What if CRT were precisely about what its advocates say it is?
“Far-right white people are in a moral panic over Critical Race Theory,” Pennsylvania educators are being taught, “because they fear losing political power.”
Beth Brelje, at The Epoch Times, explains that this is the lesson of a “a webinar presented by Justice Leaders Collaborative, a Michigan-based social justice training organization.” Ms. Brelje quotes Shayla Reese Griffin, the webinar leader, who states that these “far-right white people” are “really just using Critical Race Theory as a kind of an umbrella term for any kind of cultural things that the far-right isn’t interested in.”
This is, of course, disingenuous. Critical Race Theory is not merely an umbrella term. It is a theory of power that tracks oppression (which is a specific variety of power) along rigid class lines, the classes being defined by race.
And it is a movement of the “far left.”
Which is why CRT’s defenders and obfuscationists identify their opponents as “far right.”
Heaven forbid were moderates and centrists also to object!
It’s a bluffing tactic, this extremist-identification, aiming to make moderates, centrists, and just normal, non-political people ashamed to criticize CRT.
It’s manipulative.
CRT’s way off, since power, broadly defined, is everywhere and omnipresent and omnidirectional — everybody has some power, nobody has all power. Critical race theorists aim to ply victimhood status as leverage against innocents who do not want to harm anyone; too often they pretend that everybody on one side of a racial divide is a victim and everybody on the other side is an oppressor. It’s a repackaging of a too-familiar “guilt trip,” as we used to say in the Sixties.
As for parents in most school districts, they’ve discovered they have little power to lose. But by confronting the people they vote onto school boards, they gain more.
Democracy proves itself as one method of holding the powerful to account.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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