Last night the Santa Ana Unified School District Board of Education – which is being sued over alleged anti-Semitism in the development and content of its radical Ethnic Studies curriculum – voted to re-hire the same consultant who helped develop that curriculum over which they’re being sued – this time to train district educators in teaching that curriculum.
The contract for $92,000 was awarded to Xicanx Institute for Teaching and Organizing – more commonly known as Xito – a radical non-profit that “provides decolonial Ethnic Studies” training. The contract was approved unanimously and without discussion, despite objections from members of the public.
Xito is based in Tuscon and run by two “liberated” Ethnic Studies activists – Sean Arce and Anita Fernandez.
Arce is a radical firebrand infamous for inflammatory posts in social media that cross into anti-Semitic territory. In a May 2021 Facebook post, for example, he accused Jews of controlling the California state legislature and the development of the state’s Model Ethnic Studies Curriculum.
Arce was one of the Ethnic Studies missionaries who were apoplectic over the backlash against the original draft Model Ethnic Studies Curriculum, which resulted in the extremely radical curriculum framework being deep-sixed in 2019. Arce and other Ethnic Studies devotees reject the current model curriculum as watered-down and consider the original draft to truly represent Ethnic Studies – hence it is “liberated.”
“The founder of Xito promotes himself to be significantly anti-Semitic, as evidenced by his social media posts, which make bigoted remarks about Jewish legislators,” said Karen Jaffe.
“There are posts that simultaneously accuse Jews of controlling the United States,” said Jaffe. “His social media is a veritable training ground as a classic course on anti-Semitism.”
She also said Arce “promotes violence: he applauded and shared [an Instragram] reel protestors in Mexico burning the Israeli embassy.”
“Given that the district is defending itself against claims of anti-Semitism, it is not in the district’s best interests to renew its contract with Xito,” said Jaffe.
“I’m here to ask you to please not renew the Xito contract,” Robin Gee asked Board members. Given the group’s intense and one-sided political focus and views, she said utilizing Xito would necessarily cause Ethnic Studies teachers of violate official Board policy requiring teacher impartially and factually present all sides of controversial issues, without promoting any partisan positions.
“And that teachers help students separate fact from opinion and warn them against drawing conclusions with insufficient data,” she said.
Xito teaches nothing but partisanship and encourages its supporters to take wild out of context assumptions as fact,” she continued.
Gee said Xito’s ideological teacher training pedagogy violates a section of their contract with SAUSD, which prohibits vendors from discrimination or encouraging discrimination by teachers and student based on race, color, religion, national origin and ancestry.
“Zito’s framework is a statis binary of oppressed v. oppressor,” said G, and they teach that the only way out is becoming ‘resistance warriors’.”
Arce has since deleted his personal Instagram and Facebook accounts, as well as Xito’s Instagram and Facebook accounts. His personal X.com account, and Xito’s X.com account remains active.
Xito’s X.com account is dominated by post’s accusing Israel of “genocide” in its war of self-defense against Hamas. Given Xito’s overwhelming focus on the Israel-Hamas war, it is remarkable that the group completely ignores the October 7 savage massacre of 1,200 innocent Israelis women, old people, children and men.
Here is a Xito post celebrating the violent Watts riots of 1965, in which 34 people were killed:
Earlier this month, Arce approvingly shared this ad – created by the theocratic dictatorship that is the government of Iran – depicting an Israeli Olympic athlete as having blood on his hands:
Here, Arce shares a denunciation of Israel as a creature of “European settler colonialism draped in religion defended by white guilt and capitalism.”
Arce’s anti-white bigotry and general paranoia is on display in this social media post:
Here is Arce posting that white people should be denied input into Ethnic Studies curriculum by virtue of being born white:
While Arce is more high-profile, his business partner Anita Fernandez is just as radical. “Abolition” in this context is a branch of Critical Theory that is opposed to educational norms such as testing and punishing cheating, and pushes deemphasizing traditional math and literacy programs. In other words, it’s goal is abolishing what normal people think of as education.
These are just examples. A deep dive into Xito, Arce and Fernandez quickly surfaces a dep-seated political radicalism that is alien to the experience of the vast majority of Americans.
At the heart of the Jewish communities objections to the SAUSD Ethnic Studies curriculum is its deep-seated hostility to Israel and equally deep-seated sympathy to Palestinian “resistance” that has manifested itself in decades of violence and terrorism aimed to Israel’s destruction – culminating in Hamas’ mass murder of 1,200 innocent Israelis on October 7
The SAUSD is paying Arce to train SAUSD’s Ethnic Studies teachers in how to teach the district’s impressionable young students how to view the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Social media posts like this lend credence to his critics and underscore grave concerns as to why SAUSD leadership continues to entrust teacher training to a political activist with such inflammatory and extreme views.
Even a cursory review of the views of Arce and Fernandez and the viewpoints pushed by Xito would lead a reasonable person to conclude the objections of Jewish community members are justified – raise serious questions about whether the SAUSD Board member are more concerned about molding junior social justice warriors rather than educating children.
A reasonable person might also question why SAUSD Board members, facing a very strong lawsuit that is exposing anti-Semitism within the district, would double-down and once entrust teacher training politicized educators whose corpus of statements, posts and opinions can fairly be described as anti-Semitic?
