white supremacy – Homeschoolers Anonymous

White Supremacist Homeschooling

November 20, 2014May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team5 Comments

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Jonny Scaramanga’s blog, Leaving Fundamentalism. It was originally published on August 26 2014, and has been modified for publication on HA.

So here’s the most horrible thing I’ve found in a while: White Pride Homeschooling.

I don’t even want to give their page the extra traffic, so I’m linking to an archived version of their website (from August 2014).

From their website (Warning: you are about to read racist propaganda):

The biggest increase in intermarriage has occurred in recent years, due to the social interaction of children of different races in the school room and subsequently the board room and then bedroom. In the year 2000 – 9 percent of married men and women below age 30 were intermarried, compared with 7 percent of those ages 30 to 44, 5 percent for those ages 45 to 59, and about 3 percent among those age 60 and older. Obviously school busing, the promotion of interracial marriages by “Christian” preachers, visible images in all types of media, and 12 (plus) years of social conditioning in the schools for each and every child has had a devastating effect on the racial integrity of white America.

Gotta love the use of square quotes around “Christian” in the above paragraph, because obviously true Christians are racist Christians.

Yup, this is a Christian organisation. No doubt you are wondering which curriculums they suggest parents can use without polluting the minds of their pure Aryan offspring.

In no particular order:

Bob Jones University Press

Alpha Omega (pretty much a clone of ACE, but reputedly more academically challenging)

CLASS (the Christian Liberty Academy School System, which produces a custom curriculum based on a mixture of texts from publishers including A Beka and Bob Jones)

And, of course, Lighthouse Christian Academy, which is the homeschool wing of Accelerated Christian Education.

*****

You may be surprised. You should not be.

Now, I am not saying that Accelerated Christian Education is a white supremacist organisation. I’m sure ACE would prefer to distance itself from such racism (Side note: Dear ACE, if you publicly condemn this organisation, I will write one blog post in which I say nothing but nice things about you). But it is telling that the bigots at White Christian Homeschool find ACE’s materials entirely compatible with their aims.

The fact that ACE’s cartoons depict segregated classrooms means that Mrs White Supremacist Homeschool Mom can rest assured that the materials will reinforce what she is already telling her children: White kids should be separated from the other kids. After all, these white supremacists don’t hate black people. They even link to the National Black Home Educators Resource Association, explaining: “As we encourage a Christian lifestyle for all races and do not believe in integrated classrooms – we are providing this link.” See, they’re thoughtful really.

Bob Jones University’s presence in this company is even less of a surprise, given that organisation’s history of white supremacism. It’s not entirely clear when BJU would have abandoned its discriminatory entrance policy if the political climate had not forced it to do so by 1975.

If all this is shocking you, clearly you need to bone up on your history.

Biblical literalism lends itself quite comfortably to racism. “Slaves obey your masters” is a clear-cut instruction. Although my Christian teachers loved to remind me that the British Abolitionist William Wilberforce was a Christian, they tended to gloss over the fact that most of those opposing him were Christians too.

As Mark Noll noted of the US Civil War, and Carolyn Renee Dupont argued about American segregation, racists have always found ammunition in the pages of the Bible. And this is partly because of the way they read it.

Today fundamentalists condemn racism (and they find Bible verses to support that, too). But the way they encourage children to read the Bible has not changed. As a non-believer, of course, I don’t hold the Bible sacred at all, but it seems clear to me that if you’re going to study it, you need to pay attention to the context in which things were written. The Bible is a compilation of books by different authors who made different points, so you cannot conclude “what the Bible says about X” from any single passage.

It’s funny, isn’t it, that Christians suddenly started noticing that the Bible was opposed to racism shortly after it became culturally unacceptable to be racist.

I don’t care whether you can find more verses in the Bible to support racism or to condemn it. All that matters is that it’s possible to support both positions quite well from the text. And this proves that the way ACE (and its ilk) teach children to read the Bible in fact does nothing to prepare them for the real world.

Begging God To Make Me White: Rachel’s Story

November 11, 2014May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team16 Comments

Also by Rachel on HA: “Hurts Me More Than You: Rachel’s Story.”

I never realized what an anomaly my family was at homeschool conventions or homeschool co-ops until recently we ran into another Indian family at one. The first I have ever met. And they were only looking into homeschooling. They weren’t even homeschooling yet!

See, my family is not your typical homeschooling family. We’re brown. But more than that, we’re Indian. Like, from India.

And we are still the only Indian homeschool family to date that I know.

For years I’ve felt like an outsider at homeschool conventions because I would look around and every single other person was white, with either brown or red hair neatly tucked into a bun, a traditional jean jumper or skirt, and a nicely demure aura, and there I was with my brown skin, long straight black hair hanging loose, jeans, and gauzy shirt. You can imagine the looks I got.

And here’s where it gets personal.

Race is a very big thing in the homeschool community, I’ve discovered. Douglas Wilson has been skyrocketed into the spotlight for his classic white supremacist views, and his book excusing slavery in the American South, but before I even read his book I started having problems with a class I was taking at the time: Gileskirk Christendom, based on the beliefs of a certain Dr. George Grant. He portrayed Western Civilization, and, most notably white people, as the “greatest flowering of Christianity”, and descrys the rest of the world as pagan, primitive, and ungodly.

It’s as if Christianity equals White.

When I was 12 and 13 I had a mad crush on a young man who was a personal friend of our family. I thought he was fantastic. I adored him pretty much. But he was a good 7-8 years older than me and never realized my hopeless obsession. Before long I realized that there was no way he would ever fall for me, and I remember my mom telling me that it was hopeless because his mom would decide who he courted, and the girl he married would have to be white. (His mom was just that kind who read all the “white supremacy couched as christian” homeschool literature, and raised her kids on Westerns where white = good and dark = bad).

After all, good upstanding white Christian homeschooled guys want a “clean” girl. They want someone with white skin and brown hair, who’s tall and fair and a poster child for homeschooling. They don’t look for shorty curvy brown girls who have way too much passion and poetry in their veins.

And believe me, I’d read all the books. On how you had to be meek and quiet and not rebel or listen to secular music; and all the books made a white southern lifestyle seem equatable with Christianity. You know, where you didn’t go to college, and waited for the perfect Prince Charming. What particularly impacted my view, though, was that the books said that being seductive or sexy was “the sin of Bathsheba” therefore it was considered taboo.

Now, one considers white skin inherently “seductive” or “exotic”, yet those are exactly the stereotypes which come with having copper colored skin. I was convinced that had I only been white, he may have cared for me and it broke my heart and plunged me into extreme self-hatred.

I can remember writing a teary-eyed journal entry begging God to make me white because if I was white, then he would love me. Well, he turned out courting a girl who is just that: white. tall. fair. with brown – blonde hair and who’s pretty much perfect.

And while we all have ideas of what our first heartbreak will be, little did I think that it was my skin color which would break my heart.

I came across a small homeschool pamphlet on courtship yesterday which listed a number of factors which would disqualify a person as a potential spouse. One of them was entitled “race”.

My eyes filled with tears and I threw the book across the room.

It’s just that mindset which is so contrary to the Word of God which says that in Christ there is neither “Jew nor Greek” and that God is no “respecter of persons”, that frustrates me so much. Perhaps this is because I personally have experienced it. I know firsthand the destructive consequences.

It has taken me years to see anything beautiful in my skin color. It’s still a struggle. There are days I’m ok with it, and days I hate it because it’s so…. brown.

If race is something I have no control over, then what makes a white girl more christian simply because she, through no superiority or fault of her own, was born with less melanin in her skin than me?

And after years spent with SPF 100, whitening creams, etc. I give up.

I’m me and that has to be enough.

But I can 100% assure you that those books aren’t helping anything. It’s stupid to hold one skin color up as “better” than another. Because in the eyes of God we are all equal, no matter.

It’s about time the homeschool community discards the religious baloney and heads back to Scripture on this one.

When Homeschoolers Turn Violent: Cheyne Kehoe

March 10, 2014May 12, 2020HA Editorial Team2 Comments

Series note: “When Homeschoolers Turn Violent” is a joint research project by Homeschoolers Anonymous and Homeschooling’s Invisible Children. Please see the Introduction for detailed information about the purpose and scope of the project.

Trigger warning: If you experience triggers from descriptions of physical and sexual violence, please know that the details in many of the cases are disturbing and graphic.

*****

Cheyne Kehoe

Like his older brother Chevie, Cheyne was homeschooled and inculcated into the white supremacy beliefs of his parents.

Despite his own extremism, Cheyne ultimately became disturbed by his older brother’s violence after his brother “began talking of killing their parents and his own wife,” as well as “taking a sexual interest in Cheyne’s wife.” Cheyne was the one who turned his brother in to the authorities.

After his involvement in the police shootout in 1997 with his brother Chevie and his connection to the Aryan Peoples Republic (considered a terrorist cell), Cheyne was featured on America’s Most Wanted. He later turned himself in to authorities. Cheyne was sentenced in 1998 to more than 24 years in prison for attempted murder. This sentence was reduced to 11 years because he had turned his brother in as well.

Upon being released from prison, Cheyne moved with his father Kirby from Washington to Arizona. Despite being banned from owning firearms as convicted felons, they began stockpiling weapons. Cheyne and his father Kirby were consequently arrested again in September of 2013 on “federal firearms charges,” after a raid on their sprawling ranch in Arizona turned up “dozens of weapons and thousands of rounds of ammunition.”

View the case index here.

When Homeschoolers Turn Violent: Chevie Kehoe

March 10, 2014May 12, 2020HA Editorial TeamLeave a comment

Trigger warning: If you experience triggers from descriptions of physical and sexual violence, please know that the details in many of the cases are disturbing and graphic.

*****

Chevie Kehoe

Chevie Kehoe is the oldest of eight sons born to Kirby and Gloria Kehoe.

He was named after his father’s favorite brand of automobile. Born in Orange Park, Florida in 1973, Chevie’s family moved in 1985 to Stevens County, Washington. They lived there for years in “isolation and poverty.” Chevie was enrolled in a public junior high in 1987 and was an honor student who dreamed of joining the Air Force. But his parents withdrew both him and his younger brother Cheyne one year later to homeschool them. His father saw school as a threat, and his parents urged him “to become a white warrior instead.”

Chevie’s family raised him with extreme anti-government and white supremacist views. They pressured him and his brother to bow to their beliefs, resisting their children’s desires to have driver’s licenses and Social Security numbers. Eventually, Chevie himself became a self-identified white supremacist. He formed a plan to take down the U.S. government with a militia for the “Aryan People’s Republic.” He married two women, claiming that polygamy furthered the Aryan race. By the age of 24,

Mr. Kehoe was one of the most notorious white supremacists in the United States, having engaged in a kidnapping, three robberies, three murders and two police shootouts, all in a quest to establish an Aryan republic for white people.

In 1995, Chevie and his father Kirby robbed a man in Tilly, Arkansas. The man, William Mueller, was a friend and an unlicensed gun dealer. A year later, Chevie and another individual robbed the Mueller family again, but this time tortured and murdered William, his wife Nancy, and his 8-year-old stepdaughter Sarah. They dumped the bodies in the Illinois Bayou. The bodies were later discovered by a woman who hooked a shoe and bone while fishing. In 1997, Chevie and his brother Cheyne were involved in a shootout with police officers in Ohio, video from which aired on World’s Scariest Police Shootouts. In 1998, Chevie pled guilty to felonious assault, attempted murder, and carrying a concealed weapon relating to the shootout. Finally, in 1999, Chevie was convicted of murdering William Mueller and his family. He received 3 life sentences in prison without parole. Chevie’s own mother Gloria and younger brother Cheyne testified against him.

In the only interview Chevie gave after his 1997 arrest, he blamed his family for his life path. He said,

In my entire life, my dad always hated this or hated that and never gave me something to love or something to work toward.

View the case index here.

When Homeschoolers Turn Violent: Joseph Hall

March 7, 2014May 12, 2020HA Editorial Team2 Comments

Trigger warning: If you experience triggers from descriptions of physical and sexual violence, please know that the details in many of the cases are disturbing and graphic.

*****

Joseph Hall

In May 2011, 10-year-old Joseph Hall shot his father Jeffrey at point blank range with his father’s own gun. The murder made national headlines not only because of Joseph’s young age but also because the boy’s father was a Neo-Nazi and a regional director of the National Socialist Movement, a white separatist group.

Joseph’s home life has been described as extremely troubling. His parents divorced when he was young and their custody battle raged for years. He experienced years of abuse, being beaten regularly by his dad. Child protective services were called to his family’s home 23 times, beginning when Joseph was only 3 months old. Unfortunately, no abuse could be substantiated.

He began experiencing behavioral and emotional issues and learning challenges in pre-school. His father indoctrinated him into his white supremacy beliefs. Both in public school and at home, Joseph lashed out. He reportedly “hit his sisters and his stepmother, stabbed classmates at school with pencils and once tried to strangle a teacher with a telephone cord.” With “a history of severe aggressive behavior,” he was kicked out of nine schools. Joseph was ultimately withdrawn from public school to be homeschooled. His father was the one to homeschool him, despite having only completed 11th grade himself.

Jeffrey Hall, the father, was part of the National Socialist Movement, a neo-Nazi organization labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Jeffrey educated his son on how to “patrol” the Mexican-American border and how to operate guns.

Joseph decided to murder his father because he thought his father was going to divorce his stepmother and break up their family. After the murder, while he was being interrogated, Joseph said that, “I didn’t want to do it. It’s just that he hurts us.”

In 2013, Joseph was found guilty of murder. He was sentenced by the Riverside County Superior Court to 10 years in a state juvenile correction facility.

View the case index here.