CRT: Teachers union president calls for educators to “teach the truth” and include critical race theory in curriculum CBS. Republicans see critical race theory as new front in ongoing culture wars The Hill.
by Clare M. Lopez, FPM
This is the fourth article in this series on Critical Race Theory (CRT). The earlier three may be seen here, here, and here. Their intent was to document the deteriorating situation across America, and especially in our schools, where curricula increasingly focus on Marxist propaganda that teaches children to hate their own country and seeks to instigate racial divisiveness intended to foment civil strife and eventually, a communist revolution. The series began with an explanation of the purely Marxist origins of CRT, its ideological roots in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the transplant of the Frankfurt School to the U.S. in the 1930s, and the eventual spread of CRT narratives throughout American academia, faith communities, government, media, popular culture, and society in general.
With the Biden administration, and specifically the Department of Education, openly pushing the teaching of CRT in U.S. public schools, the situation is raising alarm among educators, parents, legislators, and ordinary citizens. As embedding of CRT into Ethnic Studies programs in California and other states became widespread over the last several years, parents increasingly began to realize the malignant nature of what was being taught to their children. Tried and true pedagogical methodology that rewards academic achievement, focuses on fact-based education, and operates on meritocracy was being replaced with meaningless policies of “equity”. Everything was reduced to race. Instead of Marxist economic class divisions, CRT substituted ethnic and race labels that identify Americans as either “oppressed” or “oppressors”. Identity by intrinsic, immutable characteristics took the place of Martin Luther King’s “content of one’s character”. The Marxist rot that spread throughout American society with what seemed a startling rapidity took many by surprise. In fact, though, that ideology had long been nurtured carefully, methodically, but below the radar, following Italian communist Antonio Gramsci’s blueprint for a “long march through the institutions”.
But now, it is everyday American citizen patriots who are waking up. Organizations like The Civics Alliance have formed to promote the teaching of the U.S.’s founding principles, accurate history, the brilliant ‘structure of our self-governing federal republic’, and the spirit of individual liberty. The American Cornerstone Institute, founded by former neurosurgeon and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Trump administration, Dr. Ben Carson, likewise focuses on promoting the first things principles that undergird our Republic: Faith, Liberty, Community, and Life. The Final Report of President Trump’s 1776 Commission offers an excellent outline to “enable a rising generation to understand the history and principles of the founding of the United States in 1776 and to strive to form a more perfect Union” through a restoration of American education grounded in a teaching of that history and those principles that is “accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling.”
Twenty-one state legislatures have either introduced legislation to ban the teaching of CRT or actually banned it altogether. Some, as in Missouri, take aim directly at the New York Times’ 1619 Project, that promotes teaching of a hostile, twisted version of American history focused single-mindedly on race and a past history of slavery. Understanding that CRT deliberately inculcates discrimination and racial animosity among students, many of the bills proposed and/or passed thus far prohibit teaching that divides students into groups deemed either inferior or superior to one another. While some state legislation focuses specifically on schools, other measures take a broader approach to banning CRT in all state government agencies as well as workplaces. Teaching American citizens that they are defined only by inclusion in a certain ethnic group, race, sex, or other inherent category is recognized as destructive of individual liberty and personal responsibility, not to mention national social cohesion. Governors, states, and their legislators are insisting on the equal treatment of every individual under the law. They openly reject the overt racism of provacateurs like Ibram X. Kendi, whose works are featured in many schools’ CRT curricula, including his “anti-racism” formula: “The only remedy to racist discrimination is anti-racist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”
In early May 2021, Rep. Mark Green (R-TN) introduced a bill into the U.S. House of Representatives that would ban U.S. Military Service Academies from teaching CRT. Himself a West Point alumnus and Iraq war veteran, Green accurately called CRT “a Marxist ideology created to tear American institutions down”. He added that CRT is “based on a massive and purposeful misunderstanding of the American founding, American history, and America as it exists today.” His measure follows on April 2021 reporting from the Washington Free Beacon that revealed administrators at West Point were embracing “radical racial politics” and planning to include CRT in its curriculum. An “inclusive training” reading list featured such works as Ibram X. Kendi’s 2019 book, “How to be an Antiracist” and a Ta-Nehisi Coates article titled “The Case for Reparations”.
Perhaps even more important is the gathering momentum of American citizen patriots at the local level. Parents especially are rising to action against the hate-filled, Marxist, racist, and sexualized class content they are seeing, often for the first time. Angry parents, both Moms and Dads, many newly aware of what’s being taught to their children, are joining forces to push back against the communist indoctrination of their children. They are taking their concerns directly to their local school boards and elected officials, speaking out, overturning objectionable content, and sometimes even removing and replacing those school board members who refuse to heed them.
Demonstrators gathered in front of the Los Alamitos Unified School District Headquarters in Los Alamitos, California on 11 May 2021 to protest new teaching guidelines. Although the school board denied it would be teaching CRT, it had voted unanimously to “implement new social justice standards in classrooms”. More than 30 people took to the podium to voice their concerns about “equity” instead of “equality” of opportunity and the teaching of ideology instead of fact-based STEM courses and the greatness of the American ideal.
At some of the priciest, most elite schools in the country, the parents’ movement against politicized education is gaining steam. A letter written by a parent at New York’s Brearley School – annual cost at $54,000 – went viral in April 2021 after journalist Bari Weiss publicized it. The multi-page letter detailed a father’s objections to the school’s advocacy of the Black Lives Matter Movement, support for CRT, and an overall obsession with race. Explaining why his family decided to remove their daughter from the school, this father urged fellow parents to take action “before the damage to the school, to its community, and to your own child’s education is irreparable”.
An especially determined group of parents in the affluent Washington, DC suburb of Loudon County, Virginia is working to recall six of the county’s school board’s nine members because of their insistence on imposing racist CRT teaching in the county’s school system. They’ve organized themselves into a Political Action Committee called “Fight for Schools” as well as a formidable group called “Parents Against Critical Theory (PACT)” that is gaining nationwide attention. These parents first began to organize in June 2020 to push for the reopening of schools closed in response to the coronavirus pandemic; but, in fact, it was the remote learning that allowed such parents to see what their children were being taught. The newfound realization that CRT-type indoctrination promoting hateful concepts of “white supremacy”, “systemic racism”, “white privilege”, and “white fragility” was permeating their classes raised red flags and roused Loudon County parents to action.
The debate heated up even further in May 2021 after local law enforcement was called in to investigate claims that an “anti-racist parents of Loudon County” Facebook group was reported to have shared an enemies list of parents who oppose CRT. Then, things got even worse. A group of furious parents attended a Loudon County School Board meeting on 10 May 2021, taking the podium one after the other to slam the Board for its plans to implement CRT teaching in the county’s schools. But that was just the beginning. Angry Moms then got up to the microphones to read aloud passages from books assigned to ninth graders in the county. The language in those books could not even be aired without bleeps on the TV shows that covered the meeting or printed in full in the media reports about them—they were that pornographic. One parent pointed out that it was Loudon County that banned Dr. Seuss and “Huckleberry Finn” as being “offensive” but were assigning reading to children that was grossly, graphically pornographic.
One last example comes from a Virginia Mom who survived Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s before escaping to immigrate to the U.S. Xi Van Fleet also attended the Loudon County School Board meeting on 10 May 2021. She ripped into the Board members for their support of CRT, telling them that what she was seeing alarmed her because it was so like what went on in Mao’s China, when millions of Chinese were murdered in a decade-long purge based on class-based identity criteria. “To me, and to a lot of Chinese, it is heartbreaking that we escaped communism and now we experience communism here, too”, she told the Board.
So, this is the good news: denials and excuses from local school boards and sycophantic media trying to cover for them are no longer working. America’s parents at last are in the fight for the future of their children. Citizen patriots, including some courageous governors and legislators, are rising up to fight back against the divisive, racist, Marxist ideology that seeks to subvert America’s students and turn them against their own country.
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