A federal agency funneled coronavirus relief funds from President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan to “anti-racism” and “social activism” programs for children.
The Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) announced a total of $15,255,733 in coronavirus relief for grants “to institutions across 49 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico to support the role of museums and libraries in recovering from the coronavirus pandemic,” according to Fox News.
Many of these grants were radical social activism and anti-racism-oriented programs for children and had little-to-nothing to do with coronavirus relief.
The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, received $50,000 to build a nine-foot tall bronze statue in Marcus Garvey Park to “address black masculinity, stereotypes and shared diasporic experiences.”
The Rochester Museum and Science Center received $49,632 in order to fund a field trip for third-graders that would “utilize the ‘Take It Down’ exhibit, which tells the story of a community-led effort to remove racist artwork from a historic carousel, as a tool for anti-racism education.”
Boston, Massachusetts’ Historic New England was awarded $49,750 to hire a curator to “amplify marginalized voices and represent a complete history of the region,” and catalog and digitize documentation of the impacts of the Black Lives Matter movement and the coronavirus pandemic in “A Time to Remember.”
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts received $43,400 to fund training guides to “incorporate greater cultural fluency and responsiveness into their tours using an anti-racist lens,” and “introduce new tour topics for school audiences” regarding “social-emotional learning, identity, empathy, and social activism.”
The new program will serve pre-K through 12th grade students as well as adults and university and multigenerational audiences.
“The museum will also introduce new tour topics for school audiences when in-person tours reopen in 2022, including social-emotional learning, identity, empathy, and social activism,” according to the IMLS website.
Northwest Mississippi Community College was awarded $33,000 in coronavirus relief funds to start “safe spaces” on campus so that students can cope with “post-pandemic stress, racial injustice, diversity/inclusion, and resilience.”
The Whitaker Center for Science and the Arts in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, received $50,000 to push “equity, diversity, and inclusion-focused STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) programs for pre-K through 12th-grade students in the greater Harrisburg area.”
In order to fund a “programmatic staff member to collaborate with and support communities of color and LGBTQ communities, as well as a curator to work with communities on climate change and climate justice,” Alaska’s Anchorage Museum was awarded $50,000.
The American Rescue Plan was passed along completely partisan lines, and was sold by the president to the American people as being about recovery from the artificial shutdown in response to the pandemic.
“Now, critics say my plan is too big, that it costs $1.9 trillion,” Biden said at the time. “So that’s too much. Well, let me ask them: What would they have me cut? What would they have me leave out?”
IMLS told Fox News in part that these funds were allocated “to support the vital programs and services libraries, museums, federally recognized tribes, and nonprofit organizations serving Native Hawaiians provide to their communities.”
Breccan F. Thies is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter @BreccanFThies.
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