As their children slowly return to pre-pandemic classroom teaching, a new threat is facing parents: indoctrination of their children using critical race theory.
BRIGHT editors report that the Biden administration has proposed a rule, which would rely on the heavily discredited and historically inaccurate 1619 Project and “hatemonger” Ibram X. Kendi’s work to create new American history and civic education grants that reportedly promotes “anti-racism.”
The “Guilting” of White People
While the Education Department wades through the bureaucratic processes required to pass the rule, local school districts in California, Virginia, and even historically red states such as Texas are attempting to “institutionalize racism” by promoting hate-filled content focused on guilting white people.
Pessimism Feeds the Ideological Agenda
Jason L. Riley condemns journalism’s “cavalier disregard for providing the necessary context in its coverage of racial controversies.” Much blame, he writes in the WSJ, lies on the media’s willingness to play down or ignore the truth about America’s racial progress.
The pessimism peddled on the left by pundits and elected officials is in the service of an ideological agenda, and it’s probably doing more real harm to race relations than any actual racism.
First, it’s worth clarifying (yet again) that former supporters of Barack Obama, not white nationalists, were the voters responsible for Mr. Trump’s election.
Even the NYT agreed. In 2017, the newspaper reported that Donald Trump “flipped millions of white working-class Obama supporters to his side. The voter file data makes it impossible to avoid this conclusion.”
Debunking the Polemicists
Mr. Riley cites a compelling new report from the Manhattan Institute. Using survey data, political scientist Eric Kaufmann notes that racial attitudes have been trending toward more tolerance for well over half a century, even as black politicians (Mr. Obama, Kamala Harris ), professional polemicists (Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram X. Kendi), and major media organs (New York Times “1619 Project”) continue to insist otherwise.
According to Mr. Kaufmann, “at a time when measures of racist attitudes and behavior have never been more positive, pessimism about racism and race relations has increased in America.”
Terms like “systemic racism” and “unconscious bias” are increasingly common, but white racist views have been in steady decline, whether with regard to having black co-workers, classmates or neighbors.
The political left has a stake in overstating both the existence and effects of racism so that it can advocate for more and bigger programs to combat it. And the media has long been willing to do the left’s ideological bidding. Social media allows for wide publicity of statistically rare incidents that are in reality getting even rarer, giving the impression that isolated and infrequent events “happen all the time.”
Mr. Riley argues that Kaufmann’s research helps to explain last summer’s street protests and “why the nation was on pins and needles last week while awaiting the George Floyd verdict.”
The media has fed the public a story line about race and policing that serves the interests of activists and liberal politicians but that cannot be supported by facts and data.
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