In mid-April, I reported on a website operated by the Seattle public school system that defined racism in such a way that only whites can be considered racist.

According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, increasing attention to that website since then has caused the school system to address the issue:

An outpouring of criticism forced Seattle public schools on Thursday to pull a Web site that viewed planning for the future, emphasizing individualism and defining standard English as examples of cultural racism.

The message had appeared under an “equity and race relations” section of the district’s Web site and was mentioned Thursday in an opinion piece by a Libertarian writer in the Seattle P-I. Criticism of the site has been building in the world of blogs for weeks.

In its place Thursday was a message that the site will be revised to “provide more context to reader around the work that Seattle public schools is doing to address institutional racism.”

So, in other words, the school system pulled the website not because it defined racism as a white-only phenomenon or because it defined individualism as a form of racism, but because the website didn’t describe what the school system was doing to fight those racist individualists and their institutions.

I don’t think that statement resolves the situation; if anything, it proves that the critics of the school system are correct in believing that Seattle schools are pushing a political agenda.

The “explanation” offered by the Seattle public school system isn’t satisfying Andrew Coulson of the CATO Institute, either. A recent critic of Seattle’s educrats, Coulson commented on the new developments:

“It’s a non-apology apology,” said Coulson, an education history scholar and author of “Market Education: The Unknown History.”

“My sense was that the definition was extremely offensive, but there was not much sympathy for those who were offended ...,” he said. “The harm that can come from the Web site is the tarring of the ideal of individualism as racist, while the ideal of individualism is a central principle on which our nation was founded. Liberty is individual, not collective. So for our school district — our official school organ of the state — to tell children it’s racist to believe in a principle on which our nation was founded — is troubling.”

Indeed.