Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signed a bill on May 7 banning the teaching of critical race theory in the state’s public and charter schools.
Critical race theory is a quasi-Marxist ideology that holds that racism is ingrained in the United States. Among other concepts, it labels people with white skin, including children, as oppressors who hold an inherent advantage over other races and should feel guilt due to their “privilege.”
Critical race theory is fast becoming America’s new institutional orthodoxy. Yet most Americans have never heard of it — and of those who have, many don’t understand it. This must change. We need to know what it is so we can know how to fight it.
To explain critical race theory, it helps to begin with a brief history of Marxism.
Originally, the Marxist left built its political program on the theory of class conflict. Karl Marx believed that the primary characteristic of industrial societies was the imbalance of power between capitalists and workers. The solution to that imbalance, according to Marx, was revolution: The workers would eventually gain consciousness of their plight, seize the means of production, overthrow the capitalist class and usher in a new socialist society.
Public school education has never been more propagandistic.
We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst,” wrote C. S. Lewis, commenting in his book The Abolition of Man about propagandistic trends in education. These days public school educators laugh at patriotism and are not shocked but pleased to find anti-American dissidents in our midst. Even Lewis couldn’t have anticipated the sheer volume of poisonous propaganda sloshing through today’s public schools, propaganda that is deliberately designed to turn students against their own country.
President Joe Biden may have revoked his predecessor’s ban on critical race theory and embraced its concept of “equity,” but several US states have adopted laws against the doctrine, setting up a showdown with the White House.
On Tuesday, Arkansas passed legislation banning critical race theory (CRT) “indoctrination” in public agencies and prohibiting the state from promoting collective guilt, segregation, racial stereotyping or scapegoating.
A father who pulled his daughter out of her $43,000-per-year New York City school said other parents are unaware of how bad the ‘woke’ teaching in the city’s schools has become, and should follow his lead and withdraw their children.
Harvey Goldman took his nine-year-old out of Heschel School, a Jewish day school on the Upper West Side, because he felt its curriculum ‘teaches children to feel bad about the color of their skin’.
‘They are teaching these kids terrible things,’ he said on Tuesday. ‘Teaching them to feel bad about themselves and it is really awful.’
MSNBC host Joy Reid mocked a parent Tuesday night for saying that opposing critical race theory in schools was not racist.
Reid said that thanks to the “1619 Project,” a controversial initiative to teach history in a way that centers around slavery and teaches that 1619 was the true founding of the United States, “we’ve seen a growing movement to reframe how American history is taught in public schools.”
Many American parents may assume that culture-war battles over critical race theory and “wokeness” are fought on legitimate terrain, involving such matters as how high school students can best grapple with our nation’s complex past. Perhaps they think that the suddenly ubiquitous topics of gender identity and preferred pronouns rankle only those parents who are old-fashioned in their thinking. If only. America’s youngest students are being bombarded with classroom activism and indoctrination that is inappropriate not only developmentally but for public school systems in general.
A Texas school board has scored an overwhelming election victory to stop “critical race theory” and a new “cultural competence action plan” from being forced into classes.
The elections in Southlake on Saturday were so divisive that backers of the new anti-racism measures called on the Department of Justice to intervene — and even pop star Demi Lovato ripped opponents of the plan.
The Oklahoma House on Thursday voted to ban public schools and universities from teaching critical race theory in civics and history classes.
After hours of discussion and debate, the GOP-controlled House voted 70-19 in favor of the bill, HB1775, which now heads to Gov. Kevin Stitt’s desk to be signed into law.
How this pernicious ideology rejects rational inquiry and objective truth.
On September 22, 2020, President Trump issued Executive Order 13950, “Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping.” The order contained the kind of emotionally charged language about critical race theory that is seldom seen in these legalistic documents: “This ideology is rooted in the pernicious and false belief that America is an irredeemably racist and sexist country; that some people, simply on account of their race or sex, are oppressors; and that racial and sexual identities are more important than our common status as human beings and Americans.”
Once upon a time, a CRT was a Cathode Ray Tube, that bulky thing that ran old televisions. Those tubes have been replaced by sleek new liquid crystal displays, but the initialism lives again as the hottest thing in totalitarian ideology: Critical Race Theory.
CRT is still an idiot box, however. It tells you what it wants and shuts out everything else. But instead of showing you I Love Lucy and Gunsmoke (or Miami Vice and Knight Rider) it shows you that America is a racist monstrosity that inculcates white supremacy at every turn. Don’t try to change the channel, CRT is at every frequency. Sit back and obey.
When John McWhorter, professor of Linguistics and American Studies at Columbia, described ‘antiracism’ as America’s ‘new flawed religion’ in 2015, few could have imagined just how prescient that description would prove to be. Just last week, the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi thanked George Floyd for “sacrificing his life for justice” while CEOs, celebrities, and other politicians all made versions of the same promise: the work was not done.
Until last summer, Harvey Goldman had no idea that his 9-year-old daughter was learning about George Floyd’s death and Black Lives Matter as well as her own “white privilege” at the $43,000-per-year Heschel School in Manhattan.
Now he’s part of an underground network of parents in NYC and around the country, many of whom are left-leaning, fighting what they believe is the undue focus on race by schools as part of the new “woke” culture.
Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors posted a video to her Instagram page Thursday saying people must “fight” for an “abolished” criminal justice system after the murder of George Floyd and police-involved shooting of Ma’Khia Bryant.
The head of an elite private school in New York City privately admitted to a teacher that the institution is “demonizing white people for being born.”
h/t Marvin
