(Center of the American Experiment) — On Oct. 21, 2024, pro-Palestinian student protestors took over Morrill Hall, the University of Minnesota’s administration building. The students covered security cameras with spray paint, smashed windows, and secured doors with bicycle locks, trapping staff members inside. U of M president Rebecca Cunningham described the ordeal as a “terrifying experience” for staff.
Coercive student activism of this kind is nothing new at the U of M. For years, it has been cheered and held up for emulation by the university’s Center for Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender & Sexuality Studies (RIDGS) — an amalgam of “oppression studies” departments whose core, the Department of African American and African Studies, grew out of a student seizure of Morrill Hall in 1969.
RIDGS’s self-declared mission is not academic but political — indeed, revolutionary: to “challenge systems of power and inequality” and “imagine social transformation.” Now the ideological zealots who run RIDGS are coming to Minnesota’s K-12 classrooms under the aegis of the Walz administration’s new Social Studies and Ethnic Studies academic standards. They have launched a comprehensive K-12 Ethnic Studies initiative that aims to spread their extremist ideology to our youngest students.
The Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) formally adopted Walz’s Social Studies standards in January 2024, adding “liberated” Ethnic Studies. These new standards teach that the American project is irredeemably racist and in need of radical reform, and calls on students to “organize” for “resistance” to our nation’s fundamental institutions.
As implementation of the standards begins, bewildered school officials throughout the state are scrambling to come up with curricula to teach children this alien worldview. RIDGS has moved aggressively into the breach. It is preparing a database of Ethnic Studies lesson plans for Minnesota K-12 students, which it rolled out to teachers at Education Minnesota’s annual conference on Oct. 17, 2024, with the teachers’ union’s enthusiastic backing.
But RIDGS’s ambitious plans go well beyond this. The center is ramping up a “K-12 Ethnic Studies initiative” that will build Ethnic Studies “infrastructure,” conduct professional development workshops, and support the design of licensure pathways in coming years as the Walz administration’s liberated Ethnic Studies initiative goes into effect in all subjects and grades.
Who’s leading the charge at RIDGS to teach this toxic ideology to our 10-year-olds? Some of Minnesota’s most “fringe” thinkers.
One is Elliott Powell, a RIDGS faculty member who presented sample lesson plans to teachers at Education Minnesota’s convention in October. According to RIDGS’s website, Powell is an “interdisciplinary scholar of US popular music, race, sexuality, and politics” who is currently working on two books. The first is “tentatively titled, Prince, Porn, and Public Sex” and the second — Illegitimate Sounds — “explores the queer potentiality of recordings like demos that do not conform to commercial audio legibility.”
Jimmy Patino, RIDGS’s director, studies “radical social justice groups” of the 1960s, like “Black Power” and “the Chicano movement.” Keith Mayes, its previous director, focuses on “how African Americans have found ways to resist impositions of white meaning and emplotment”— i.e., “the narrative construction of reality.”
In 2022, Jacob Oertel — recently named program director of RIDGS’s new Ethnic Studies initiative — wrote a gushing profile of “E.” Ornelas, who exemplifies the kind of student RIDGS seeks to mold. Ornelas (“they/them”), a graduate student, “studies the speculative fiction writings of Black and indigenous authors, particularly those who identify as women, trans, queer, or two-spirit” and how characters respond to violence without “police punishment” or “prisons,” wrote Oertel. He praised Ornelas as an “abolitionist” activist who has “thrown themselves” into student organizing.
Another model student, former U of M student body president Jael Kerandi, helped lead a “movement to cut ties between police and universities.” Her advice to Minnesota’s young people: “You can be an activist wherever you go.”
Minnesota’s Ethnic Studies standards are tailor-made for RIDGS
Minnesota’s new K-12 Social Studies/Ethnic Studies standards are tailor-made for turning out students like Ornelas and Kerandi. In fact, the striking resemblance between the standards — their ideas, vocabulary, and priorities — and RIDGS ideology is no coincidence. From the outset of Gov. Tim Walz’s campaign to inject liberated Ethnic Studies into Minnesota’s K-12 public schools, MDE has collaborated with RIDGS, first to create and now to implement the standards.
In 2020, a U of M history professor affiliated with RIDGS served as MDE’s Social Studies standards drafting committee’s only subject matter expert. In 2023, MDE appointed another RIDGS faculty member to its “Ethnic Studies Working Group,” advising the department on all aspects of Ethnic Studies implementation. Both the drafting committee and the Working Group have been dominated by members and allies of a left-wing activist organization called the Minnesota Ethnic Studies Coalition (MESC), with which RIDGS is now collaborating on its own Ethnic Studies lesson plans.
RIDGS has not publicly released the lesson plans it will be marketing to Minnesota schools, as of this writing. But they will assuredly draw on the “Racial Justice Resources” that RIDGS currently promotes at the college level.
On its website, RIDGS links to those resources with an image of political protest signs: “De-fund the Police,” “Justice 4 George,” and “Black Lives Matter.” Resource categories include “student activism,” “abolition and reparations,” and “decolonizing museums and cultural spaces.”
Here are the sorts of instructional materials RIDGS is likely to use in lesson plans about a high school Ethnic Studies benchmark that requires students to “develop an analysis of racial capitalism, political economy, anti-Blackness, Indigenous sovereignty, illegality and indigeneity”:
- A “Racial Capitalism & Prison Abolition Zine” that makes “accessible the theories of Black Marxist and prison abolitionist scholars” including Angela Davis.
- Radical History Review’s “Reading Toward Abolition: A Reading List on Policing, Rebellion, and the Criminalization of Blackness.”
- Native American-focused resources entitled, “For Our Nations to Live, Capitalism Must Die” and “Unsettling America: Decolonization in Theory & Practice.”
- A comic book about illegal immigration, “Freedom or Prison,” promoted by the Resisting Surveillance and Deportations Collective.
- A “Brief History of US Museums as colonial, imperial, and sexist spaces.”
Students must resist oppression
The core of RIDGS’s Racial Justice Resources website, however, is its “student activism” section — a how-to manual for planning and carrying out disruptive operations at educational institutions. One of MDE’s new Ethnic Studies standards, entitled “Resistance,” encourages young people to engage in just this sort of activity. The three-part standard instructs K-12 students to “describe how individuals and communities have fought” for “liberation” against “systemic and coordinated exercises of power locally and globally”; to “identify strategies” that “have resulted in lasting change”; and to “organize with others” to engage in similar activities.
In plainer language, the standard requires students to study the goals and tactics of left-wing political activists, which it presents as models for emulation, and exhorts students to follow their lead in challenging what a related standard calls “historical and contemporary injustices.”
RIDGS’s Racial Justice resources cover all these bases. Under the heading of “historical activism,” it features a detailed case study of how, in 1969, the radical Afro-American Action Committee planned and executed the Morrill Hall takeover where it demanded — and got — the U of M’s African American Studies department. In terms of recent “liberation” activism, RIDGS’s website links to the Twitter (X) page of the extremist UMN Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), whose members call on students to join in the group’s ongoing protests and demands. The UMN SDS spearheaded both the October 2024 Morrill Hall takeover and a pro-Palestinian protest, encampment, and “die-in” in April 2024, which led to the arrest of nine demonstrators.
Students can also find “guides and toolkits for effecting change,” including a manual entitled “Campus Organizing Guide.” “So what is ‘direct action’?” the guide asks. The answer: “Direct actions are primarily defined by their confrontative, public, disruptive and possibly illegal nature.” In addition, RIDGS features an analysis of “campus demands” — including the “role of police on campus” and “hate speech and bias” — that have proven effective across the nation.
MDE’s “Resistance” standard instructs young people to “organize with others” to engage in political activity, and RIDGS facilitates this as well. It recommends extremist social media accounts for students to follow and provides contact information for “student groups leading change,” among them “grassroots and activist movements towards police abolition in local communities.”
All in all, RIDGS’s instructional material will enhance the appeal of left-wing political activism for Minnesota youngsters in a variety of ways. First, it will glamorize student activists, presenting them as civil rights heroes engaged in exhilarating, noble work. This is the effect of RIDGS’s public statement defending the UMN SDS’s April 2024 pro-Palestinian protest and encampment:
“The Center for Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender and Sexuality Studies (RIDGS) recognizes that most of our constitutive units were born of student protest and struggle against exclusionary and hierarchical power structures … We see it as positive and necessary for students to peacefully speak out in regard to issues of settler colonialism, apartheid, white supremacy, gendered violence and genocide.”
Likewise, RIDGS will convey the idea that raucous, abrasive protests and walkouts get results, while reassuring hesitant young people that disruptive behavior, including property damage, will not bring serious consequences.
To mobilize K-12 cadres, RIDGS seeks to shape kids’ identities
Perhaps the greatest threat “liberated” Ethnic Studies ideology poses is its manipulation of students’ “identity,” or sense of self, to advance its own political agenda. Today many young people are vulnerable to coercive thought reform of this kind, as family breakdown and a vacuum of meaning and purpose have left them yearning for a cause larger than themselves.
Ethnic Studies maintains that personal identity is a function of race. This assumption undergirds MDE’s new “Identity” standard, which requires students to “analyze the ways power and language construct the social identities of race, religion, geography, ethnicity, and gender” and to “apply these understandings to one’s own social identities and other groups living in Minnesota.”
A central goal of Ethnic Studies pedagogy is to pressure students to adopt the one-dimensional identity of “anti-racist.” By directing them to submerge themselves in a collective racial identity — white or non-white — it begins to erase their self-concept as unique individuals. This is key to creating what’s been called “the child soldiers of Ethnic Studies.”
Cult-like tactics of this kind are on display in one of RIDGS’s “Scaffolded Anti-Racist Resources,” entitled “Stages of white identity development.” This “identity development model” is designed to “facilitate growth for white folks to become allies, and eventually accomplices for anti-racist work.”
Subjects who go through the process move from the “contact” stage of identity transformation (“I don’t see color”) through “disintegration” (“I feel bad for being white”) and “reintegration” (“I have a black friend/child/relative”). Subsequent stages are “pseudo-independence” (“belief that privilege is not based on merit, but on bias & racism”) and “immersion” (“begins to work against systems of oppression, rather than seeing racism as individual actions”). Subjects are said to become true anti-racists when they achieve “autonomy” (“embodied anti-racism: being willing to … engage in protests”).
Progress along this hierarchy is said to be marked by changing attitudes and beliefs, including religious beliefs. For example, subjects are directed to ask themselves questions such as “does your solidarity change how you read your Bible?” and to consider reading books like The Cross and the Lynching Tree.
Another example of coercive thought reform is RIDGS’s guide to “starting anti-racist conversations with friends and family.” This resource exhorts students to put “anti-racism” at the center of their lives and to pressure family and friends to “dismantl[e]” their own “anti-Blackness.” “Don’t … End the conversation at the first sign of discomfort,” the guide warns young readers. Have a goal — like asking your conversation partner to “attend a protest” or “sign a petition.”
This ideology will render our schools unworkable
Under RIDGS’s influence, strident challenges to school authorities are likely to become much more common in Minnesota public schools. We saw the division and disruption such conduct caused during George Floyd-related protests at Minnetonka High School in 2020 and pro-Palestinian walkouts at Edina High School in 2023.
More importantly, however, RIDGS’s involvement in our schools is likely to poison the classroom environment in a way that can lead to a breakdown of the educational enterprise itself. This is already happening in higher education, as a New York Times story — “The University of Michigan Doubled Down on DEI: What Went Wrong” — made clear in October 2024.
In recent years, the university has created a debilitating race-based grievance culture by “teaching students to view the world chiefly through the lens of identity and oppression,” according to the article. This policy has generated “an enormous amount of fear,” a university regent told the Times. Both faculty and students now complain, he says, that “I can’t say anything in class anymore. I’m going to get run out of class.”
One targeted professor put it this way: “It’s this gotcha culture they have created on campus. It’s like giving a bunch of 6 year olds Tasers.” Classes are being “derailed” by “arguments about Gaza and Zionism” and “protests and marches intended to disrupt day to day academic life,” the article notes. Meanwhile, black students are “less likely to report feelings of being valued and belonging” since the diversity experiment began.
In August 2020, Minnesotans got a preview of what’s around the corner in our own state when a group styling itself “197 Students for Change” mounted a “Days of Demands” campaign at Sibley High School (now Two Rivers High School) in West St. Paul. Citing anonymous reports, the students targeted “racist” teachers and administrators by name, and published accusations against an “all-white administration trio” who “deny their own racist tendencies” and “get off by oppressing BIPOC (sic).” They demanded that faculty who didn’t “retai[n] information taught in their equity training” be punished and that “predatory teachers” be fired — leading some teachers to fear for their jobs. The group also called for banning “students who have been actively racist” from sports, clubs, and other “privileges.”
If K-12 schools adopt RIDGS’s instructional materials, their students may soon be marching in support of demands like the following, all of which appear on RIDGS’s website:
- “Safe spaces” for minorities in every classroom;
- a mandatory “Reporting Discrimination, Harassment & Retaliation statement attached to every syllabi (sic)”; and
- correction of “the mismatch in biographies and consciousness between students of color” and the “counseling and mental health” providers who treat them.
How will Minnesota school leaders respond as such incidents multiply throughout our state?
How will RIDGS get into Minnesota classrooms?
Under Minnesota law, the authority to choose curricula rests with local school boards. Some boards may be tempted to adopt RIDGS’s Ethnic Studies lesson plans because members trust the U of M brand, MDE and the teachers’ union endorse them, or RIDGS frames them as helping students to “see themselves in the curriculum.”
But even if boards decide against RIDGS, its materials may still make their way into the classroom. Under a new law, Minnesota teachers can end-run their school board’s authority and use whatever instructional resources they like, so long as these deal with a “protected class,” such as African Americans or sexual minorities.
It’s possible that, going forward, MDE will attempt to soft-peddle its radical Social Studies standards for fear of political fallout after Gov. Walz’s disastrous run for vice president. But the Walz administration has opened the door — through the academic standards and Ethnic Studies infrastructure it has created and entrenched — to self-serving, extremist institutions like RIDGS that are intent on exporting their dangerous ideology to Minnesota public school classrooms. Creating alternative pathways like this will ensure that the most radical content gets into our children’s hands.
If MDE chooses not to promote RIDGS’s lesson plans, we can expect RIDGS to market them directly to local school boards. This has happened in California, where the Coalition for Liberated Ethnic Studies has successfully prevailed on a number of school boards to adopt its own model Ethnic Studies curriculum, whose content California Gov. Gavin Newsom has rejected as unacceptably extreme.
Here in Minnesota, it’s scandalous that this debacle is unfolding as students’ reading and math performance continues to decline, both in absolute terms and relative to the rest of the nation. How long before our state’s political leaders correct this tragic situation with a campaign equivalent to the focus and funding they are now lavishing on liberated Ethnic Studies?
This article was originally published by the Center of the American Experiment.
Katherine Kersten
Katherine Kersten, a writer and attorney, is a Senior Policy Fellow at Center of the American Experiment. She served as a Metro columnist for the Star Tribune (Minneapolis) from 2005 to 2008 and as an opinion columnist for the paper for 15 years between 1996 and 2013. She was a founding director of the Center and served as its chair from 1996 to 1998.
