Students are instructed to fill out a “Social Identity Chart” listing their Gender, Sexual Orientation, Emotional Developmental Ability, Race, Religion, and Socio-economic status, and to define themselves as an "Agent" or "Target” of oppression. Students report that, since no one wants to be an agent of oppression, they strive to find as many ways as possible to qualify as a victim of oppression.

Mountain View/Los Altos UHSD: Intersectionality, Positionality, and Social Identity

“Interpersonal Racism” is defined as: “what some white people do to people of color up close.” Rather than condemning all interpersonal bullying regardless of the source, the above definition misrepresents the concept, pitting only “white people” against “people of color,” using a definition explicitly rejected by the CDE. (The CDE-approved ESMC defines "interpersonal racism" as "what some members of an ethnic group do to members of a different ethnic group up close.”)

Pajaro Valley USD: The 4 I’s of Oppression

In an initial ESMC draft, written by Liberated ES leaders, many role models of color listed were violent or promoted violence, while peaceful change agents were omitted. Some of those included were Oscar López Rivera (responsible for 130 bomb attacks in US cities), Lolita Lebrón (led attack on the US congress that wounded 5 Congressmen), Assata Shakur, and Mumia Abu-Jamal (each convicted of 1st degree murder). A list of 154 role models of color omitted non-violent leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, and Thurgood Marshall.

Militant Role Models in Liberated Curricula

Liberated curricula champion John Brown, an abolitionist, who “beheaded male enslavers” and “hacked their bodies into pieces.” It explains that he "believed violence in a righteous cause was a light to purification.”&LESMC teaches that the ends justify the means, and that violence is a valid form of resistance.

Liberated Ethnic Studies: John Brown Lesson, Slides 7-19

Liberated curricula choose to highlight Yuri Kochiyama, a Japanese reparation activist who was an admirer of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. She is highlighted INSTEAD OF Japanese role models such as Congressmen Norman Mineta and Robert Matsui, and Senator Daniel Inouye, who successfully introduced /advocated for reparations legislation.

LESMC: Militant Role Models

Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (LESMC): Gang violence, Black on Black/Brown on Brown violence are examples of “internalized oppression” that “always begins from outside of the oppressed group.” This “horizontal violence means the colonized turning on each other… instead of directing our resistance/violence upwards to free ourselves...”

LESMC: Internalized Oppression, Slide 12, teacher’s note

The LESMC is clear that the Liberated brand of “Ethnic Studies does not feign neutrality.” Rather than encouraging students to question and verify information, the LESMC insists that “the dominant narrative found throughout mainstream education and curriculum is biased, presenting a false or selective account of our his/herhxstories and realities.” Students are instructed only to reject all mainstream facts and history, not to evaluate them.

LESMC: Intro to Ethnic Studies, p. 12

“Teachers needed to be grounded in the correct politics to teach ES.” – Jorge Pacheco at a 2020 teacher training by the Ethnic Studies Initiative. Pacheco, one of the original authors of the rejected ESMC drafts and leader in the Liberated Ethnic Studies Consortium, continues to lead these teacher training sessions throughout Santa Clara County, CA.

"Students will understand how normalization, implicit bias, common sense and consent work together to create hegemony… First, we need to understand common sense the way that [founder of neo-Marxism] Antonio Gramsci, an Italian philosopher, understood it…" This Liberated objective imposes LESMC’s narrow ideology (i.e., that common sense and normalization create hegemony), then forces a dogma-based, atypical definition of “common sense” to sell the ideology. Students are not asked whether normalization and common sense create hegemony; they are forced to internalize that idea, seeing the world only through Gramsci’s Liberated / neo-Marxist philosophy.

LESMC: Hegemony and Normalization, p.1, 7

The introduction to the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (LESMC) lays out this flawed fundamental premise, which students are forced to accept throughout the course. It asserts that all systems are racist and oppressive “Because white people designed all of our institutions, schools, courts, government, etc. and made sure that only white people would benefit from white supremacy.”

LESMC: Intro to Ethnic Studies, p. 3

“Who has power over you at school? Brainstorm some people, institutions, etc. that can control what you do in school.” School “exerts control and dominance, this is done through force or ideology.”

Mountain View/Los Altos UHSD: School Systems of Power Capuchino High School: Hegemony and Colonization

“The laws and practices in the United States continue to treat African peoples in a manner similar to slavery - maintaining dual systems in virtually every area of life…”

LESMC: Redlining to Reparations, Slide 29

The San Mateo Union High School District curriculum includes hundreds of slides and pages. Of those, only ONE two-page worksheet refers to contributions/accomplishments of ethnic groups - though even that one worksheet is in the context of “resistance.” The rest of the contents is almost 100% related to oppression, colonization, resistance, and hegemony. Specifically, students focus on “power and oppression and explain in [their] own words, how power is connected to hegemony.”

Numerous offensive antisemitic stereotypes were included in the original Liberated draft of CA’s ESMC. The ugly examples will not be repeated here, but the Legislative Jewish Caucus described it “In the few instances where the [draft] ESMC actually acknowledges Jews, it does so in a denigrating and discriminatory manner…It would be a cruel irony if a curriculum meant to help alleviate prejudice and bigotry were instead to marginalize Jewish students and fuel hatred against the Jewish community.”

Letter to California Department of Education Instructional Quality Commission

The LESMC mis-defines Zionism and demonizes the vast majority of Jews whose identity is connected to Israel, falsely alleging that “Zionism is a nationalist, colonial ideology that, from the late 19th century on, has called for the creation and expansion of Israel as a Jewish state in historic Palestine by any means necessary.” This definition denies the 3000-year-old Jewish connection to the land of Israel which is at the heart of Zionism, in addition to being inaccurate and at odds with accepted definitions of Zionism (the movement for the self-determination and statehood for the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland, the land of Israel).

LESMC: Teach Palestine Toolkit

Groups such as Sikh Americans expressed their dismay with the Liberated curriculum found in the initial drafts of the ESMC. This letter from 52 Gurdwaras and over 1200 individuals demands coverage of the Sikh community’s contributions.

“We understand and critique the relationship between white supremacy, racism, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, xenophobia, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, … and other forms of power and oppression.” This is one of many listings of “capitalism” as a form of oppression or racism in Liberated curricula. It is even part of LESMC’s Guiding Principles. The inclusion of capitalism as a system of oppression was specifically rejected by the CDE, and yet it remains in Liberated curricula.

LESMC: Enduring Understandings for Each Unit, Unit 3

White Supremacy is equated with private property in slides from Ethnic Studies Teacher Training, Santa Clara County, October, 2020

When teaching material that has been specifically rejected by the CDE, the LESMC teacher training specifically directs: “Is the administration likely to be supportive if you tell them about your plans? Or are you better off trying to fly under the radar or growing strong enough as a group to pressure them? … administrators usually hate controversy, so it’s a lot easier for them to say no or institute a process that delays your work forever rather than support you moving forward.”

LESMC: Teaching Controversial Curricula