LETTER: BOE Candidate Takes Issue with Gaouad Letter
In a letter to MyRye.com, Board of Education candidate Bozidar Jovanovic expresses disappointment with MyRye.com’s publication of the letter from Zachary Moulaye Gaouad (RHS ’19).
Jovanovic’s letter:
It is quite disappointing to see another hit piece appearing in the press, this time from Mr. Gaouad a RHS graduate. It is also interesting to note the implication of collective guilt regarding last week’s racist incident in RHS – which also shows a fundamental difference in approach. The acts are those of individuals who I am sure will be discovered and treated accordingly. At the very least, there was a march for unity against racism on Sunday 5/16/21 – I was there to support the idea that the whole town comes together and discusses the issues we are facing.
Whether Mr. Gaouad believes he is marxist or not is of little importance – but the fact that he uncritically supports Steinhardt center and its pronouncements of Critical Race Theory makes him a follower of marxian logic. Oppressors and oppressed, oppressors have disenfranchised the oppressed and now violence is justified to make things right. You may not believe it, but that’s the essence of it, no matter the lipstick that’s put on it. In fact, one of the apostles of this movement Ibram Kendi says:
The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.
When you start from the outrageously wrong premise you are bound to arrive at equally wrong conclusion, thus Steinhardt center is the problem that must go away. I certainly support the district in the effort to address the discrimination issues that have been raised. Task force is a way to go, but not this task force. Had Mr. Gaouad taken time to learn about what I suggested for a long time – the task force that actually represents our community and not the employees of the district – he would have understood that status quo is not what I have in mind. As a matter of fact I intend to make sure that district is operated with full transparency and openness, and that it supports all students. But maybe that is the reason for the hit pieces in the first place?
As for the reading material in school which is something that I have advocated for over 10 years now, sure Mr. Gaouad, I did read Angelou and Douglas and Hughes, and also Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, but you are again missing the point – the authors you are mentioning were not part of the particular reading list that was discussed. The point is that the list contained less than 10 pieces that can be considered literature and the ideological bent of the non literature texts was unmistakable. I will state again that the proper approach is to have at least 90% of material be true literature (and that doesn’t mean a particular skin color) and the rest could be lighter contemporary pieces so long as the ideological bent is balanced – which is not the case today.
I will not go to the level of calling for you to not vote for someone, I leave that to those who are ideologically driven. Tomorrow, May 18 go to the polls and be informed on where the candidates stand. Be informed by what candidates did and what they stand for, not by misguided ideological hit pieces.
I spoke with John Leonard and I can unequivocally say that if you offer us your support, there will be no status quo in the business of the Rye City School District. For more information, you can go to www.boz4boe.com
Sincerely yours,
Bozidar Jovanovic, PhD, CFA
Says it all.
Your campaign stayed classy through the end; focused only on debating ideas, not attacking people. And the clarity of your convictions is a breadth of fresh air in a world in which most people are afraid to speak up and just go along to get along.
I beg to differ. Going after a 19-year old without whom this community wouldn’t have a chance to learn about unconscious bias and to grow better and bigger every day is not ok. Without this young gentleman, who seems to have become the lightning rod, Mr Boz wouldn’t have a campaign.
Implicit/unconscious bias = pseudoscience. Debunked with multitude of experiments since it’s fresh debut in 1998. Same subjects taking IAT tests get different results when being tested over and at different times of the day. The correlation between implicit bias and discrimination has been statistically weak to the point of insignificance. But for CRT supporters none of that matters, because the outcome is predetermined. Perhaps we can find something more serious to discuss?
No one has ever proven that implicit/unconscious bias is not real. You hold objective answers to extremely subjective questions. By denying these facets of biases, you are denying our lived reality and experiences with implicit and unconscious bias/racism in Rye that affected us deeply as it pertains to our emotional development.
“a father and son are in a horrible car crash that kills the dad. The son is rushed to the hospital; just as he’s about to go under the knife, the surgeon says, “I can’t operate—that boy is my son!” Explain.”
“The researchers ran the riddle by two groups: 197 BU psychology students and 103 children, ages 7 to 17, from Brookline summer camps. (They did the latter study through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP).“
“In both groups, only a small minority of subjects—15 percent of the children and 14 percent of the BU students—came up with the mom’s-the-surgeon answer.”
I could refer you to so many other studies if you need more. Make of them as you wish.
Riddle study taken from:
https://www.bu.edu/articles/2014/bu-research-riddle-reveals-the-depth-of-gender-bias
Unfortunately for you – and here I don’t mean just you personally but the entirety of CRT believers – science doesn’t work that way.
You are the one that makes the claim “implicit bias exists and it results in discrimination”. The burden is on you to prove that it does, it is not on the rest of the world to prove the negative. So far, the IAT tests have proven to be unreliable at best, pure charlatanism at worst. The connection between the results and discrimination is statistically weak – implying there is no reasonable conclusion that can be drawn.
This is very similar to the claim Scientology makes – “there are thetans living in your body and you need a lot of this very secretive, specialized and expensive training to get them out”. See the analogy here? “There is implicit bias and you need a lot of very expensive training to get over it”. Neither one has proven that claims have any validity.
The second issue is even more thin. “Lived Experience” is yet another jargon term that is completely meaningless. One of the biggest weaknesses of CRT and its metastases is the denial of objective reality. As you claimed “you are speaking your truth” and stating “your reality”. You and I may interpret things differently but there is one objective reality out there. You need to try speaking the truth and observing reality.
That is not to deny you had bad experience in Rye. The fact that you say you felt unwelcome needs to be examined and solutions found. The CRT approach that is demonstrably false is not going to provide that solution.
I know there are plenty of papers published in the “grievance studies” journals. Scientifically, it has been proven that the entire field lacks any rigor or objectivity. In 1996 Sokal has published a paper in Social Text that was completely bogus. In 2017 and 2018, James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian wrote 20 intentionally nonsensical papers filled with jargon and managed to get 7 published. One of which was famous rewrite of a chapter in “Mein Kampf”. If you really wish to disrupt something, that’s where you should start – clean up the act of the pseudoscience that passes for learning in grievance studies disciplines. After the field actually rises to the level of real, objective science, then we can listen to it’s results.