Critical Race Theory’s Experiment With NJ’s HIB Law

New Jersey’s Harassment, Intimidation, and Bullying law is the current educational crisis affecting all school children

A specter is harming New Jersey Public School students: the specters that rise from the mephitic vapors released when critical race theorists experiment with state laws. New Jersey’s Harassment, Intimidation, and Bullying law (HIB) is meant to protect students from pervasive harms that can leave lasting impact; however, progressive law firms, with assistance from necrophilic educators and students designated as “upstanders”, are exploiting peer interactions to promote the “magic pill” hypothetical Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic propose in Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (2017).

Delgado and Stefancic ask the reader:

“What about racism? Suppose a magic pill like the one mentioned above were invented, or perhaps an enterprising entrepreneur developed The Ultimate Diversity Seminar, one so effective that it would completely eliminate unkind thoughts, stereotypes, and misimpressions harbored by its participants towards persons of other races. The president’s civil rights advisor prevails on all the nation’s teachers to introduce it into every K-12 classroom, and on the major television networks and cable network news to show it on prime time. Would life improve very much for people of color?” (20)

The Magic Pill is New Jersey Public Schools’ Harassment, Intimidation, and Bullying Law.

The Ultimate Diversity Seminar is the Social-Emotional Learning program.

The Civil Rights advisors are Presidential Executive Orders that permit progressive law firms to turn teachers into litigators and students into “upstanders.”

The Magic Pill theory conceived inside university classrooms found its first test cases through human resource department complaints. New Jersey lawmakers then turned university administrative policies into a law where left-leaning ideologues construct an improvised reality to fit a theory. Critical race theorists and DEI activists conduct lab experiments with K-12 public school students by having them swallow this “magic pill” using manipulative disciplinary practices.

School administrators blame technology, COVID, and general student misbehavior for the high number of HIB referrals and incidents within their respective districts. Reports indicate that HIB’s have quadrupled between 2018 and 2023 across the state. This timing tracks with President Obama’s 2014 guidance that allowed “career bureaucrats and others to impose unwarranted legal obligations resulting in bad disciplinary policy” (Szafir, 2018) by threatening to withhold federal funding from schools.

New Jersey public school administrators follow these federal orders using the state’s HIB law as the primary means for addressing student conflict. Here, central planners apply critical race theory in school disciplinary actions to neutralize teacher and counselor autonomy when conducting investigations. This allows critical race theorists to covertly enter civic institutions through “open windows and doors.”

This “Ultimate Diversity Seminar” has been introduced into schools as “character” education programs, where a shared language further entraps students inside the ideological structure that surrounds truth, individualism, and traditional values. According to Gray, (2024) “to a considerable degree we are what others seem to tell us we are, especially if those others are authority figures.”

Inside this logocracy, students find that if told enough times that they and their peers are struggling, students demonstrate the impulsive, anxious, and impressionable characteristics that develop through dependence and learned helplessness. They perceive incidents as harassment, intimidation, and bullying, and comply with mandates by reporting any questionable and emotionally upsetting experiences to the nearest adult.

The intention of New Jersey’s HIB law is to “strengthen the standards and procedures for preventing, reporting, investigating, and responding to incidents of bullying in schools;” however, Strauss Esmay, the prominent law firm training a majority of New Jersey school boards, district administrators, and anti-bullying specialists on this law do so from a critical theorist perspective that defines HIB using examples from “the rest of the world.” (Strauss Esmay 2023).

The presentation’s inspiration that “the spirit of the law is to eliminate HIB conduct within our schools and among the students in the district” (p.7) comes from Delgado and Stefancic’s hypothetical. Thus, creating an environment that promotes students to tell on one another, for staff to prioritize legal protection, and for lawyers to dilute the spirit and language of the law when presenting an appeal case, ultimately decided upon by a politically appointed Department of Education commissioner. These tactics dismiss the state’s best practices and guidelines for effective conflict resolution that come from alternative presentations.

NJPSAFEA/Legal One definitions, interpretations, and guidelines are at odds with the progressive law firms that incorporate critical race theory tactics that loosely define terms to affect the outcome of an investigation. These firms allow anti-bullying specialists to embellish situations that appear more similar to conflict.

Teachers and investigators protect their actions instead of updating their initial impressions with genuine curiosity and connectivity as an investigation materializes. Incidents that could have been resolved through code of conduct policy within a local school are subject to broader involvement from faceless bureaucrats.

“Under Biden, the Department of Education’s office for Civil Rights was transformed from arbiter of last resort for allegations of discriminatory treatment to a forward operating base for the left in America’s culture wars” (Eden, 2021). Progressive school leaders, believing they can

eradicate misbehavior, position themselves into making impulsively poor decisions that have a significant social and financial cost. Attorney Law Judges who preside over parental appeals defer to school districts’ procedural decisions that satisfy the legal minimum. Progressives, rejecting neutrality as the baseline for decision-making, continue embarking on destroying the fragile institution that is public school through reactive thinking.

Educators have lost sight of the first principles for educating youth and instead navigate the map of first order thinking that has been drawn by DEI bureaucrats. Methodically, systematically, and strategically, these Critiques influence educators to comply with current cultural ideology. Instead of appealing to the “better angels of our nature” educators concede compassion, patience, understanding, calm judgment, and reflection over to ideological impulse. Their failures are a result of “not having the right perspective; ego-induced denial; and distance from the consequences of their decisions” (Parrish, 2020). Knowing this, is life better for children?

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

References

• Delgado, R., & Stefancic, J. (2017). Critical race theory: An introduction (3rd ed.). New York University Press.

• Eden, M. (2021, May 25). How the Biden administration is politicizing school discipline. City Journal. https://www.city-journal.org/

• Gray, P. (2024). Peter Gray’s Newsletter #49. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/

• Parrish, S. (2020). The great mental models: General thinking concepts (Vol. 1). Farnam Street Media.

• Strauss Esmay Associates, LLP. (2023). HIB law and policy training presentation. [PowerPoint slides].

• Szafir, A. (2018, June). The Obama administration’s school discipline guidance is a case study in federal overreach. The Federalist. https://thefederalist.com/