina school parents, students, teachers and staff, none will make your skin crawl quite like this one.

A widow sent this to us yesterday. It is a training program that her late husband, a bus driver for the Edina public schools, was forced to attend in 2012 which left him utterly humiliated. At this “Equity and Racial Justice Training” day, bus drivers and custodians were instructed in diversity, cultural competency, oppression, racism, and whiteness.

Bus drivers and custodians. Equity and Racial Justice Training. 

What?! Edina schools have reached a whole new level of crazy liberalism if they are putting staff members who have minimal daily contact with students and who are not educators through this kind of “training.”

School bus drivers and custodians are primarily white, low income individuals. And yet the Edina school district feels it necessary to instruct them in white privilege. This is one of the most shocking parts of the training session:

The lesson goes on to say:

This is the core of our work as white folks

This requires a major paradigm shift in the thinking of white people:

• Issues of race and racism ARE the problem of white people on a daily basis,
• Now, white people are part and parcel to the solution and not just good-hearted folks who are helping out “others”.

If I was a bus driver my daily problem would be tolerance of noisy, rambunctious children, not white privilege. In fact, I would probably be curious as to what white privilege I possessed. Making an hourly wage of around $17, I would be perplexed as to what advantages my skin color provides when I’m making around $30,000 a year (Edina is actually quite generous in their salaries for bus drivers–they’re above the national mean of $14.96 and they’re currently hiring, so if interested you can read the job description here).

But the “Equity and Racial Justice Training” would correct me in my ignorant and selfish thoughts. Towards the end of the meeting, I would participate in this exercise:

Here I would have the opportunity to practice what I learned about racism and white privilege such as how

Whites are actively taught not to see their privilege: The central point here is that whites are meant to not notice the benefits and advantages they get as a result of being white. If whites were to have a thorough and deep knowledge of these advantages, they would be more apt to speak in much greater numbers against the power structure that bequeaths them. As a result the system of white privilege and racism would stand a greater chance of being dismantled. Thus, “Super Whitey” likes to keep whites oblivious to these benefits.

“Super Whitey”? First, that is a terrible name for a villain, I don’t think it would even scare the children. Second, thank goodness Edina schools are here to keep us humble and remind even their lowest-paid employees of the privilege they posses because of their skin color.

But according to some Edina residents, like the moms I had the pleasure of meeting yesterday, this is progress. A person’s occupation, income or even character doesn’t determine his social status, it’s his or her race. You can call that profiling, or racism. And subjecting custodians and bus drivers to this sort of nonsense is bullying–bullying that so outraged this particular bus driver that his widow remembered it clearly, years after the fact.