UPRISING: Parents Across America Fight Critical Race Theory

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Originally posted on June 29, 2021.

In the Spectator, Peter Wood chronicles the efforts of parents around the United States to fight back against critical race theory and the school administrators attempting to install the radical Marxist ideology in their schools. He writes:

It is an open question how deeply members of the K-12 educational establishment understand this nonsense. America’s school teachers and school administrators are not exactly the cream of the intellectual crop. Most of them have been through those indoctrination mills called schools of education where John Dewey mingles with Paulo Freire and retired terrorist (‘guilty as hell, free as a bird’) Bill Ayers. All they know about education is that it is supposed to be ‘transformational’. The question ‘transformed from what to what?’ gets answered with the all-purpose progressive catechism, ‘from oppressed to free’, which serves as a license to destroy any claims of culture, civilization, tradition, moral order, or knowledge that stand in the way.

With legions of teachers and school administrators imbued with this outlook, it is little surprise that CRT looks like a fine new pedagogical instrument. It is yet another hammer for battering the pillars that uphold the ideal of America as a society committed to those unevenly yoked goals of liberty and equality. Why not just replace them with ‘diversity’ and ‘equity’? The reasons why not may be invisible to today’s educators, but fortunately not to the parents who show up at the school board meetings.

‘They caught you red-handed with an enemies list to punish opponents of critical race theory. You’re teaching children to hate others because of their skin color,’ declared Dick Black of Ashburn, Virginia, addressing the school board in Loudoun County, Virginia before the board abruptly adjourned the meeting and called the police to arrest the protesters for trespassing. Among the other speakers was Xi Van Fleet, a woman who survived the Cultural Revolution in Mao’s China, only to find critical theory back on the educational agenda in the US where students are being taught ‘to loathe our country and our history’.

‘You talk about critical race theory which is pretty much teaching your kids how to hate each other, how to dislike each other,’ averred Tie Smith addressing the Bloomington Public School Board in Illinois on June 9. Smith explained that CRT was taking away his accomplishments as a successfully self-educated black man.

In Southlake, Texas, voters by an overwhelming margin and with record turnout replaced the entire Carroll school board with a slate of candidates opposed to the district’s ‘Cultural Competency Action Plan’, another DEI scheme. They denounced the plan as creating ‘diversity police’ and ‘reverse racism’.

In Tredyffrin Township, Pennsylvania, residents packed a school board meeting to complain about a ‘racial equity’ curriculum that they said labels white students as oppressors. According to the Tredyffrin-Easttown, Pennsylvania Patch, resident Deana Wang told the board, ‘America is great because of two reasons; this county nurtures innovative minds that drive progress on a global scale, and American people seek to embrace constructive criticism. Critical race theory is creating the indoctrination environment that will constrain children’s creative sense of self and consequently limit their analytical productivity as adults.’

Look wherever you might across the United States, populist uprisings against public schools for embracing CRT are underway. CRT proponents are fighting back, not just via figures such as Marc Lamont Hill and Joy Reid, but also by organizing their counter-protests. But for once the numbers and the energy are on the side of those who seek to uphold traditional values and accurate history. This is a grassroots movement which has substantial political implications for the 2022 midterm elections. The Biden administration beginning on inauguration day has gone all-in in its support for CRT, the 1619 Project and related endeavors. The Anti-CRT Burghers have a lot to chew on.