I went on a guided tour Thursday of Rome’s historic Colosseum and saw the significance of the barbarism there thousands of years ago.

Rome presented its public executions as equitable since the person losing a life was armed equally to the professional combatant tasked with spilling the prisoner’s blood.

Even the Romans understood the benefit of faking fairness to persuade the public to accept the overwhelming gaps in skillset and preparedness in those defending themselves in such a cruel environment.

Today’s progressives are much like the Romans of the past.

In liberal school districts across America, they’re doing everything possible to get the public to accept mediocrity as fair and equitable and arming our children with educational paper swords, misleading them into believing they can battle the world without the solid weapon of knowledge.

Take Portland Public Schools.

The district is considering adopting new “equitable grading practices” that it’s already using in some schools.

It sent a handout pointing to data showing historical racial disparities in students’ pass/fail rate.

The handout instructs teachers to avoid giving zeros — or any grade lower than 50% — on assignments not meeting expectations, incomplete or handed in late or not at all.

Homework can’t be graded.

Teachers can’t even penalize the scores of students who’ve cheated.

How do officials justify these wild alterations from the typical grading structure?

“What it’s doing is, it’s assessing mastery and accuracy,” PPS’ Chief Academic Officer Kimberlee Armstrong stated.

“It’s about fairness, it’s about reducing bias, it’s about considering the diverse backgrounds and needs of students.”

Progressive school administrators always talk about biases that exist within their schooling structure, but they rarely discuss what policies exist that are objectively accentuating those biases.

They only know how to present the veneer of fairness by artificially inflating underperformers and leveling the more exceptional students.

A school district that states we need to have fewer expectations of students handing in course work on time because the minority children fail to do so is beyond condescending.

I feel bad for any parent who has a minority child under the tutelage of any “educator” who truly believes this.

Though they’re supposedly fighting to end racial biases, the officials’ reasoning and methodology in changing the grading system only exposes how their motives are based on racial biases, racist tropes and simplistic theories assuming certain groups’ lack of output is equal to intellectual inferiority.

These elitist progressives cannot conceive any other possibility why some minority children are unable to keep up with others in an equal environment other than their race — and to cover up their own years of failure to uplift the ones who have fallen, they manipulate the grading system instead of helping these children.

Real white supremacists would allow someone who doesn’t look like them to struggle surviving while reinforcing the false belief that he or she is actually excelling so the kid fails in a competitive world.

Real racial bias shows itself when officials claim your black child can’t meet simple expectations like handing in work on time.

Now that I think of it, they probably do believe the trope that black people are always late, so let’s not penalize them for handing in work late: They can’t help it, right?

More and more of America’s educators have become ideologically captured and put into practice the most condescending ideas as they claim to be the saviors of the melanated class.

The truth is, they look down on us with pity and have become our social executioners as they create circumstances to set us up for our demise.

The paper sword they’re handing minority children is crafted by a patronizing anti-racist, not a diligent educational sword maker.

Even the ancient Romans could see this isn’t a fair fight.

Adam B. Coleman is the author of “Black Victim to Black Victor” and founder of Wrong Speak Publishing. Follow him on Substack: adambcoleman.substack.com.