No One is Teaching Critical Race Theory in Public Schools
The dogma being taught is as ill-defined and openly religious as Scientology.
According to the Rage Profiteers "CRT is an academic theory taught at the college level that promotes and explores the idea that systemic racism infects every aspect of US society."
According to the Fearmongers CRT "explicitly endorses principles of segregationism, group-based guilt, and race essentialism—ugly concepts that should have been left behind a century ago."
Ibram X. Kendi (the author of How to Be an Antiracist as well as earlier writings that posited that “white people were fending off racial extinction, using ‘psychological brainwashing’ and ‘the aids virus.’”) promotes the idea that "The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination."
A major criticism of Ibram X. Kendi’s quasi-religious antiracist agenda is the disconnect between the lack of specific mechanisms he recommends and the focus of his goals.
One of the reasons Kendi does not set out the legal and policy proposals required to actuate true equality is that they are unlikely to be embraced, even by the poor blacks and browns they are supposed to assist.
Pulling down a statue of a Civil War general or changing the name of an elementary school is easy. Examining privilege and tweeting about it feels like progress but changes very little in terms of economic growth, the transfer of generational wealth, or pruning the inequity of incarceration numbers to more fairly reflect the demographics.
A secondary flaw in Kendi's work is a decisive lack of scientific evidence to back up his claims. For him (and his followers) racism is like the SCOTUS version of obscenity—he can't define it but he knows it when he sees it. For Kendi, any disparity of outcomes in racial progress is due strictly to white supremacy. Given our history, it's not a bad take on things except that the facts do not support the claim.
In simple terms, Kendi's version of CRT posits a belief that any disparities between racial groups are evidence of structural racism; that the norms of free speech, individualism and universalism which pretend to be progressive are really camouflage for this discrimination; and that injustice will persist until systems of language and privilege are dismantled.
Myside Bias
Myside bias occurs when people evaluate evidence, generate evidence, and test hypotheses in a manner biased toward their own prior opinions and attitudes. Research across a wide variety of myside bias paradigms has revealed a somewhat surprising finding regarding individual differences. The magnitude of the myside bias shows very little relation to intelligence.
The entire cultural battle concerning CRT and specifically CRT as taught in schools is seeped to the pores in Myside Bias.
Bill Maher said he was "for it" if authors such as Toni Morrison were taught but not if it meant changing how teachers treated children.
"If that's what critical race theory means," Maher said. "If it means separating 5-year-olds by race and telling some, 'You're oppressors,' and the others, 'You're the oppressed,' and giving up on a colorblind society and resegregation and racism is the essence of America — then I'm out."
Isn't that the divide? Are public school teachers teaching children the complexities of systemic racism to children unable to critically parse things out or more thoroughly teaching about our country's racist past?
A Reverse Scopes Trial
July 1925, the mixture of religion, science and the public schools was ablaze in Dayton, Tennessee. The Scopes trial—or "Monkey Trial," as it was called—dominated headlines across the country. It began as a publicity stunt. John Scopes wasn't even a biology teacher and couldn't actually attest to any evolutionary theory he had presented in the classroom but the ACLU game was strong at the time. It didn't matter whether evolutionary theory was being taught only that it was reported to have been taught in order to gin up the religious types and go to trial.
Much the same could be said about the many instances of supposed CRT in the Classroom moments peppering the twitter trails of both the Critical Justice Belligerents and the Status Quo Warriors. No one is teaching the legal theories of Derrick Bell to fifth graders but the tendency to redefine terms on the fly has become a hallmark of those seeking to reframe the national narrative on either side of the ideological playground is set.
The essence of the Scopes Trial was about teaching a scientific theory versus the tried and true religious traditions of Tennessee. The presence of superstition and blind faith in God the Creator was threatened by a theory that man evolved from simians—a theory supported but not proven by scientific inquiry and study.
In a bizarre but foreseeable reversal, Critical Race Theory (and the subsequent pop redefining that theorizes about how anti-black racism is baked into the foundations of institutional America) is a sociological theory, one as yet completely unproven by anything except by legal reasoning and 'lived experience.' The argument to continue teaching children one hundred years ago about the faith-based religious tenets of the Bible are now replaced and flipped with a movement to teach children that the unsubstantiated belief in systemic racism is fact, not faith.
"There is no CRT"
The gaslighting of the Progressive Media is becoming as ridiculous as that of the Conservative Bobbleheads.
The cry that CRT doesn't exist (as said by an MSNBC pundit on the night of the most recent Virginia Gubernatorial race) or that CRT isn't being taught in grade schools is a pedantic dodge. Like a Texas anti-abortion soldier declaring that abortions are still legal. Sure, Jeb.
CRT is most definitely not being taught in schools. No shit. What is being taught is more like a KendiDiAngeloesque mixture of CRT-inspired propaganda.
"My school, like so many others, induces students via shame and sophistry to identify primarily with their race before their individual identities are fully formed. Students are pressured to conform their opinions to those broadly associated with their race and gender and to minimize or dismiss individual experiences that don’t match those assumptions. The morally compromised status of 'oppressor' is assigned to one group of students based on their immutable characteristics. In the meantime, dependency, resentment and moral superiority are cultivated in students considered 'oppressed.'"
"An elementary school in Cupertino, California—a Silicon Valley community with a median home price of $2.3 million—recently forced a class of third-graders to deconstruct their racial identities, then rank themselves according to their “power and privilege.”
Based on whistleblower documents and parents familiar with the session, a third-grade teacher at R.I. Meyerholz Elementary School began the lesson on “social identities” during a math class. The teacher asked all students to create an “identity map,” listing their race, class, gender, religion, family structure, and other characteristics. The teacher explained that the students live in a “dominant culture” of “white, middle class, cisgender, educated, able-bodied, Christian, English speaker[s],” who, according to the lesson, “created and maintained” this culture in order “to hold power and stay in power.”
Next, reading from This Book Is Antiracist, the students learned that “those with privilege have power over others” and that “folx who do not benefit from their social identities, who are in the subordinate culture, have little to no privilege and power.” As an example, the reading states that “a white, cisgender man, who is able-bodied, heterosexual, considered handsome and speaks English has more privilege than a Black transgender woman.” In some cases, because of the principle of intersectionality, “there are parts of us that hold some power and other parts that are oppressed,” even within a single individual."
Third fucking grade?
Let's stop playing games here and at least acknowledge that there is a dogma at play. As dismissive one must think of the majority of Americans as being stupid and partisan, some of this stuff is beyond the pale. Third grade?
Is it rampant? Of course not. Are school systems bowing down to it? Yes. Too many school districts are codifying the DEI (Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion) mantras without rigorous study or research as a knee-jerk reaction to the fear of being picketed or having their schools burned down by activists.
No one—NO ONE SERIOUS—objects to teachers teaching students about slavery or Jim Crow laws or the obvious history of racism in America's DNA. Those who do are on the Red end of the color spectrum and should be taken no more seriously than the rabid secular zealots attempting a cultural coup toward this KendiDiAngeloesque dystopia. The 1619 Project is fine to teach high school students as one alternative view but far from the defining history of the country.
Ironically, none of this does a damn thing about addressing income inequality, the abysmal funding of black and brown populated schools, the need for increased health benefits to those in poverty, the privatization of prisons, the pernicious use of the War on Drugs to permanently imprison a third of black men, or the fact that the most anti-black killers in this country are not white.
If Black Lives Do Matter (and they most certainly do) this orthodoxy is not in service of them.