Little League baseball coaches in Alexandria, Virginia, will be required to receive training in “anti-racism” this month, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
What are the details?
The city’s Little League board President Sherry Reilly in an email to coaches last week said the league had partnered with the Positive Coaching Alliance and that all coaches and league board members were asked to cancel May 24 practices to make room for a Sports Can Battle Racism workshop, the paper said.
The Free Beacon said the workshop document for coaches includes themes such as “Create a Caring Climate” to “Model Anti-Racist Behavior” and that coaches are encouraged to teach themselves to take note of their own “internalized racism” and look for “potential institutional racism” in the community. The paper added that coaches also are asked to “be on the lookout” for moments that can serve as “anti-racism learning opportunities.”
Casey Miller, a spokeswoman for the Positive Coaching Alliance, told the Free Beacon that training costs are between $1,000 to $10,000 but didn’t say how much the Alexandria Little League spent on the yearlong partnership or the coaches’ training.
The training will be conducted over Zoom, the paper said, near the end of the Little League’s spring season, which ends the first week of June.
Pushback from a parent
Alexandria parent Barry Bennett, however, told the paper that the Little League coaches’ training is “a bunch of busybodies virtue signaling. Leave 10-year-olds alone.”
As it happens, Alexandria is a decidedly far-left city; of the residents who voted in the last presidential election, 80% voted Democratic. The paper added that Positive Coaching Alliance’s online resource library for “overcoming racism in sports” is similar to the “antiracist” and critical race theory-based training in some of the public schools in the state.
More from the Free Beacon:
Virginia school districts have mandated similar training for their teachers. Arlington County schools required teachers to participate in an equity training program in which they were taught how to create an “actively antiracist learning environment.” Loudoun County schools spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on teacher training sessions based on critical race theory—the idea that American institutions are inherently racist.
One resource, geared toward high school student athletes, is a definition guide with more than 30 entries, such as “cultural appropriation,” “systemic racism,” and “intersectionality.” The guide links equality with “meritocracy” and includes an addendum that asks “whether equality is enough” and if “equity is a more important principle.”
Gender “transcend[s] biology,” according to the guide, and is “very complex since people can identify in diverse ways.” It notes that Facebook offers more than 70 gender options.
The alliance also offers a quiz that allows high school athletes to assess their “privilege.” Being a child of a parent or guardian with a college degree is one example of privilege. Athletes and coaches can also use the website’s “identity wheel,” which includes sections on sex, sexual preference, race, and religion, to “increase awareness of how privilege operates to normalize some identities over others.”
But parents of late have been battling woke overreach:
