Parents, do you want your toddlers being taught that “White people are a part of a society that benefits them in almost every instance,” and that “It’s as if white people walk around with an invisible force field because they hold all of the power in America”? Because that’s what 4-year-olds are being taught in a Washington, DC, public school.
Funny how this thing that we are being told is not happening … keeps happening. “How dare you accuse us of indoctrinating your kids in racist attitudes? Now shut up while we browbeat little ones with the ‘Anti-Racism Fight Club Fistbook for Kids,’ which says, ‘If you are a white person, white privilege is something you were born with,’ so you must be ‘loud, uncomfortable, confrontational and visible to ensure change is made.’”
Putting a noxious twist on the old Rodgers and Hammerstein tune, kids, you’ve got to be carefully taught … that you’re a racist.
The book — which, according to a Nov. 30 letter from Janney Elementary School principal Danielle Singh, was given to students in pre-K through third grade as part of an “Anti-Racism Fight Club” — asks, “Where do you see racism in yourself? This requires true soul-searching. Be real with yourself, don’t feel guilt/shame and own it. It’s the first step in becoming an anti-racist.”
This is mind poison. Parents are absolutely right to be alarmed about this kind of teaching, and need to take a more active role in preventing it from becoming more widespread.
The left has been dismissing these concerns, and waving away the radical new ideology, by pretending critical race theory is not being inflicted on our kids. Stopping public schools from teaching this corrosive ideology constitutes an “effort to weaponize CRT” (the Guardian), “a phony ‘issue’ … to get people as enraged as possible” (Paul Waldman of the Washington Post) and a “moral panic” (New York magazine and many others).
And yet here is the “Fistbook” (it’s not a “handbook,” by the way, because a hand that isn’t clenched into a fist isn’t threatening enough): “Imagine a white person raced against a Black person. The white person would be able to run at his normal speed while the Black person would have a 100-pound weight attached to his leg. Chances are the white person would win the race almost every time.”
Yeah, that’s not what I see when I watch Olympic sprinting. But in addition to citing a laughably inapt example, this line of indoctrination is morally wrong.
White kids shouldn’t be bathed in racial guilt, and it’s just as important that black kids should not be steeped in racial grievance and resentment. Kids should be taught to treat everyone equally and advance us toward the colorblind society: This was the dream in the “I have a dream” speech. Instead, children are being taught to be obsessed with race.
What possible good can it do to a black child to be told that the whole system is stacked against him? Why turn innocent kids who are still learning their ABCs into a generation afflicted by emotionally destructive feelings?
For the sake of shorthand, it’s perfectly reasonable for parents to call this critical race theory and to order their school boards to stop it. CRT, whatever its academic meaning a decade ago, is now simply a broadly used term for any racial-essentialist nonsense such as that “whiteness” is inherently suspect or that to be black is to be automatically a victim of “structural racism.”
CRT now means the kind of vicious, divisive and counterproductive propaganda that is infecting every corner of American life, from mandatory training seminars at huge corporations, to federal agencies to kindergarten. It represents a huge step backward in the racial progress of this country, and we should fight it off before it takes hold of any more institutions. Racism is pernicious regardless of what race is under attack.
