I’ve been posting a bunch of what I’ve accumulated on Critical Race Theory and the bad, ugly side of this pernicious theory, so, it’s time for a few links and stories to help you counter the crazy I’ve been sharing about CRT.
North Carolina group encourages whistleblowers to come forward. A North Carolina education advocacy group launched a website this week to help whistleblowers expose radicalism in K-12 schools. Education First Alliance launched its Schoolhouse Shock watchdog site on Monday to help parents and teachers call attention to radicalism in the classroom. Users can anonymously upload videos, photos, and documents from their child’s class to catalog critical race theory-based lessons being taught in schools.
“Our new statewide whistleblower program, Schoolhouse Shock, will add to our toolbox in the fight against the onslaught of racially inflammatory and sexualized curriculums that children are being immersed in all over North Carolina,” Sloan Rachmuth, Education First Alliance president, said in a statement.
…Education First Alliance charts the rise of critical race theory in education on its blog. The group reported on a nine-week-long “Culturally Responsive Teaching” training that instructed teachers to “disrupt” the education system with critical race theory. The group also documented a series of tweets in which James Ford—a North Carolina state education board member who was hand-selected by Democratic governor Roy Cooper—lauded anti-Semitic preacher Jeremiah Wright.
The organization uncovered documents that instructed North Carolina public school teachers to ask students about their sexual orientations and more. Middle school students in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district were asked about their sexual preferences. Sixth graders at Innovation Academy, a school south of Raleigh, were given a survey that asked students to count the number of genders and sexual orientations they believe exist, as well as whether they believe the gay community deserves rights.
Grassroots opposition to leftist indoctrination is on the rise. In North Carolina, Robinson in March created the F.A.C.T.S. Task Force, which provides parents another way to share radical education materials and other examples of “indoctrination” in schools. The national, nonpartisan Parents Defending Education launched in March to provide resources—including a tip-line and instructions for filing public records requests—to parents who want to protect their child’s education from “activists promoting harmful agendas.”
By the way, call and write to NH State Governor Chris Sununu and urge him to deny the use of tax monies for this kind of Racist teaching out of our schools. Not everyone is caving and this onslaught of Marxism is not impossible to fight.
Last week, journalist Christopher Rufo broke the news that Disney was deploying employee training based on the principles of critical race theory. According to the documents he obtained, the company had some of the most explicit and divisive content based on the principles of critical race theory leaked yet. It posits that black employees are fragile and not able to tolerate questions about their point of view. It also uses concepts found in Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility to encourage self-examination of feelings white employees have probably never had…
…According to Rufo’s whistleblowers, this new program was making Disney the unhappiest place to work. The program included employee affinity groups segregated by race “with the goal of achieving “culturally-authentic insights,” according to Rufo. In addition to writing the article for his website, Rufo appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight to break the story. The backlash against Disney was swift and fierce. As Rufo noted:
Disney is playing with fire. The premise of the company has always been to provide an escape for middle Americans, but Disney’s executives seem to have growing contempt for the very people who visit their amusement parks, watch their films, and buy their merchandise. Disney is no longer neutral ground; instead, the company has committed to becoming the “wokest place on Earth,” whatever the consequences.
And OOPSIES – the key to unlock the lock that this movement seemed to have on “Woke” individuals, School Boards, and companies:
A fair guess is that one of the millions of impressions Rufo’s expose earned was a Disney lawyer. The entire content shared publicly is a blatant violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The training assigns behavior, feelings, and attributes to employees solely based on their race. They were doing it in all directions, not just to white employees. It is a lawsuit waiting to happen…According to his internal sources, the training has magically disappeared
And thanks to Conservative consumer backlash that started to affect its bottom line:
…What does it mean when one of America’s wokest corporations starts learning the steps to the Backpedal Tango? Answer: It means we might just be winning, baby.
Coca-Cola to “pause” diversity initiatives after senior exec. resigns. Have a Pepsi… and a smile:
While Coca-Cola’s website states “Diversity, equity and inclusion are at the heart of our values and our growth strategy and play an important part in our company’s success,” this may not be the complete picture, after the company’s senior vice president and global general counsel Bradley Gayton resigned recently. Many are speculating that Gayton’s resignation is tied to a decline in customer support for Coke, given his history of pushing for diversity initiatives at the company.
And of course, in Red States where sanity is a bulwark against most of the Left’s faddish attempts to pervert our social norms, legislators and Governors are fighting back against this “theory” that simple turns the table on what was White on Black discrimination to Black on White discrimination. Really? Imposing a different kind of racial discrimination is supposed to make amends for a previous one? Didn’t yo Momma teach you that two wrongs don’t make a right? Racism is racism regards of a given skin color.
When Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signed H.B. 1775 into law on Friday it caused something of a crisis for an 8-person school board in Oklahoma City, and their response tells you everything you need to know about the concepts and stances of the hard-left. H.B. 1775 put a state-wide ban on teaching critical race theory, a hard-left ideological belief that America is a racist country, that all minorities are victims within the American system, and that white people are to blame for all of it. According to Fox News, Oklahoma’s school board reacted to the ban in the typical fashion of those who ardently believe in critical race theory; they began being racist.
Board member Ruth Veales, a black and Native American woman, accused those who passed it of trying to protect “white fragility.”
Yeah, like we should be agreeing to continue to use the Left’s made up vocabulary ANY TIME!!!!???? No way – once you agree to go along with Leftist Vocabulary (e.g., “White fragility”), you can’t win. Tell such people to just stuff it – you aren’t playing by their rules and totally reject their language norms which make it impossible for you to successfully debate their bass-ackwards ideas. They’ve created them to be self-referential without really defining them – use another set of made up words or concepts to defend the first – a continual Catch-22 round robin in which no rational discourse is available. It is MEANT that they can always assert that something is true while eliminating any possible way to say “that’s not me”.
I don’t suffer from either white guilt or white fragility, both of which the Left says that THEY can easily see but that I can’t. See what just happened there? They’ve defined the debate, the terms, and the only possible outcome is for you to accede to their worldview.
…In Texas, U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor has issued a temporary restraining order sought by a [White] restaurant owner against the Biden Small Business Administration. The owner challenged the Biden administration’s Restaurant Revitalization Fund which gives priority to businesses owned by women, racial minorities, veterans, and other “socially and economically disadvantaged” groups. Judge O’Connor enjoined the SBA from giving such preferential treatment based on racial and gender classifications.
<snip>…It’s a challenge to the race-based admissions policy of Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) — rated the best public high school in the country last month by U.S. News and World Report. The Fairfax County School Board scrapped the standardized test that TJ used to select students objectively (and that probably helped make the school as good as it is) in favor of a system that distributes the vast majority of slots to the top 1.5 percent of students at each of the county’s middle schools.
The new policy disfavors Asian-Americans….Accordingly, a group of Asian-Americans sued the School Board. It [the School Board] moved to dismiss the lawsuit. But Senior Judge Claude Hilton, a conservative who has been on the bench since 1985, denied the motion.
Judge Hilton was not persuaded by the School Board’s claim that the policy is racially neutral. It may be neutral on its face, but, said Hilton, “Everybody knows. . .that it’s designed to affect the racial composition of the school.”
And CRT’s basic premise, that only Whites can be Racists, is now being fought in the Arena of Ideas as well as in politics and the judicial system:
Last Friday Andrew Sullivan published a piece on Substack about Critical Race Theory. This piece is really an attempt to summarize what CRT is in the most fundamental sense. As Sullivan describes it, CRT isn’t just a new wave of social justice reform that seeks to expand what gets covered in textbooks, but an ideology that is at base hostile to liberalism, i.e. the philosophy of individualism, democracy, free enterprise, etc.
The genius of liberalism in unleashing human freedom and the human mind changed us more in centuries than we had changed in hundreds of millennia. And at its core, there is the model of the single, interchangeable, equal citizen, using reason to deliberate the common good with fellow citizens. No ultimate authority; just inquiry and provisional truth. No final answer: an endless conversation. No single power, but many in competition.
In this open-ended conversation, all can participate, conservatives and liberals, and will have successes and failures in their turn. What matters, both conservatives and liberals agree, is not the end result, but the liberal democratic, open-ended means. That shift — from specifying a single end to insisting only on playing by the rules — is the key origin of modern freedom.
My central problem with critical theory is that it takes precise aim at these very core principles and rejects them. By rejecting them, in the otherwise noble cause of helping the marginalized, it is a very seductive and potent threat to liberal civilization.
…And because that narrative is deemed to be the only absolute truth, claims of truth are now seen as merely demands for power…Because of its insistence on this oppression narrative as fundamental, CRT is ultimately not compatible with any other theory.
…Sullivan concludes that the demand by Ibram X Kendi and others that everything be categorized as either racist or anti-racist is really a demand that they embrace CRT’s oppression narrative over the messy process of liberalism: “This debate is not about whether you are a racist or an antiracist. The debate is about whether, in your deepest heart and soul, you are a liberal or an anti-liberal.”
It’s a good argument but you already know what Robin DiAngelo would say about it. Any attempt to deny the oppression narrative as fundamental is just further proof of guilt. There is no room for debate about those fundamentals in CRT. After all, debate itself is one of the “master’s tools,” i.e. a part of the liberalism that CRT would like to shrug off.
Heads you lose, tails you lose more. That’s the philosophical underpinning I mentioned above – its wording, its phrasing, has been set up that you are within its circular debate but you are not allowed to debate. By rejecting any other theory, it rejects the Classic Western Liberalism one – the one that effectively set us free and has been doing to for centuries. No, there was no Big Bang event – but a slow, incremental march towards it that has only been marred when Totalitarians have established a toe hold.
And CRT is a manifestation of such a form of Totalitarianism.
Wednesday, FNC host Tucker Carlson reacted to Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot declared she would prioritize black and brown journalists over white journalists in the name of racial “equity.”
Carlson called Lightfoot “a monster.”
CARLSON: For months now, privately, we’ve been searching for a meaningful definition of the word “equity.” We’ve consulted linguists, we’ve dusted off moldering reference books, and we’ve scoured the four corners of God’s own internet, all in an effort to figure out what equity is.
…So what is equity? Well, tonight, finally we know what it is. Equity, it turns out is racism. It’s as simple as that. Equity is racism…Bigotry, in other words, prejudice, hatred. That’s what equity is. We know this thanks to Lori Lightfoot, Mayor of Chicago.
Too many people shy away from engaging in this fight. No, it isn’t a conversation, it really isn’t a debate – it is a fight over who we are as Individuals and as a country. CRT proponents wish to eternally classify you either as a Racist/Oppressor or as Oppressed / Victim simply by the color of your skin. Is this what we really want? Is this a plan for a peaceful Society? Or one in which everyone will be pitched against everyone else?
