by Casey Chalk
Americans are up in arms about the proliferation of critical race theory, or CRT, in our nation’s schools and public institutions. Protestors are disrupting school board meetings in Virginia. Parents are pulling their children out of elite schools in New York City. Yet if you listen to corporate media and leftist politicians, the story on CRT keeps changing.
First was the claim that there is no CRT in grade school curricula, and that calls to remove it were a conservative ploy to rile the base for the 2022 elections. Now the story has shifted to asserting that CRT is simply true history. Why the left keeps pushing (and changing) the narrative may expose the real vulnerabilities of the “antiracism” CRT crowd.
But first, let’s consider what the sources are saying. “Critical race theory [is] a decades-old academic framework that most people had never heard of,” asserts a June 21 Washington Post story. It’s “a decades-old academic framework that examines how policies and the law perpetuate systemic racism,” says another May 3 article.
“Much scholarship on CRT is written in academic language or published in journals not easily accessible to K-12 teachers,” notes a May 18 report in EducationWeek. It’s a “complex critique that wouldn’t fit easily into a K-12 curriculum,” declares Georgetown University Law professor Gary Peller at Politico.
One finds similar statements from various liberal commentators. CRT is “the dry and arcane stuff of graduate school seminars,” says WaPo columnist Eugene Robinson in a 28 June op-ed, waving off conservative concerns about the theory as polemical fear-mongering. Opinion writer Colbert King in turn asserts: “D.C. schools don’t teach critical race theory but do provide anti-racist training for educators and classroom discussions of systemic racism.” Michelle Goldberg at the New York Times declares: “teachers aren’t instructing young kids in law school scholarship about structural racism.”
In other words, it’s not simply that the critics of CRT are wrong. It’s that they’ve manufactured a crisis that bears little, if any, resemblence to facts on the ground. Truckloads of articles and op-eds by reporters and columnists in establishment media assure faithful readers that CRT is definitely not being taught in schools.
CRT is arcane and esoteric, an obscure, ivory-tower, academic subject confined to grade school discussion groups at elite universities. Students, and perhaps even teachers, aren’t even capable of understanding the nuances of CRT, they tell us.
Then on July 3 the National Education Association — the largest teachers union in the country — announced a six-figure campaign to “have a team of staffers for members who want to learn more and fight back against anti-CRT rhetoric” and an official position that “in teaching these topics, it is reasonable and appropriate for curriculum to be informed by academic frameworks for understanding and interpreting the impact of the past on current society, including critical race theory.”
This was followed by a July 9 statement by White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki in answering a question about CRT and anti-racist curriculum, in which she implied that both should be taught in schools. She explained: “There is not just slavery and racism in our history, there is systemic racism that is still impacting society today.”
The brazenness of this about-face is remarkable but perhaps expected.
Aside from teaching that the way to combat racism is to merely empower it among different people, the major problem with CRT is that while it teaches “systemic racism” they don’t specify who created the system. They blame the white framers and the Constitution for the problem when, in fact, the blame rests solely with the Democrats. It wasn’t all whites that supported slavery but DEMOCRAT whites. It wasn’t all whites that created and implemented Jim Crow laws in the South but DEMOCRAT whites. It wasn’t all whites that institutionalized racism in the South but DEMOCRAT whites.
Oh, and Muslim blacks ran the slave supply market, enslaving and selling blacks captured in battle or simply rounded up for sale.
But none of this is included in the curriculum. Only what the Marxists want promoted is taught, that all whites are racist, that the Constitution (despite there being NOTHING that implants racism) is racist and that the nation was founded on racism and would not even BE without racism. Yet, that is merely the Democrat point of view.
This is why the left has no credibility and bear suspicion of corruption. They pursue an agenda which the vast majority finds repugnant. Then they denounce those who don’t agree with it. When that fails, they try to pretend their agenda doesn’t exist. This didn’t work with their political violence, it didn’t work with “collusion”, it didn’t work with “defund the police” and it doesn’t work with their support for institutionalized racism through promoting CRT.
What has been made clear is that Democrats believe, as they always have, that racism is just fine as long as they get to designate where it is directed.
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
― George Orwell, 1984