Critical race theory (CRT) isn’t new, but it’s widespread prevalence in the American education system is. Now some people are trying to convince us that angry, paranoid parents are mislabeling new teaching frameworks as CRT because CRT is not being taught in schools. Also, they claim that the parents who oppose changes to school policies and curriculum should be labeled “domestic terrorists,” but that’s another story.
While we should promote critical thinking in schools and learn to consider material from different perspectives, that is not what CRT does. Instead, CRT teaches students that their identities determine their complicity in systemic oppression and indoctrinates classrooms to hate values like equality, individual merit, and colorblindness. And it doesn’t stop there. Parents in a NYC public school were called on to “reflection on their whiteness” because “whiteness” is so dangerous. To do so, these parents were asked to refer to Barnor Hesss’s 8 White Identities.
Defining Critical Race Theory
So, what is CRT? The textbook titled Critical Race Theory: An Introduction gives the following definition: “The critical race theory (CRT) movement is a collection of activists and scholars engaged in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power. The movement considers many of the same issues that conventional civil rights and ethnic studies discourses take up but places them in a broader perspective that includes economics, history, setting, group and self-interest, and emotions and the unconscious. Unlike traditional civil rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law. (p. 3, emphasis added)
CRT is the basis for rewriting American history through baseless efforts like the 1619 Project. This theory undergirds concepts of “white privilege,” “white fragility,” and “white oppression,” which blame white people (straight, Christian men in particular) for the injustices in society and portrays people of color as victims. It collapses western culture with “whiteness,” so if a person of color embraces western values like being on time, working hard, and Christianity, he or she would be considered “white adjacent,” which is almost as bad. (Never mind that good values transcend “white cultures” and the first Christians emerged in the Middle East and Africa.)
And if you’ve ever heard of needing to “decenter yourself,” that is CRT talk for “you’re too privileged, so you’re inherently oppressive, and you need to submit to the historically marginalized and oppressed.” Additionally, CRT is at the root of the defund the police push because these activists believe that law enforcement and legal institutions are inherently and systemically racist.
For more on CRT, check this and this out.
CRT and American Education
Despite what some educators, politicians, and media pundits may tell you, CRT is being taught from kindergarten to graduate school in a growing number of American schools, colleges, and universities. Even if they don’t mention it by name, race, gender, and sexuality (all components of critical theories in general) frame lessons and how teachers structure (or “de-structure”) classrooms.
So if it looks like a critical duck, walks like a critical duck, and quacks like a critical duck, it is a critical duck even if teachers say that it identifies as a non-critical goose. Names are far less consequential than the actual instruction of any theory’s tenets.
And the tenets of CRT are being taught in schools. Check out this and this for a few examples. And if you think these examples, if true, are outliers, please visit this website that tracks the schools that teach CRT and is ran by Cornell Professor Bill Jacobson. His currently tally is that about 400 colleges and universities are teaching and promoting CRT. And check out this for CRT in K-12 schools. And this is one of many parents explaining the negative impacts of overly racialized lessons (among other things).
I know this is true because I have seen it myself for the past decade and a half. When I was in high school in Oregon I was selected to participate in a seminar in race that my father later found out was a beta test for CRT for the school district. In this seminar I was told that I am inherently racist and privileged because I am white, and that I couldn’t disagree with any person of color because I am not one. I stood up to the adults running the seminar when they said disparaging things about white people because one of the rules of the seminar is that one race could not dictate or invalidate the experience of another race, and those adults said they were not white.
I’ve also seen CRT work its way through higher education. Now the most vocal students always complain about systemic oppression, seek ways to bring down the system, and expect professors to train them to be activists. And if a professor or administrator does not toe the CRT line, these activist students will launch heinous, deceitful campaigns to cancel them. I know this because it happened to me. A growing number of students are becoming ideologically captured by CRT so much so that anyone well-versed with CRT can predict everything these students will say. That is a clear indicator that these people are being brainwashed, not educated.
And an increasing number of schools are embracing “anti-racist” (the solution to the problems raised in CRT) doctrine in their mission statements and creating new courses and departments to promote CRT. Here’s an example. Notice that one of the assignments is as follows: “Develop a Social Justice Project: This class will consider the concept of social justice as a means of disrupting the effects of systematically imposed repressive forces.” Just go to a local university’s website, or your alma mater, and search “critical race” and see what comes up.
The Consequences of CRT
Telling children to hate their country’s past, other people because of the color of their skin, and themselves if they are the wrong color (i.e., white) will clearly have dire consequences. We should not ignore the racism and oppression of the past. We should also not view history with such a black and white (pun intended) framework that omits facts, lacks nuance, and is often blatantly false.
This is not education. This is indoctrination. Our kids are not learning how to think but what to think. They rage against a system they don’t even understand. Ironically, some of my most activist-like students earned some of the worst grades in the American Politics university courses I taught. So, if your kids are in a school, private or public, pay attention! Also, be wary of policies that include terms like “inclusion,” “diversity,” and “equity”
because these represent radical, destructive solutions based in CRT.
What makes this gaslighting about CRT worse is that many of the same people who say that CRT in schools is a vast right-wing conspiracy are now telling us that parents don’t have the right to determine their own children’s education. These people think that the rest of us are unable (or unwilling) to expose our children to a broad range of perspectives, so only educators should make decisions on a school’s curriculum.
Let’s not kid ourselves. CRT is the most intolerant, close-minded, delusional framework that has even been taught in American schools, to the best of my knowledge. And according to their logic, you have to trust me because I was an educator. But something tells me they don’t want me running the show.
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