Michigan Gives $1 Million Of Our Tax Dollars To A Michigan State University Group That Promotes ‘Decentering Whiteness’

The first thing I had to look up is what the heck is “Decentering Whiteness”.  It was not easy to find.  What I first found was a bunch of racist bigoted sites that had quite a bit of word salad to fill their pages all of it useless.

I finally came across the following:

"Layla Saad defines it in her Me and White Supremacy workbook:  "White centering is the centering of white people, white values, white norms and white feelings over everything and everyone else. ...Whiteness is so used to taking up space in all spaces, that when it is restricted or a boundary is put in place to center and protect BIPOC, its reaction is often one of white fragility, tone-policing, white superiority, white exceptionalism or just straight up violence (whether verbal or physical).”

What does BIPOC mean, good question?  According to Webster's Dictionary, it means “Black, Indigenous, (and) People of Color”.

Now that we have that figured out why are our Michigan politicians giving our tax dollars to groups that promote racism and bigotry?

The Michigan Capitol Confidential is reporting that our brilliant Michigan politicians have given $1 million taxpayer dollars to Michigan State University this year for a group called the Hub of Innovation in Learning and Technologies.  What is this group, another great question?  According to their site they are:

“The Hub’s mission is to help our partners design and deliver transformative learning experiences. The Hub is an internal design consultancy for Michigan State University on a variety of learning experience design projects. We help our partners from across campus (colleges, departments, units, and the connected faculty, staff, students, and administrators) imagine and then make those transformative experiences. Design is fundamentally about transformation: ideas to realities, problems to solutions, existing moments to new ones.”

What does that mean?  Another great question who the heck knows.  I wonder if they actually know.  The Michigan Capitol Confidential believes this group creates “groups of faculty" who are eager to attend recurring meetings and collaborate around a specific pedagogical topic.” That did not help me understand what they do.  The problem is these “learning communities” are teaching or promoting “race-based, equity, and social justice engagements”.

Now let us get back to “Decentering Whiteness”.  One of these “learning communities" is a group called the Anti-Racist Educator Dialogue Group.  This group “aims to support educators in enacting anti-racist pedagogy and decentering whiteness in their work with doctoral students”.

I again ask why are Michigan politicians giving our taxpayer dollars to such a racist/bigoted group?

They would probably say why not I need their votes.

The Michigan Capitol Confidential article was kind enough to let us know the following:

• MSU will receive $354 million under the 2021-22 state budget, all from Michigan taxpayers.
• MSU is also getting tens of millions in additional federal relief dollars.
• The university has an endowment fund that was valued at $3.4 billion in 2019-20.

Do you really want to vote for someone that wastes our tax dollars like this?