Shortly after the San Francisco Chronicle published an op-ed that denounced an educational program called Woke Kindergarten, the right-wing echo chamber kicked into high gear.

Tiger Craven-Neeley, the author of the op-ed and a third-grade instructor at Glassbrook Elementary in Hayward, California, was incensed that the district had spent $250,000 on workshops and one-on-one mentoring for teachers run by Woke Kindergarten founder Akiea Gross. He deemed it a waste of taxpayer money. Although Craven-Neely was put on leave by the district in February for unspecified unprofessional conduct, Gross has been subjected to ongoing doxxing and harassment since the op-ed was circulated. What’s more, Woke Kindergarten’s contract with Glassbrook Elementary was abruptly terminated in February after a two-year run; it had originally been contracted for three years, beginning in 2022.

In addition, the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation, a four-year-old entity created to oppose “the woke culture that is destroying America,” has filed a complaint against the Hayward Unified School District with the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights and the Alameda County Office of Education, charging in the filing that it improperly spent federal funds on “left wing indoctrination rather than reading and math.”

The complaint has garnered many right-wing supporters, some of them long-standing groups in conservative circles and some of them more recently formed: Eagle Forum of California, the Chinese American Citizens Alliance, For Kids and Country, the National Association of Scholars and Color Us United, among them. Right-wing press accounts have added to the conservative frenzy, linking Woke Kindergarten to the evergreen bugaboo of critical race theory (CRT). And Congresswoman Virginia Foxx (R-North Carolina) took to the floor of the House of Representatives to declare in February that Woke Kindergarten is “what is wrong with our education system.”

Woke Kindergarden is the brainchild of Akiea Gross, a nonbinary educator who began teaching more than a decade ago. Gross has master’s degrees from Columbia University’s Teachers College and Touro University, and began the project on their Instagram page in 2016. “I’d created a teaching unit called ‘Everyday Heroes versus Superheroes Through a Lens of Black History and Resistance’ and wanted to share this resource with others,” Gross told Truthout. Their students, kindergarteners at Harlem Village Academies (HVA), had been using the curriculum and learning about the power of organizing when Donald Trump was elected president in 2016. “They were upset,” Gross recalled, “and wanted to protest. That was the moment that Woke Kindergarten first entered my mind.”

Gross left HVA in 2018 and spent the next two years consulting. Then, in 2020, the pandemic hit. “Very quickly, schools closed and on-site early childhood programs crumbled. People were overwhelmed and did not know how to talk to their kids about the virus or about the death of George Floyd,” Gross said. “I am a responsive educator. I saw the need to create something so I made it. I also started........

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