This popped up over the weekend. A group calling itself Dallas Justice Now sent a letter asking parents in one white neighborhood near Dallas to stop sending their kids to Ivy League schools.

I’m dead right now. 😂Highland Park is one of the richest areas in Texas. These Democrat parents would walk across hot coals & plan a murder for the chance their kids go to an Ivy League or other top schools. Then they get this from a Black Lives Matter Organization. 😂😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/WlmxNRiPco

— Kathleen McKinley (@KatMcKinley) July 25, 2021

The letter, which claims it was sent to white Democrats who support BLM reads in part, “We are asking you to pledge that your children will not apply or attend any Ivy League School or US News & World Report Top 50 School.” I guess the idea is that by having fewer white parents send their kids to these schools they will make more room for minority parents, though it never quite says that. If the letter is real, it’s not very well thought out.

But is it real? Or is this some kind of satire by a group looking to make social justice efforts seem ridiculous? It’s actually hard to tell.

My first question is where did this group get a mailing list of white Democrats in one Dallas neighborhood? It seems they have been collecting names, addresses and donations for a few months so maybe this is just their own list. Or maybe they bought a list from some other political group.

In any case, the letter directs people to the group’s website where they have a choice to either sign the pledge “I agree” or refuse by choosing “I am a racist hypocrite.” That’s very much in keeping with Robin DiAngelo’s views on social justice (agree or you’re a racist in denial). The site also claims the names of those who refuse to sign will be released publicly.

On the one hand this definitely seems like something you could imagine a genuine SJW group doing. On the other hand, most of these groups are little more subtle in their public approach.

The group definitely has a web presence. Their current URL is dallasjustice.org but they were actually founded last October with a slightly different URL dallasjusticenow.org. Here’s the original site on the Wayback Machine. Since then, they have posted to a blog pretty frequently, sometimes a couple times per day. All of that material has also appeared on their Facebook page. Some of the material may be original but a lot of it is borrowed from Daily Kos or other news sites. All of that to say, this could be a troll but if so it’s one that someone has been working on for about 9 months.

The letter above included a contact email address for someone named Jamila. Just an hour ago (as I write this), there was a video posted on both Facebook and Twitter by someone who identified themselves as Jamila (no last name). “We are a non-profit advocacy group in Dallas and we are fighting for change…I’m a parent myself and I would love to be able to send my children to college. I feel that not only sending my children to college would not just be a good thing for them, a good thing for us. But also in the future to come, their kids will say ‘Hey, mom, dad went to college, I’m going to do that too.'” Here’s what it looked like before it disappeared:

However since I started writing this the video has been scrubbed. Maybe that’s because this blew up on social media yesterday and they are getting a lot of blowback. It’s not clear.

Anyway, it’s genuinely hard to tell if this is just an embarrassing case of a social justice group going too far or if the whole thing is a clever bit of satire by someone with a lot of time on their hands. I see lots of skepticism on social media that the letter above could possibly be real but so far no one seems to have definitive proof one way or the other.

For now, it’s probably best to take it with a big grain of salt. If it’s real, maybe one of the major newspapers in Dallas will write something about it. As of now, the only site that has touched it is Dallas City Wire which is a site I’ve never heard of before. That article quotes the group’s leader saying, “They are the problem. If whites want to be our allies, they MUST make sacrifices.” Again, it’s genuinely hard to tell if this is on the level.