In his July 8 letter, Dr. Robert Vellani maligned Alamance County citizens who spoke out against political indoctrination during a recent Alamance Burlington School System (ABSS) board meeting. I was one of those who spoke. Vellani is a member of the ABSS Superintendent’s Equity and Diversity Committee.
Vellani avoided any genuine consideration of the citizen speakers’ concerns. Instead of unifying, he used drive-by insults. He characterized the speakers as destructive, divisive and “misinformed gaslighters.” Yet, he offered no evidence to support his claims. While condemning others, Vellani sanctimoniously signaled his own virtue and intention to “move forward clear-eyed and honestly into an equitable future for all.” Yet, he left out how we’re supposed to do so without a working definition of “equity.”
Many people reasonably believe that “equity” means “equality.” Undoubtedly, Vellani knows that equity is short-hand for Marxist “social equity,” whose goal is “equality of outcome.” He knows the sinister history of equity-based ideology: You’re either for us, or against us. As prominent proponent Ibram X. Kendi puts it, any policy not explicitly designed to rectify unequal outcomes for different races is automatically a racist policy that must be eliminated. Worse yet, Kendi’s philosophy attributes malice to those who have none. It promotes policies that tenaciously discriminate based on race in order to eliminate supposed discrimination. It turns Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s standard of judging people by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin, on its head.
How will Vellani’s “equitable future for all” be brought about? What level of coercion will he employ? Every parent has the right to receive answers to these important questions. I call on Alamance County citizens to keep asking ABSS leaders to clearly define the current inequitable situation, and the process used to counteract it.
