BREITBART: Obama High: No child left benign

Andrew Breitbart
Monday, October 13, 2008

Elected officials in Chicago made international news last week by proposing to create a public high school for gay, lesbian and transgender students.

The Pride Campus of the School for Social Justice is set to open with 600 students in 2010, and its curriculum promises to "teach the history of all people who have been oppressed and the civil rights movements that have led to social justice and queer studies."

Yet no American journalist covering the presidential race has queried the Chicago-based Sen. Barack Obama about this radical development in education reform: a key issue to which the young senator has committed much of his public life and all of his executive experience.

From 1995 to 1999, Mr. Obama oversaw the Annenberg Challenge, a nearly $100 million Chicago-based education-reform group co-founded by unrepentant domestic terrorist Bill Ayers.

Nor has any intrepid mainstream-media reporter looked into a greater trend across the United States in segregating public school students by politically correct "victim" class for the explicit purpose of indoctrinating children in "social justice." This loaded political term has been preached by such Obama allies and mentors as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the Rev. Michael Pfleger and Mr. Ayers: committed left-wing agitators all, and all off-limits to the working press.

So what exactly is "social justice"? This past Martin Luther King Day, a group of social-welfare students at the University of California at Berkeley got together and took a stab at defining it:

"Social justice is a process, not an outcome, which (1) seeks fair (re)distribution of resources, opportunities and responsibilities; (2) challenges the roots of oppression and injustice; (3) empowers all people to exercise self-determination and realize their full potential; (4) and builds social solidarity and community capacity for collaborative action."

Fitting the narrative, the Social Justice High School in Chicago was created in an act of political protest. The first words on its main campus' Web site at the "About Us" tab make it clear that public funds are intended to develop future Moveon.org and ACORN-style activists: "On May 13th, 2001, fourteen community residents of Little Village neighborhood staged a nineteen-day hunger strike demanding the construction of a new high school."

The protesters back then chanted: "Construyan la escuela ahora!" ("Build the school now!"), and victory was theirs. It was "Si, Se Puede" in action, the Spanish-language Obama chant, and also, not at all coincidentally, the slogan of self-described "social justice" activist Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers Union.