'Anti-Racist' Teaching Is Racist, Unconstitutional: D-65 Teacher

EVANSTON, IL — Alleging that she has been subjected to a "racially hostile environment" and treated differently at work because she identifies as white, a longtime Evanston/Skokie School District 65 drama teacher filed a federal civil rights lawsuit Tuesday against the district and a trio of its administrators.

The complaint is highly critical of the district's focus on racial equity over equality and rejection of so-called colorblind messaging. According to the suit, administrators now consider messages like “treat everybody equally” and “love conquers all” to be racist. District 65 "continues to treat individuals differently based on their race," it says.

Stacy Deemar, 49, of Wilmette, has taught in the district since 2002. She currently teaches part-time at Nichols Middle School and previously taught part-time at King Arts, Haven Middle School and Kingsley Elementary, according to her complaint. In 2015, she was honored with an Award of Excellence in Creative Drama from the Illinois Theater Association.

“Creative drama affords all students the opportunity to flourish in a non-traditional setting regardless of academic abilities," Deemar said when the district announced the award six years ago. "The beauty of creative drama is that students use their visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, linguistic and logical intelligences."

According to her lawsuit, Deemar only spoke out against the district's racial equity policies once — during a February 2016 meeting about a book for teachers to use multiethnic folk literature in drama class.

When she did, "her colleagues interrupted her, rolled their eyes, and told Plaintiff she did not know what she was talking about." Deemar figured "if she voiced her concerns further, she would be marginalized and face further humiliation from her colleagues," according to her complaint.

According to an earlier complaint Deemar filed with the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights in June 2019, summarized in a January 2021 letter of finding, the district began discriminating against white staff, students and job applicants in the 2017-18 school year.

And during the 2018-19 school year, the drama teacher told federal education officials, she suffered discrimination due to the district's failure to sufficiently discipline students who assaulted her — and retaliation when administrators canceled portions of a second grade musical.

Carol Ashley, enforcement director of the civil rights office, told District 65 Superintendent Devon Horton there was insufficient evidence that administrators had retaliated against Deemar.

But Ashley's office concluded that the district had "engaged in intentional race discrimination" with its use of racially exclusive "affinity groups," "privilege walks" that separate students based on race, and a curriculum that required district staff to treat people differently based on race.

"[T]he District appears to have deliberately singled out students and other individuals by their race, in order to reduce them to a set of racial stereotypes. Title VI bars such discriminatory conduct," Ashley said.

The office found that the district's policy to explicitly consider the race of students when disciplining them also violated Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, with Ashley expressing "serious concerns" that District 65's anti-racist training may have created a racially hostile environment.

"[T]hese [training] materials, if used as directed, would have led students to be treated differently based on their race, depriving them of the benefit of a classroom free from racial recrimination and hostility," the enforcement director added. "Such treatment has no place in federally funded programs or activities."

Ashley attached a resolution agreement that she said had been negotiated with the district. But the enforcement director told Deemar that she could not get a copy until the resolution was finalized within 90 days, Deemar said in March, telling the New York Post anonymously that she was "concerned with staff and student safety."

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Within two days of President Joe Biden's inauguration, the case was suspended due to the new president's Executive Order 13985, Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government, which revoked former President Donald Trump's September 2020 Executive Order 13950, Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping, that targeted diversity and inclusion training programs.

Deemar has retained attorneys from the Roswell, Georgia-based Southeastern Legal Foundation, a conservative nonprofit legal organization. Her three-count lawsuit filed Tuesday alleges violations of the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection, intentional discrimination and a racially hostile environment, both in violation of Title VI.

Deemar alleges she was subject to racial harassment through "mandatory race-based training, race-conscious student curriculum, segregated staff meetings and affinity groups, privilege walks, and frequent and repeated affirmation by Defendants about the District’s commitment to making racial distinctions among students and staff," according to the complaint.

She asks for $1 in nominal damages and for a judge to declare that District 65 and its administrators violated Deemar's civil rights and order the district to take "all affirmative steps necessary to remedy the unconstitutional, illegal, discriminatory conduct" it describes.

Most of the allegations precede the hiring of Devon Horton, who joined the district in June 2020 and is named as one of the defendants.

In June 2019, former superintendent Paul Goren submitted his resignation after negotiating a settlement agreement that saw him walk away with a severance package worth nearly $100,000.

Goren is not named among the defendants, although the suit notes a 2018 statement from the then-superintendent where he acknowledged "the idea of separating by racial identity feels uncomfortable for some" but suggested participation in the racially segregated groups was voluntary.

Deemar's suit also describes a mandatory two-day staff seminar developed by Pacific Educational Group called Beyond Diversity, which uses materials from a training program called Courageous Conversations.

As part of the training, teachers were segregated into "racial affinity groups" to read poetry, according to the suit, which said there were at least seven affinity group sessions in the district's main office in 2018 and 2019.

The training allegedly also uses the terms “white talk” and “color commentary” to characterize interracial conversations, with "white talk" defined as "“loud, authoritative ... controlling,” and “color commentary” as “silent respect … [and] disconnect.”

The suit describes an exercise called "White Privilege: The Color Line Exercise," which involves separating staff based on their responses to a series of prompts. It also notes that the district hosted study groups on the book White Fragility by Robin DeAngelo, although it acknowledges Deemar did not participate.

Deemar's complaint also describes the 2021 Black Village curriculum, presented as part of a week of Black Lives Matter materials, as suggesting that the nuclear family — two parents and their children — is a "way whiteness/white supremacy shows up in the United States."

That curriculum teaches that the dominant American culture is an individualistic one, while African culture is collectivist, allegedly instructing teachers to explain, “The principles of Intergenerational, Black Villages, and Black Families [are] important to the Black Lives Matter movement because racism is a problem that will take a collective village to resolve," according to the complaint.

At Nichols, it said each department was responsible for presenting a Black Lives Matter lesson, with “Intergenerational, Black Families and Black Villages” presented by the physical education department, “Diversity and Globalism" presented by the math department, and “Black Women and Unapologetically Black" presented by the science department.

Deemar's lawsuit points out that Stacy Beardsley, assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction, served as interim superintendent, which she did from July 1 to Aug. 19, 2019, and names her as one of the defendants, along with Deputy Superintendent Latarsha Green. The complaint makes no mention of the pair of interim superintendents who led the district for the next 11 months, and it does not name them as defendants.

Deemar did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday, and her attorneys declined a request for an interview and a copy of her 2019 complaint to the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights.

A district spokesperson has not responded to questions about whether the district has ever imposed hiring quotas based on race, segregated mandatory teacher meetings by race or hosted mandatory racial affinity groups for staff.