When parents reject public-schools teaching critical race theory, a common retort from the left is that it’s a university graduate-level analytical framework that’s incomprehensible by children and therefore incapable of being taught in K-12 schools.
This attempted gaslighting of parents and conservatives from Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — nothing to see here! — through such false claims is destructive.
In fact, we’re already seeing the horrifying results on our kids.
Just because CRT began as a 1970s-era, law-school-level analysis doesn’t mean it isn’t adapted for lower-level understanding.
Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton broke barriers in comprehending the laws of physics, but the vast majority of us can never fully, technically grasp how or what they did.
Yet the basics of physical science are age-appropriately adjusted for masses of students from elementary to high school.
The truth is union-controlled public schools are teaching kids to be racist — paid for by your tax dollars — and it’s making schools more dangerous and disharmonious.
Instead of the promised racial reckoning blossoming into racial utopia, the CRT crowd is fracturing America.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed of a country where children are judged by their character, not skin color.
But in January, school officials forced students at Virginia’s West Springfield High School to watch a racist, dehumanizing video about microaggressions.
It depicts white people as blood-sucking, cartoon mosquitos who must be destroyed by nonwhite people wielding flamethrowers.
In Orlando, Fla., Howard Middle School black teacher Ethan Hooper proudly displayed his Black History Month video on TikTok, showing his white students bow down to, luxuriously fan and cater to their black classmates.
And in Springfield, Ohio, police reported an incident at Kenwood Elementary School, where a group of black students on the playground rounded up white students “and forced them to state, ‘Black Lives Matter,’ against their will.”
Police say the black students could face charges of assault and menacing.
What’s unfolding in real life echoes what Iowa schoolteacher Jane Elliot found decades ago.
Starting in 1968, Elliot indoctrinated her students in a troubling “experiment” where she’d teach kids with brown eyes to despise and marginalize blue-eyed students and vice versa.
Her students responded aggressively against those with the opposing eye color, leading to bullying and abuse.
Elliot’s unethical tactics needlessly harmed students’ academic performance.
We now have a nation of Jane Elliots from coast to coast.
It’s vitally important to teach children to reject racism and learn empathy.
But today’s schools introduce a new kind of racialism that reduces human beings to prisoners of their race, rather than unique individuals.
Black Lives Matter and CRT are failing to create effective racial healing.
In 2014, the last year before BLM rioters began burning down majority-black neighborhoods and destroying black-owned and -operated businesses, Gallup found 55% of Americans said they were “very” or “somewhat” satisfied with the state of America’s race relations.
Just 35% said they were “very” or “somewhat” dissatisfied.
Those numbers flipped in 2015, with 62% reporting dissatisfaction with race relations and just 30% reporting satisfaction.
In 2021, things got worse, with 71% reporting dissatisfaction in race relations and 61% this year.
We know CRT’s race-obsessed lens doesn’t work.
So why are schools doubling down on this toxic, Marxist-rooted philosophy?
It stems from the 1930s-era, Marxist-inspired Frankfurt School.
Germany’s Frankfurt School founders, who created critical theory, sought to dismantle capitalism and Western civilization, just as America’s CRT does today.
Indeed, BLM founder Patrisse Cullors, proudly calls herself “a trained Marxist.”
CRT divides people by skin color through ideologically infused methods. Despite what leftists claim, this is not teaching neutral history.
It is a political ideology that relies on lies, including The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” an ahistorical assault on truth.
Tragically, the “1619 Project” is peddled to schoolchildren nationwide.
CRT supporters ignore the fatal effects of LBJ’s Great Society, which ravages black families and neighborhoods.
They ignore black conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele and Jason Riley who prove how welfare decimates families.
They’re dead set on dismantling capitalism, never mind the good it’s done, and teaching young Americans to loathe their country.
America’s far from perfect, but we cannot deny the enormous progress Dr. King and the civil-rights movement wrought.
CRT backers would have us reverse that progress, stepping back to the time of segregation.
Teachers pushing this pernicious philosophy in the classroom and out are engaged in a perilous experiment whose results are already obvious: CRT divides us in alarming ways.
Carrie Sheffield is a senior fellow at Independent Women’s Voice and Tony Blankley Fellow for American Exceptionalism at The Steamboat Institute.
