Tag: Critical Race Theory

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education and schooling general freedom ideological culture

Inherent Racism of Racism

CRT, race guilt, racism

New Hampshire bans public school teachers from telling kids they’re inherently racist or oppressive because of unchosen traits like skin color.

Some lawmakers want to overturn the ban.

The debated law, Right to Freedom from Discrimination in Public Workplaces and Education, is imperfect. But we live in a world where some taxpayer-​funded educators, inspired by noxious doctrines like critical race theory, are eager to accuse students of being inherently racist or sexist or oppressive.

Obviously, though, moral wrongdoing is something chosen. One doesn’t commit it merely by having a certain hue, gender, or ancestors.

So how can one reasonably object to a provision stating that “No government program shall teach [that] an individual, by virtue of his or her age, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, [etc.] is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously”?

The law itself stresses that it’s not to be interpreted as prohibiting discussion of “the historical existence of ideas and subjects” like racism. Nevertheless, critics falsely claim that the law bans classroom discussion of racism as such. And their repeal bill, HB61, seeks not to perfect the current law but to repeal all sections “relative to the right to freedom from discrimination in public workplaces and education.”

New Hampshire lawmaker Jim Kofalt rightly reminds proponents of HB61 of the vision of Martin Luther King, a future where his children would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Power Theory

CRT, critical race theory, communism, racism, race

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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education and schooling First Amendment rights

Don’t Ask, We Won’t Sue

Solas, CRT, Critical Race Theory

Uh oh. Haul out the armament and load and aim — at least if you’re responsible for educating the young daughter of Nicole Solas.

Solas is among the many parents who missed the memo about how sinful it is to have some idea of and influence on what their kids learn in public schools.

She’d heard about how public schools have been indoctrinating kids with a noxious ideological brew about race and gender. So she asked the principal of her daughter’s school in the South Kingstown School District of Rhode Island whether collectivist critical race theory and gender theory were any part of the curriculum.

The principal give hints that this was indeed happening. But then the school stopped talking. Instead of elaborating, school officials told Solas to instead send formal public record requests to learn what was happening at the school.

Which she did. Then the school district began publicly harassing her for being a “threat to public education” (as we all should be, given such doings). The Rhode Island branch of the National Education Association even went so far as to sue this mom.

Nicole Solas could easily have been swamped by litigation costs. Fortunately, the Goldwater Institute stepped in to defend her against the lawsuit and help her pursue her inquiries about the school.

As for her little girl, she’s doing fine. In a private school that is open about what it teaches, which doesn’t include any corrosive political agenda.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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What Is and Is Not Censorship

CRT, critical race theory, censorship

For days on end, outside of Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon, antifa protesters hounded book buyers and bookstore workers. These activists were on a mission: to get the store to expunge Andy Ngo’s book Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy, from its website offerings.

“We have to show up every day until they stop selling that f — king book,” one activist said, comparing her effort to “stopping the historical publication of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.”

As the story in FEE makes clear, the store had already banished it from the block-​sized building itself. But management has so far refused to de-​list it from its website. 

Meanwhile, Democrats (or at least the leftists at Salon) have been dubbing attempts by legislators and school boards to get rid of Critical Race Theory and similar woke nonsense from their curricula as “censorship.”

Here’s the muddle: as mobs play censor to a privately owned book company, leftists pretend that public input into the revision of curricula in taxpayer-​funded, government-​run schools is worse.

There are Jewish, Christian and Muslim schools near where I live. I have absolutely no say about what they teach their students; if I demanded that they conform to my standards, my demand would (depending on threat level) constitute censorship. 

But if I’m taxed to support a school, and the school is constitutionally run as democratically controlled, my “voice” on the matter of curriculum is not in any way censorship — even if educators “professionally” disagree with my position.

Forcing someone else’s reading decisions is censorship; determining your own (or your children’s) is not.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling national politics & policies

Gaslight Theory

Joy Reid, Karl Marx, Marxism, CRT, critical race theory

“[P]arents are fighting with school boards in cities and towns across the country,” MSNBC’s Joy Reid informed her audience, “over curricula that they believe teaches white kids that they are racist.”

Reid asserted that “none of this is actually happening,” 

She spoke with Kimberlé Crenshaw, the executive director of the African American Policy Forum and a professor of law at UCLA and Columbia University. Crenshaw invented the term “Critical Race Theory” and told Reid that CRT was merely a “boogey-​man,” adding: “I think I would know if we were being taught in K‑12.” 

The “GOP freak-​out over Critical Race Theory,” offered Reid, was a “highly manufactured strategy created by seasoned political operatives looking for the perfect wedge issue.”

Reid ignores parents across the country actively encountering this racist anti-​racism. Back in April, parents in Loudoun County, Virginia, documented half a million tax dollars going to programs titled “critical race theory.” After being told there was no such thing. It’s happening all across the country.

But fear not: the National Education Association to the rescue! 

A few days ago, the nation’s most powerful teachers union cleared it all up by passing New Business Item 39 to defend the use of CRT in K‑12 public schools, including by providing “an already-​created, in-​depth, study that critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-​Blackness, anti-​Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society, and that we oppose attempts to ban critical race theory and/​or The 1619 Project.”

The NEA may be on the wrong side, but nevertheless buries the disingenuous psy-​op of the left intelligentsia, for whom no lie is too big to push.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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The A‑word in Our Schools

Banning “Critical Race Theory” in public schools and other government institutions seems like such a good idea that when you read Scott Shackford’s headline at Reason, “Don’t Ban Critical Race Theory in Education. Embrace School Choice Instead,” you may balk. 

“Conservatives in Florida, Idaho, and the nation’s capitol are attempting to block public schools from teaching Critical Race Theory,” Shackford writes, describing CRT as “an ideology that holds that racism is historically fundamental to how America’s political, legal, and cultural institutions are structured.” His problem with this political move is that it is “an authoritarian proposal that would cut off classroom debate about hot-​button political issues.”

My issues really begin with the a‑word.

From what I can tell, CRT is itself authoritarian, and groupthink-​oriented, class-​based and generally racist. The program looks designed to implement a sort of Cultural Revolution indoctrination-​and-​social control system into American institutions, definitely not to encourage “classroom debate.” 

While Shackford makes the obvious point that America’s past institutional make-​up was indeed racist and structurally so, and that learning this is important for a decent education, CRT did not add this to “the debate.” This has been widely acknowledged for years.

Besides, CRT activists go much further, calling “whiteness” a disease and white people ineluctably, “systemically” racist.

Though Shackford’s main point — that we should take the occasion to offer the best way out, “school choice” — is indeed a great one, letting socialist radicals and weak-​minded educrats enshrine a racist theory about racism into public institutions amounts to a kind of brinksmanship, a “collapsitarian” approach.

Couldn’t we put government education’s allotted doom on the back burner, stop teaching CRT or other woke indoctrination, and also empower parents and students with freedom of choice?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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