Progressives are having a really hard time getting their story straight. Is CRT in schools simply a conservative lie or is it essential education and “honest history”? It appears they are sure of only one thing: Donald Trump is involved, they’ve figured out why conservatives are against it, and they claim they have the math to prove it.
The once and hopefully future, in his mind at least, governor of Virginia and forever Clinton crony Terry McAuliffe came out and said what many progressives think about a parent’s relationship with their schools at a debate last week. “I’m not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decision.” To ensure there was no mistaking his meaning, Mr. McAuliffe added, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” In other words, parents no longer need worry about their children’s education, the progressive left and the teachers’ unions will take care of all the details, just sit down and shut up. It doesn’t matter that none other than Virginia law actually says otherwise, stating clearly “a parent has a fundamental right to make decisions concerning the upbringing, education, and care of the parent’s child.” Why let a silly little thing like the law get in the way of indoctrinating America’s youth?
Of course, Mr. McAuliffe isn’t content to just tell parents to butt out and leave it at that. He needs to go one step further and spread lies about Critical Race Theory and what’s been happening in our schools. According to him, the entire controversy over whether students are being taught their country is evil is just a right wing conspiracy and, perhaps needless to say, Donald Trump is to blame. On June 4, he was asked, “I was just wondering – with all of the Republicans talking about critical race theory, and they’re making this huge deal about it, and it’s all of the conversation with the news in Virginia. What are you going to say to all of those people making education about that?” He replied, “That’s another right-wing conspiracy. This is totally made up by Donald Trump and Glenn Youngkin. This is who they are. It’s a conspiracy theory.”
In that case, according to Mr. McAuliffe, the most powerful teachers’ union in America publicly voted to endorse a “conspiracy theory” earlier this year, literally bragging about its importance to the curriculum. At the National Education Association’s annual meeting, the creation of a new task force to bring Critical Race Theory to every school in the country was supported by almost 90% of delegates. This new task force is charged with identifying “the criteria for safe, just, and equitable schools, including exploring the role of law enforcement in education. This work will also support campaigns that eliminate the school-to-prison and school-to-deportation pipelines; seek to remedy economic injustices, which include housing insecurity, food insecurity, and limited or no access to health care and childcare; and advocate for funding that addresses resource disparities based upon race, income, and geographic wealth patterns—plus other work required to reduce social and economic barriers that limit students’ academic and economic progress.” Around the same time, the American Federation of Teachers was taking to Twitter to inform us that “Critical Race Theory isn’t ‘divisive.’ It’s an irreplaceable lens with which we can view our difficult history.”
Oddly, much like Mr. McAuliffe, the unions and the teachers themselves were all claiming Critical Race Theory wasn’t being taught in schools right up until the vote. You might say they also thought it was a conspiracy theory. At the time, 96% of educators said their schools didn’t require them to teach CRT and only 45% said that teachers should have the option to add it to their lesson plans if they choose. “We’re saying, ‘What is the fuss about?’” explained Lynn Daniel, a ninth-grade English teacher in Arizona. “We don’t get it. This objection is being pushed upon us, and it’s not even happening in our classes. I don’t understand it.” They also claimed the entire dialogue was having a “chilling” effect on teachers, making it more difficult to do their important work. “Teaching is a hard job on a good day,” explained Colin Sharkey, Executive Director of the Association of American Educators. “There’s a lot that can go wrong, but there are teachers who want to help have a productive conversation about race in America with their students, and now they’re worried about whether they might say the wrong thing.”
As you can see, progressives are having a hard time getting their story straight. Is CRT in schools simply a conservative lie or is it essential education? It appears they are sure of only one thing: They’ve figured out why conservatives are against it. Coincidentally, all opposition to divvying up America by race and proclaiming racism is essential to American life is driven by the very same impulse that produced President Donald Trump. You guessed it, “white resentment,” “white fragility,” “white rage” and “white fear,” and just like with Trump, they claim they can prove it. According to NBC News, an “analysis of 33 cities and counties where school districts have faced rancor over equity initiatives this year in at least three recent school board meetings finds that each has become less white over the last 25 years, reflecting a national trend.” The “analysis” is based on yet another new metric, “exposure,” which claims to measure “how likely white students are to have classmates of a different race.” NBC News found that “in 22 of the 33 districts facing recent battles over diversity initiatives, the exposure of white students to students of color increased more than that national average.”
“In virtually any community, when there is rapid demographic change you see a backlash,” explained Tomás Jiménez, a Stanford University professor specializing in population changes. “When demographic change happens quickly, the backlash tends to be stronger.” Apparently, this purported “backlash” can be over just about anything, from the large like Critical Race Theory and funneling millions of valuable educational dollars to every diversity consultant grifter on the planet, to the small such as which holiday to celebrate and what languages should be used in signage, because who doesn’t want street signs to look like Ikea instructions? NBC News then shifts the focus from the toxic to the mundane, from Critical Race Theory that claims the entire country will continue to be irredeemably evil until we create a social utopia managed by minorities to waxing eloquent about the obvious benefits of inclusiveness. This should be pretty simple: Claiming the country was founded on racism and remains hopelessly mired in it today, and everything we’ve done to combat racism is merely a scam perpetrated by white people to perpetrate more racism is bad. Inclusiveness, that is accepting people for who they are and embracing our differences, be they racial, ethnic, cultural, regional, religious, sexual, or what have you assuming it’s not criminal, is good.
This, of course, shouldn’t be difficult to understand, but the goal of progressives pushing CRT is not now, nor has it ever been inclusiveness. The word is tossed in there to make the unpalatable palatable, the same way the traditional notion of equality has been replaced with equity which sounds similar, but means something increasingly different. Progressives realize they can’t come out in public and say they’re plan is to demonize white people simply for being born, though they will say it in private, so they’ve branded CRT as some pleasant sounding quest for diversity, inclusion, and equity. The NBC News article has it all in this regard, moving from obvious statements like, “When students have more interaction with classmates of different ethnic backgrounds, and view the racial climate on campus as positive, research has also shown they’re more likely to have friendships across group lines and to have more confidence in their own academic abilities,” to not so obvious conclusions where CRT is some kind benign answer to the age old question, why can’t we all get along?
It would help the cause if they weren’t dishonest in both the framing and the data. A leading critic of Critical Race Theory, Christopher R. Rufo, responded to the NBC News analysis in The New York Post quite pointedly, “Only one problem: NBC’s analysis is nonsense. The report fails both statistically and imaginatively.” NBC uses Virginia’s Loudoun county as the epicenter of the white racial resentment driven backlash, but the citizens of Loudoun “aren’t old-line racists and segregationists.” They are “educated, affluent and diverse citizens in the elite suburbs surrounding Washington, DC. Contrary to the narrative about white families lashing out against an influx of black students, Loudoun County has roughly the same proportion of blacks as it did 20 years ago; the highest rate of population growth has been among Asians and Latinos, who, according to a recent Rasmussen poll, oppose critical race theory by a two-to-one margin — the same as white voters.” Mr. Rufo also points out that in nearby Fairfax county, “the leader of the parent opposition is an Indian-American woman, Asra Nomani, who has blasted critical race theory for reducing academic standards and discriminating against high-performing Asians.”
Of course, this level of dishonesty is required when you are pushing an agenda that assumes America is evil at its core and seeks to radically restructure American government. Once again, it should be obvious that we can teach honest history about racial strife in America and the horrid atrocities that were committed against black people while acknowledging that the framework of American government and our Founding documents ultimately had the power and foresight to eradicate slavery, end Jim Crow, and create the civil rights movement. This is the position many prominent civil rights activists, from Frederick Douglas to Martin Luther King, Jr. have taken over hundreds of years. America might have sinned, but not in its founding conception. The sin was in the application of the laws and the people applying them; the laws themselves and the Constitution were the very devices that promised future absolution. Frederick Douglas said it far better than I ever could, “What will the people of America a hundred years hence care about the intentions of the scriveners who wrote the Constitution? These men are already gone from us, and in the course of nature were expected to go from us. They were for a generation, but the Constitution is for ages.”
This is not what the Critical Race Theorists and race hustlers are saying however. To them, the sin remains indelible until we overturn the foundations of the country and embrace the quasi-Marxist form of government they desire. There’s a reason the roots of Critical Race Theory and its offshoot intersectionality were in the fever swamp left of American academia, beginning with ideas whose original names reflected the actual goals. Once upon a time, these ideas started out as “Marxist feminist critical theory” and a “Marxist feminist approach,” both of which rejected a color blind approach to matters of race. These “theories” described how ““interlocking social institutions [that] have relied on multiple forms of segregation… to produce unjust results,” driven by an “analysis claiming that systems of race, social class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, and age form mutually constructing features of social organization.” Patricia Hill Collins, for example, has long been a leading proponent of intersectionality and has taught Critical Race Theory to graduate students at the University of Maryland since 2005. There, she lectures on how, “How African American male and female youth’s experiences with social issues of education, unemployment, popular culture and political activism articulate with global phenomena, specifically, complex social inequalities, global capitalist development, transnationalism, and political activism.”
You can’t easily remove the latent Marxism from the equation. The grand design isn’t about race. It’s about “global capitalist development” and the accompanying “vectors of oppression and privilege.” In their minds, the only way to solve the racial issue is to overthrow the system and replace it with a socialist one, exactly how Karl Marx and Frederick Engel originally viewed the coming communist revolution. “In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality. And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at. By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying.”
In other words, you will be a ward of the state and all your rights will be taken away, save those your betters deign to allow. That’s precisely what the Critical Race Theorists are selling and precisely why they need to lie about it. It’s increasingly rare these days for a politician to deliver the unvarnished truth, and we should be thankful Mr. McAuliffe helped illuminate their position. In his warped view, parents no longer have a right to participate in their children’s education. Alas, this is not the only right they will seek to strip given the chance.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 