July 11, 2006

"The Race" Schools: Your Tax Dollars At Work

Top White House adviser Karl Rove traveled to Los Angeles this week to pay homage to the anti-immigration enforcement lobbying group for Latinos: the National Council of La Raza.

"La Raza" is Spanish for "The Race."

It's bad enough the White House lent its prestige to The Race's annual conference. But did you know the Bush administration has forked over millions of federal tax dollars directly to The Race?

According to GOP Rep. Charlie Norwood of Georgia, The Race snapped up $15.2 million in federal grants last year alone and more than $30 million since 1996. Undisclosed amounts went to get-out-the-vote efforts supporting La Raza political positions. The U.S. Department of Education funneled nearly $8 million in taxpayer grants to the group for a nationwide charter schools initiative.

Among The Race's most infamous government-funded charter schools is La Academia Semillas del Pueblo, the Los Angeles public school that teaches "Aztec math" (ancient dot math is the new math) and the Mexican indigenous language of "Nahuatl." The ethnic separatist principal of the school, Marcos Aguilar, told a sympathetic UCLA interviewer:

"We don't want to drink from a White water fountain, we have our own wells and our natural reservoirs and our way of collecting rain in our aqueducts. We don't need a White water fountain. . . . We are not interested in what they have because we have so much more and because the world is so much larger. And ultimately the White way, the American way, the neo liberal, capitalist way of life will eventually lead to our own destruction."

That's the tip of the iceberg. I found dozens of other publicly subsidized charter schools sponsored by The Race and funded with our money, including:

Aztlan Academy in Tucson, Ariz. According to The Race, the school's success rests on "Aztlan's ability to integrate a meaningful Chicano Studies program into their lives, language, and academics, as a means of developing their intellects as well as their pride and self-esteem." The school's name—a reference to a mythical swath of the vast Southwestern U.S. expanse, which Latino activists claim is their rightful homeland and which they seek to reconquer for Mexico—says it all.

Mexicayotl Academy in Nogales, Ariz. Who needs the three R's? At Mexicayotl, it's all about the three M's: me, me, me! The school's program is "structured and developed around the concepts of identity, culture, and language." Second mission: supporting local ethnic lobbying efforts "to right social injustices by educating the community and helping create social change." Under "greatest achievements," the school's website lists its participation in a "Peace & Dignity Run"; its visit from Rigoberta Menchu (the Marxist academic fraud from Guatemala who lied her way to a Nobel Peace Prize); and its sponsorship of the local annual Dia de los Muertos (the Mexican holiday).

The Dolores Huerta Preparatory High School in Pueblo, Colo. It's named after the far-Left Latina labor union activist who recently railed that "Republicans hate Latinos," praised illegal alien marchers and screeched that "We didn't cross the borders, the borders crossed us" in a hate-filled tirade before Arizona students.

Academia Cesar Chavez Charter School in St. Paul, Minn. Board of Directors member Louis Mendoza, an activist Chicano Studies professor, pushed the school to lobby for the federal DREAM Act (providing in-state tuition discounts to illegal alien students not available to legal non-residents). The school's website features one flag on its front page: the Mexican flag.

The White House will tell you that the National Council of The Race is a "moderate," mainstream civil rights group. But there's nothing "moderate" about The Race's advocacy of driver's licenses and in-state tuition discounts for illegal aliens. Or its opposition to strengthening security for identity documents and improving cooperation on immigration enforcement between state, local and federal immigration enforcement officials. Or its all-out war on the House GOP's border security and enforcement-first bill passed last December.

President Bush pays lip service to immigration enforcement and assimilation, while the White House sends Karl Rove to make nice with the separatist leaders of The Race and the Bush Education Department showers our tax dollars on radical Reconquista schools. It doesn't add up.

Unless, of course, you're using Aztec math.

Michelle Malkin [email her] is author of Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s review. Click here for Michelle Malkin's website. Michelle Malkin's latest book is "Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild."