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Meet Sharif El-Mekki, an unabashed black radical — shown here with none other than Angela Davis — who carries on the tradition of tickling money out of the wallets of rich white liberals.
His motives are clear enough: Line his pockets while he promotes what he thinks are the interests of blacks. It’s the donors who interest me more, but with one interesting exception, I couldn’t find real explanations for why they write the fat checks.
Mr. El-Meki’s line is promoting the idea that black students must have black teachers. To that end he runs something called the Center for Black Educator Development.
Please note the raised-fist logo in the upper left. The center’s business is “liberating education.” Liberating it from white people: “Students need mirror images of themselves leading classrooms, but Black students just get windows. They don’t see teachers who reflect their identities and experiences.”
Mr. El-Mekki has written a report called “Respecting Educator Activists of Color: The anti-racist guide to teacher retention.”
It defines education activism as “liberating education from the racism inherent in America’s institutions, including our schools.”
For black teachers, “every lesson plan is a political document, and every classroom interaction a political statement.”
That may not leave much time for math or reading, but every lesson must be liberation because “schools have historically not offered refuge from racist ideologies that sanctioned the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and countless other Black and Brown people [and have] . . . . served as incubators of these cruel and violent forces.”
Here is one of the center’s favorite claims: “Black students who have just one black teacher in K-3 are 13% more likely to graduate from high school and 19% more likely to go to college. If they have two, they are 32% more likely to go to college.”
The center provides no citation for this claim, but black students should be taught only by black teachers. And, indeed, here’s a photo on the center’s site from the good old days of segregation.
The caption explains that these wonderful teachers were “summarily dismissed, phased out and left out” when schools integrated.
As he explained in a “Q&A With Sharif El-Mekki,” “Caroline LeCount, who was a teacher and principal in Philadelphia when schools were forced to desegregate . . . [said], ‘colored children should be taught by their own.’ That was true then and it’s true now.”
This is a photo of the center’s staff; it practices what it preaches.
You can help the center by buying clothes that say, “We need more black teachers.”
Or that sport the center’s black-power logo. Only 25 to 45 dollars.
The center got tax-exempt status only in 2022, but its latest tax filings show that it’s doing very well. From the top, last year it got nearly $9 million in grants, and earned close to $150,000 on investments. It paid $3.5 million in salaries, and ended the year with nearly $20 million in assets.
Mr. El-Mekki’s personal compensation was $233,410.
Here are contractors to which the center paid $100,000 or more. A fancy Lowes hotel got nearly half a million.
This is where the center holds swish events to encourage young blacks to become teachers, and where they learn to make every lesson plan a political statement.
Next comes something called Digigeeks, which got $216,000. It does websites and social media for lefties. Its motto is “we get shit done.”
Next is UNCF, the United Negro College Fund, which got $150,000 for consulting.
And then something called Squadbuck, which writes grant applications. A $9 million harvest of grants at a cost of $112,000 is a good return. SKIP The “our team” page says Squadbuck is “working together for a better world.”
Mr. El-Mekki has an X account that reminds black teachers that every lesson should be a political act.
He also gives childrearing advice: [ 0:00 – 0:08 – no peace.”]
He has given a TED talk called “Reviving the legacy of the Black teaching tradition,” which “stretch[es] from pre-colonial Africa to historical African American leaders.”
In 2022, Mr. El-Mekki was on the transition team for just-elected Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro.
Credit Image: © Michael Brochstein/ZUMA Press Wire
Here he is on the pre-K through 12 subcommittee.
There were 300 people on the transition team, so this may not mean much, but Sharif can claim — and frequently does — that he was an advisor to the governor.
Mr. El-Mekki was raised radical. You can read all about his mother at the site for the Philly Muslim Freedom Fund, whose mission is “uplifting Muslims oppressed by the carceral state.”
That means it posts bail for black Muslims. The fund is dedicated to “Mama” Aisha El-Mekki, who was Sharif’s mother. The freedom fund publishes something called “Surmised Biography of Sister Aisha Kusaidia El-Mekki (born Saundra Marie Dickerson).
You learn about her many battles against racism, her conversion to Islam, and her love of the Black Panthers. It says she took her son — full name Sharif Dawud El-Mekki — to live in Iran, so he is “able to read and recite Quar’an, know[s] Arabic and . . . [is] fluent in Farsi,” the Persian language of Iran.
His six children are named Ali, Ahmed, Fatimah, Sakinah, Zainab and Zakiyyah.
The Muslim Freedom Fund is a little friskier than Sharif’s Center for Black Educator Development. It sells T-shirts with this image that says “Pigs are haram.” Haram means forbidden to Muslims.
In his portrait for the center, Sharif wears a Black Panther Party T-shirt, a toned-down version of the same thing.
I think you have a pretty good idea of this guy. Steeped in negritude, unapologetically black, convinced that America is racist, and running a non-profit with nearly $20 million in assets.
In 2020, the center had net assets of only $287,000.
He appears to be a pretty steady guy, so he may not jump the tracks the way some others did when they hit the jackpot.
Just this month, The Free Press published an article called “BLM Collected Over $90 Million in Donations. Where Did It Go?”
The subhead says: “on tailored suits, birthday parties, and ‘big ass’ mansions.” Some of those highflyers are now doing time in a really “big-ass” house.
But let’s turn to the more interesting but more obscure question of why foundations give him so much money.
The center’s big funding break seems to have come in 2021. “ ‘Bold, Audacious Goal’: Coalition Pushes to Add More Than 1 Million Educators of Color.”
Mr. El-Mekki’s center was one of eight groups that shared $9 million to turn out more black teachers. Tequilla Brownie of something called TNTP, coordinated the fundraising and explained why America needs non-white teachers.
“The data is pretty unassailable … that having access to more diverse teachers means students will have better outcomes, both short term and long term.”
It is now dogma that black students need black teachers.
The $9 million came from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, run by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan.
It claims to be devoted exclusively to science, but notes on its “diversity” page that science is “rife with systemic disparities, inequities, and injustice,” so we need more black teachers.
Here is a request for grant applications from “biomedical researchers with a record of promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion in their scientific field.” In 2022, Mark and Priscilla spent more than $28 million on that.
In fiscal year 2021, the center got money from MacKenzie Scott, Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife, thought to be the third-richest woman in the world. She gave away $3.8 billion dollars to 465 non-profits.
In a post about her giving that year, she talked a lot about equity, the underrepresented, and recited the dogma: “students of all ethnicities achiev[e] better learning outcomes at schools that are racially diverse.”
Mr. El-Mekki hit the bigtime with the Laura and Gary Lauder Family Fund. Here are Laura and Gary themselves, to tell you that their fund “invests in visionary leaders and projects that have the potential to create lasting impact.”
The Center for Black Educator Development is one of its “signature initiatives.”
Their daughter, Eliana Lauder, explains why the foundation gave Sharif a bunch of money in 2021. [3:19 – 4:26 “it really struck us as a Jewish family – do something about it.”]
There’s the dogma again. Black people have to have black teachers.
Maybe they do. I suppose Hispanics and Arabs and Asians need their own teachers.
This is the logic of segregation.
Mr. El-Mekki clearly wants it, but he probably didn’t say so to Laura and Gary and Eliana Lauder. Real segregation means separate communities, institutions, and even countries.
But do white people ever get to go their own way? No. We have to stick around and pay the bills for non-whites to build their own exclusive communities and institutions, and who reserve the right fully to take part in our institutions and even run them.
There is an enormous machine that pours money into countless groups that work explicitly and openly for non-whites. The focus could be education, immigrant rights, refugee resettlement, so-called police reform, “poverty” and “health” initiatives, diversity, you name it. They all more or less openly blame racism — that is to say, us — for the problems they claim to be solving. There are thousands — many thousands — of Sharif El-Mekkis. But who speaks for us? How many activists or organizations think of whites as anything other than oppressors and as sheep to be sheared?
And we’re still the majority. It will get worse as we decline as a percentage of the population.
We need to take the El-Mekkis at their word. If they can brandish their fists and demand black teachers, black communities, black everything, we should demand the same for whites. We can’t go on being the milk cows for everyone else.
We need to recognize this isn’t our country anymore and build a new one that will be ours.
