Is this new "racism" even worth being ashamed of?

By now, most people have heard about Portland, Ore. school principal Verenice Gutierrez's comments about the racially divisive nature of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Here they are in the original newspaper article:

Verenice Gutierrez picks up on the subtle language of racism every day.

Take the peanut butter sandwich, a seemingly innocent example a teacher used in a lesson last school year.

“What about Somali or Hispanic students, who might not eat sandwiches?” says Gutierrez, principal at Harvey Scott K-8 School, a diverse school of 500 students in Northeast Portland’s Cully neighborhood.

“Another way would be to say: ‘Americans eat peanut butter and jelly, do you have anything like that?’ Let them tell you. Maybe they eat torta. Or pita.”

This expanded version of racism is watered-down to the point of being meaningless. Instead of malice and assumptions about a person based on their race, this new "racism" is a virtually-harmless array of minor faux pas based on unfamiliarity with cultural nuances.

I can remember a few years ago racism was being redefined as "power plus privilege," which was a heavy-handed way to excuse non-white racists. It was as if there was no English word for racial hatred from minority members. Now we're seeing more diversity in high-profile racists, such as the actions of Latinos openly called racist.

Victim-mongers are twisting the concept of privilege to say that merely not knowing every minor differences they have with every obscure cultural on earth is "racist."

I'm sure Gutierrez gets a pass on this because of her Mexican heritage, but if you're going to look for nano-racism at that threshold, you don't get to say "Hispanic." The preferred term is "Latino" and her choice of words is a lot closer to being offensive than mentioning a sandwich.

Sandwiches are known all over the world, including in Southern and Central America, and shielding immigrant students from knowledge of basic American culture does them a disservice.

The worst part is that Gutierrez wasn't born this ignorant; she had to train for it. Her school district spent more than $500,000 paying a bogus consulting firm called Pacific Education Group to teach school officials ways to invent problems in the search for racism.

I figured Brietbart.com was being disingenuous when it said these consultants claim that white privilege in the school system is the primary cause of the black achievement gap, and not poverty, violence, broken families or lousy schools, but it was right there as the motto on the front of the web site.

At Pacific Educational Group we believe Systemic Racism is the most devastating factor contributing to the diminished capacity of all children, especially black children, to achieve at the highest levels, and contributes to the fracturing of the communities that nurture and support them.

They also seem to be a two-trick pony operation, as their seminar page only lists Latinos and Somalis - the two groups from Gutierrez's example - as their area of focus.

Picture this: A grade school teacher gives the class a word problem about how many sandwiches someone will have left over if they start with five and eat two but the conversation quickly turns to what exactly counts as a sandwich and students share their experiences with tortas and pites. Everyone spends the afternoon learning about the evils of cultural assumptions and the math lesson is abandoned in search of curing society's ills.

Maybe that's why Gutierrez's school performs in the bottom 15 percent of the state.