A New Ally Has Joined the Revolt Against Wokeness: Minorities | Opinion

A rebellion is brewing. Ethnic minorities are rising up against wokeness. In the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., Muslims, Latinos, Armenians and others are challenging the teaching of gender ideology in schools. They're protesting at school gates and demanding that teachers focus on "the three Rs"—reading, writing, and arithmetic—rather than forcing their kids to swim in the alphabet soup of LGBTQ.

This might be the most important revolt yet against the politicization of education, against the upper-middle-classes' use of the classroom as a soapbox for social engineering, where the aim is less to enlighten the young than to inculcate them with all the "correct" thoughts on sex, gender, and race. The eccentric ideologies of the largely white graduate elites are crashing against the pro-family, small-c conservatism of immigrant-descended communities.

Get your popcorn.

The revolt of the minorities is spreading through the Anglo-American world. This month, Muslim parents joined other parents' rights activists in Montgomery County in Maryland to protest against the removal of the "opt-out" for education on sensitive issues. Maryland law says parents must have the right to pull their kids from classes on "human sexuality." But the Montgomery School District decreed that teaching on sexual and gender identity does not fall under the banner of "human sexuality," and so every kid should sit through it, regardless of the religious beliefs of his or her parents.

The Muslim parents have a straightforward request: that school districts "respect the rights and sincerely held beliefs of parents and children," in the words of Zainab Chaudry of the Maryland branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. And yet for making this perfectly legitimate plea, Muslim parents have been damned as stooges of evil whites. "This issue has unfortunately put some... Muslim families on the same side of an issue as white supremacists and outright bigots," said Maryland Democratic Councilmember, Kristin Mink. (She later apologized for her comments.)

Clashes between woke agitators and minority parents are becoming commonplace. In Glendale in California this month, some parents withdrew their kids from school Pride celebrations. Armenian and Latino parents were among those who did not want their children to be subjected to rainbow re-education on sex and gender. Antifa Southern California called for counterprotests against the parents, on the basis that they are essentially "hate groups."

Meanwhile, Muslim parents in Ottawa, Canada joined with Christian parents this month with a simple demand: "Leave our kids alone." In scenes that will have caused many in the coastal elites to splutter into their macchiatos, young Muslim kids were filmed stomping on Pride flags.

England is ahead of the curve. Muslim parents in Birmingham here launched huge protests against LGBTQ education in 2019. "Let kids be kids! Listen to parents!" their placards demanded.

"Listen to parents" is a striking cry. Many parents feel that their moral authority over their kids, the sovereignty of the family itself, is being overridden by an education system and activist set that seem determined to "save" children from the supposedly regressive views of Mom and Pop. The family is a "haven in a heartless world," said Christopher Lasch. Should we really be surprised that so many parents feel angry about the invasion of this haven, the encroachment of the ideologies of contemporary capitalism into the home itself?

The fight for parental rights is surely one of the most important causes of our time.

Yet how quickly leftists, who normally patronize ethnic minorities, turn on them the minute they deviate from the identitarian script. It seems the activist set and the political elite value minority citizens only insofar as they are willing to be fodder for the woke agenda. They view these people as little more than a stage army to be marshaled against traditional class politics, who must dutifully play their part in flattering the pseudo-virtuous race politics of the upper classes.

The revolting minorities are infuriating leftists. There is "liberal dismay," reports the Guardian, that the Muslim-majority council elected in Hamtramck, Michigan in 2015 has now banned the flying of Pride flags from public buildings. Some in the woke set see it as old-fashioned religious prejudice. But maybe working-class people just don't want to be surrounded by the paraphernalia of identity politics all day long? Pride and prejudice: those are not the only options.

The revolt of the minorities makes perfect sense to me. The university-educated elites benefit from the post-family ideology of wokeness, because their connections and their power derive more from fluidity than from community, more from cosmopolitan moving-and-shaking than from the grounded experience of solidarity. But for the less well-off, family remains essential. Community is key. Such connections are everything.

New forms of education that depict the family as a problematic, patriarchal institution, which sneer at the entire idea of motherhood and fatherhood, will understandably be experienced by these people as a threat to their class interests—which in this case are the preservation of the haven of family life, of the authority of parents, and of the community bonds upon which working-class people depend for their strength and their sanity.

There is the glimmer of a new kind of solidarity in the revolt of the minorities. Working-class Muslims, African-Americans, Latinos and whites have a shared class interest in challenging the divisive, disorientating ideologies of the professionalized elites. This is why the woke are so angry: They rightly see this coming together of communities as an existential threat to their power.

Brendan O'Neill is the chief political writer of spiked. His new book, A Heretic's Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable, is available now.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.