Critical Race Theory by Any Other Name

...Would Still Smell Like Bullshit

May 16, 2022

While some on the mainstream left deny that critical race theory is being taught in schools or that anyone wants it to be so, others on the mainstream left say that it is being taught in schools and that it should be so.

ABC and Good Morning America neither deny it nor criticize it, but rather misrepresents it in defense of it. On June 14th, 2021 the American Federation of Teachers1 tweeted…

AFT @AFTunion

Watch AFT Secretary-Treasurer @fedingram on ABC's @GMA about how teaching critical race theory allows educators to "give our students the opportunity to understand the full breadth and depth of the American society." Watch the full clip now

To quote the Secretary-Treasurer of AFT, Fredrick Ingram2 in full…

What teachers have been doing is simply doing what they always do, they create magic in our classrooms. They give our students the opportunity to understand the full breadth and depth of the American society and that is about the inception of this country, that’s about our constitution, that’s about slavery, that’s about Jim Crow laws, it’s about the beautiful inventions that we’ve had, and it spans across the diaspora and is spans across any demographic kind of divide that we may have.

Clearly the AFT secretary-treasurer is not opposed to CRT in classrooms. Nor is ABC. Nor is Biden. At any rate, for their own benefit, or to avoid people like me mocking them, they may want to get on the same page and make sure they stick to the same story. For, you see, the AFT president tweeted…

Randi Weingarten @rweingarten

#CriticalRaceTheory is not taught in K-12 schools. The right’s culture warriors are labeling any discussion of race, racism or discrimination as such to try to make it toxic. They’re bullying teachers to try and keep them from teaching the truth.

washingtonpost.comAmid critical race theory controversy, teachers union chief vows legal action to defend teaching of ‘honest history’Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, condemned a conservative “culture campaign” that restricts lessons on race.

Some have told me that schools are just teaching history as they always have and that it is just a baseless right wing conspiracy theory that this thing they call critical race theory is being introduced into school curriculums. Some states have been taking legal measures against CRT being taught in schools. Does this mean they are passing laws against teaching aspects of history like slavery? Or would these be laws against something that doesn’t exist or that isn’t being taught in schools?

So, they just don’t want kids to learn the truth about racism in America’s past? Is that it? They just made up this whole conspiracy theory that there’s something called CRT that is being pushed into schools? If so, it would just be business as usual, right? Teaching history, slavery, the civil rights era and so on, right? No plans, no budgets, no inviting financial incentive for schools to teach CRT?

By the way, if you change the name of something, say, from “CRT” to “history”, have you changed the thing? Or have you merely renamed it (in attempt to deceive people)?

Blimey! But back to ‘Build Back Better’ Biden. Perhaps these states are responding to real moves by him. For example, Stanley Kurts, writing for the National Review, reported in “Biden Set to Push Critical Race Theory on U.S. Schools” (April 19, 2021)…

The woke revolution in the classroom is about to go federal. In an early but revelatory move, President Biden’s Department of Education has signaled its intent to impose the most radical forms of Critical Race Theory on America’s schools, very much including the 1619 Project and the so-called anti-racism of Ibram X. Kendi. (Kendi’s “anti-racism” — which advocates a massive and indefinite expansion of reverse discrimination — is more like neo-racism.)

Further down they write…

Biden’s Department of Education has just released the text of a proposed new rule establishing priorities for grants in American History and Civics Education programs. That rule gives priority to grant “projects that incorporate racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse perspectives.” The rule goes on to cite and praise the New York Times’ “landmark” 1619 Project, as well as the work of Critical Race Theorist Kendi, as leading examples of the sort of ideas the Biden administration wants to spread.

If it’s just about teaching history, what’s the money for? What are the “priority grants” for? They are for teaching material that is modeled on Ibram X. Kendi’s book “How to Be an Antiracist”, for example, which is cited in the government’s education proposal which we will look at ahead. In this book, he wries3…

The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.

You may have heard of microaggressions. You may know that racial microaggressions are defined as4…

brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, and environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults to the target person or group.

Notice that it is defined so that it can be unintentional. In other words, it is up to the self-professed “victim” to decide that the accused has made a microaggression against them because it could be unintentional and therefore detectable by the self-professed victim and not by the accused. This may seem like a loophole so that a person can be guilty of making microaggressions even though they did and said nothing racist or sexist or what-not. It is not just the magnification of a molehill into a mountain, it’s also just making stuff up out of nothing.

But it gets worse. Ibram X. Kendi writes in that book cited in that education proposal5…

What other people call racist microaggressions I call racist abuse.

So, something that is unintentional, such as a tone of voice that the self-professed victim imagines that the accused unconsciously took because they are unconsciously racist, however slight or non-existent, is “racist abuse” in the view of Ibram X. Kendi and he is the model to aspire to to get that money from Biden from taxpayers, huh?

That seems like the sort of thing someone does when they want to destroy society.

If one looks at this “Proposed Priorities-American History and Civics Education” (archived here), one sees that the proposal asserts…

…the importance of including, in the teaching and learning of our country's history, both the consequences of slavery, and the significant contributions of Black Americans to our society. This acknowledgement is reflected, for example, in the New York Times' landmark “1619 Project” and in the resources of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History.
Accordingly, schools across the country are working to incorporate anti-racist practices into teaching and learning.

Teaching history, including, “the significant contributions of Black Americans” is a must, of course. Teaching the real, quantifiable, objective, factually accurate, “consequences of slavery” too, of course. Teaching them about racism in the present too, of course. However, what are the chances of them actually teaching such a thing accurately and objectively?

As Douglas Murray writes in War on the West…

…one of the distinguishing mark of CRT was that its assertions were based not on evidence, as it might previously have been understood, but essentially on interpretations and attitudes. This marked a significant shift. While rarely announcing the fact, the rules of CRT had no need for normal standards of evidence. If a person’s “lived experience” could be attested to, then the question of “evidence” or “data” had to find a place further back in the queue, if at all.

Further down in that proposal of priorities for American history and for civics education, it says that the projects proposed must…

Incorporate racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse perspectives and perspectives on the experience of individuals with disabilities;

Racial perspectives? Ethnic perspectives? As I have shown in other reports on CRT, they lean heavily on the view that rationalism and objectivity is a white racial perspective. Of course, this is insulting to people who aren’t white (by saying they are not objective or rational) but this is used as an argument for the validity their “voice-of-color” perspective - that “people of color” have their own view which should be treated as just as valid as the rational and objective white view.

Thus, something that is not objectively real or factually correct can be taught as truth because it can be passed off as true in the perspective of “people of color” and therefore it’s a white racial perspective bias to not accept it as truth.

In other words, accept bullshit (but only their bullshit) or you’re racist. Either agree that 2 + 2 = 5 or be labeled racist. The proposal also has this requirement…

Support the creation of learning environments that validate and reflect the diversity, identities, and experiences of all students;

In other words, more focus on superficial features to make children think of themselves and each other in terms of skin color and so on. Also, more of this confusion of the subjective and the objective wherein a person of color’s feelings are imposed as objectively true.

As for Ibram X. Kendi, regarding his book, City-Journal writes…

If the book has a core thesis, it is that this war admits of no neutral parties and no ceasefires. For Kendi, “there is no such thing as a not-racist idea,” only “racist ideas and antiracist ideas.” His Manichaean outlook extends to policy. “Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity,” Kendi proclaims, defining the former as racist policies and the latter as antiracist ones.
…Kendi defines a racist as anyone who supports “a racist policy through their actions or inaction.”

In other words, there are racist things out there that exist, according to them, that you may not know about and by doing nothing to oppose them, you are racist.

Further down City-Journal writes…

At times, it’s hard to know whether to interpret Kendi’s arguments as factual claims subject to empirical scrutiny or as diary entries to be accepted as personal truths.

Again, there’s that whole post-modernist view that wrong views can be right, depending on skin color. According to the City-Journal…

In high school, Kendi delivered a speech bemoaning the bad behavior of black youth; by college, he had outgrown that phase and become anti-white, convinced at one point that white people were literal aliens

That sounds like mental illness. They continue…

but later scaling down to the belief that they were “simply a different breed of human.” A New Yorker piece cites a column he wrote as an undergraduate, in which he argued that “white people were fending off racial extinction, using ‘psychological brainwashing’ and ‘the aids virus.’”
Having matured out of his anti-white phase,

I have to add here that it hardly seems as if Kendi has ever left his anti-white phase. They continue…

Kendi takes a refreshingly strong stand against anti-white racism in the book, rejecting the fashionable argument that blacks cannot be racist because they lack power…The book is weakest in its chapter devoted to capitalism. “Capitalism is essentially racist,” Kendi proclaims, and “racism is essentially capitalist.” To test this claim, a careful thinker might compare racism in capitalist countries with racism in socialist/Communist ones; or he might compare racism in the private sector with racism in the public sector. Kendi does neither. Instead, he presents the link between capitalism and racism as self-evidently true: “Since the dawn of racial capitalism, when were markets level playing fields? . . . . When could Black people compete equally with White people?” Kendi asks, implying that the answer is “never.”
History offers little evidence that capitalism is either inherently racist or antiracist. As a result, Kendi must resort to cherry-picking data to demonstrate a link. Citing a Pew article, he asserts that the “Black unemployment rate has been at least twice as high as the White unemployment rate for the last fifty years” because of the “conjoined twins” of racism and capitalism. But why limit the analysis to the past 50 years? A paper cited in the same Pew article reveals that the black-white unemployment gap was “small or nonexistent before 1940,” when America was arguably more capitalist—and certainly more racist.

Excuse me, but for the government to spend our taxes on teaching our children to be against capitalism and to regard it as racist… well, it seems a it wrong. In fact, it seems traitorous. It seems like treason on the part of the Biden administration that is pushing this cancer on our children and making us pay for it.

Stanley Kurtz continues for the National Review…

The Biden administration’s interest in pushing Critical Race Theory on America’s schools could already be gleaned from the president’s repeated endorsement of the notion that America is “systemically racist.” Biden’s statements to that effect are actually cited in the new federal rule. It’s of interest as well that the new rule explicitly endorses the wave of woke Critical Race Theory currently sweeping through America’s schools.

If a store has a sign that says “no dogs allowed” and you show up to that store with your dog but you call your dog a cat, you won’t fool anyone but the most stupid of people, people as stupid as, for example, those who actually believe that they are not teaching CRT in schools because they don’t call it CRT.

Please my other pieces about Critical Race Theory…

Critical Race Theory – What is it?

Critical Race Theory is Communist

Critical Race Theory is Racist Against Everyone!

Critical Race Theory vs the Presumption of Innocence