A decades-old clip of the Christian conservative former educator and VP nominee Ezola Foster resurfaced and went viral last week.
In an almost prophetic speech posted by the X account End Wokeness, Foster discussed the far-left ideology taking root and growing within the American public school system.
Commenting on the push for “diversity,” Foster stated, “I’ve been on this earth more than half a century and as long as I’ve been in America it’s always been diverse. So I’ve been wondering, what do they mean by that?”
“What they mean is that they want to divide us. They want to divide America and keep Americans hating each other.”
This is Ezola Foster.
She was born in Louisiana in 1938 and was a public school teacher for 33 years.
In the 1980s & ’90s she began sounding the alarm about troubling trends in our schools:
-Anti-White racism
-LGBTQ+ indoctrination
-Anti-American revisionism
-The risks of… pic.twitter.com/N2MZE7mFbA— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) December 28, 2023
In a 1997 speech to the conservative John Birch Society in Dedham, Massachusetts, on problems in American schools stemming from identity politics, Foster said, “I’ve been teaching for 33 years, and during that time I have seen some major changes in our public schools.”
“Basically, what has happened is that our children are being educated today to become world citizens rather than American citizens. And that is very, very dangerous.”
[firefly_embed]
[/firefly_embed]
The educator went on to discuss issues that may have been viewed as fringe at the time but have now grabbed the attention of conservatives, such as anti-white racism, revisionist history and diversity initiatives.
Foster — who was the Reform Party’s candidate for vice president in the 2000 election when conservative commentator Pat Buchanan was the ticket’s presidential nominee — succinctly and scathingly called out identitarian activist groups. Those groups are what the establishment media now present as “social justice” movements.
About the 3:35 mark in the speech, she identified the growing issues surrounding “gender” we have in schools today, stating, “I also blame the feminist movement because they have turned our little girls into wanting to be little boys, they have turned our young women against men. They have brought in abortion on demand any time, any place, anywhere, with or without parental consent.”
Perhaps conservatives should have heeded Foster’s warnings back when these words were spoken.
While the political right focused on economic issues, the left was able to dig deep roots in the country’s education system and present U.S. culture as a uniquely oppressive superstructure that requires dismantling so that we can reach a more egalitarian state — “equity.”
Like a cancer, the neo-Marxist critical theory was able to metastasize in humanities departments within higher education. It has now entered the schools, government, institutional media, and corporate board rooms where there are mandated diversity, equity and inclusion requirements and seminars.
What we now know as “wokeness” is partly a result of intersectionality, an outgrowth of feminist theory and a term coined by one of the chief architects of critical theory, professor Kimberle Crenshaw.
Intersectionality is a lens through which we are supposed to view our society, one in which people are divided into classes of the “privileged” or the “disadvantaged” with a built-in victimization hierarchy.
While Marxism-Leninism focuses on socioeconomic classes — the “oppressors” and the “oppressed” — intersectionality and critical race theory focus on characteristics such as race and sex to explain all differences in outcomes.
This neo-Marxist rhetoric, which judges individuals not by their character but exclusively by their intersectional status, is in lockstep with the KKK and other radical groups and represents a complete inverse of the teachings of Martin Luther King Jr.
Ezola Foster, who died in 2018 at the age of 80, displayed remarkable foresight while also bringing to light the head start the left had achieved in the cultural battle.
We are now seeing the insidious ideology that she identified seeking to destabilize the aspects of American culture that have ushered in the greatest era of sustained peace and prosperity in human history.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
