Editor’s note: This letter is by Kathy Wagner, of Sandgate.
One of the hot topics we hear about almost daily and which affects students of all ages is critical race theory. Those who are injecting this curriculum into our schools and universities claim that inherent racism and white supremacy are defining elements of our society. They want to divide us into oppressors and oppressed. CRT insists that whites have unfair advantage, “privilege,” over people of color. People of color are deemed to be victims and that the deck is stacked against them.
Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement made great progress after challenging all people to judge someone based on their character and not the color of their skin. After this movement permeated the country, we have made positive change and greatly reduced discriminatory practices. CRT would take us back to segregation and racial bias, which encourages resentment and victimhood. White students should accept shame for something they had nothing to do with. Aren’t such teachings of blame and negativity detrimental to children’s development? Won’t they cause many adverse effects?
Critical race theory should not be forced upon young children, with their innocence and yet-undeveloped minds. Children are carefree and are accepting of everyone. They are without prejudice. In the classroom they shouldn’t be taught to feel shame and guilt for imagined inherent traits.
If parents want clarity about CRT, there is an important event in early August that will interest and inform them. K. Carl Smith travels the country and offers an alternative perspective than Critical Race Theory. His view of life is seen through a lens of empowerment. K. Carl Smith is a man who follows the role model of Frederick Douglass. Frederick Douglass started out as a slave, was horribly treated for years, but kept his spirit and will and was determined to become master of his own life. He eventually broke out of servitude and through education achieved great success. He became an orator, a businessman, and a writer — a role model for all.
Our young school children must be taught about such role models who overcome great adversity to become successful. They need an education which will instill a strong base and confidence that they can achieve success using their own abilities. They shouldn’t be confused or burdened with issues of race, white supremacy and discrimination that is the basis of critical race theory.
K. Carl Smith will give a black man’s perspective on CRT and new segregation in Vermont schools. After an introduction by John Klar, he will speak at the East Road Pavilion (this is the upper pavilion) at Willow Park – in Bennington at 5 p.m. on Thursday, August 5 and again on August 7 at the Dana Thompson Park House in Manchester at 7 p.m.
It is vital that parents know and understand the curriculum that has infiltrated our schools!
There will be a Q&A after the speakers finish.
Kathy Wagner
Sandgate
Truth hurts, all too often. Liberal NEWSWEEK mag just put this out on new research. Turns out it is Blacks in many states doin the hate crimes at a far higher rate than whites. So much for CRT balming the wrong people. vermont is not racist.
“Hate crimes documented by police disproportionately list Black people as attackers, according to a new report by several civil rights groups for better protections under hate crime laws.
Released Wednesday, the report is a comprehensive national review of hate crime laws that shows where laws variate. It also cited widespread flaws in data collection and reporting.
In at least 13 states, Black Americans were listed by law enforcement as the perpetrators in hate crimes at a rate roughly 1.6 to 3.6 times greater than the size of the state’s Black population, the report said.
“These repeated disparities … show that — despite the fact that people of color are far more likely to be the victims of hate violence — the instances of hate violence that are actually documented by police … are disproportionately those alleged to have been committed by Black people,” it read.
Please, please, try to understand that when a bunch of White people (and I assume you are White, correct me if I’m wrong) speak only to the disproportionate circumstances of Black Americans, good or bad, that it is precisely what the Leftist CRT movement advocates want you to say.
Your statistics are, no doubt, correct. But so what? When are we all, Black and White, going to recognize that we are being set up by Marxists, only to prove their assertion that, as free-thinking individuals, we aren’t capable of governing ourselves?
As Morgan Freeman said to Mike Wallace in that now famous interview (and I’m paraphrasing) – if you want people to stop judging one another by the color of their skin, stop judging people by the color of their skin.
Thanks Mr Green another fine point
Lest anyone doubt that this movement, characterized here as Critical Race Theory – but more often than not disguised in more euphemistic terminology such as Racial Justice, Racial Equity or Allyship – is being promoted by powerful constituencies here in Vermont, please check out the following directives from the Vermont Government and the largest professional union in the State, the VTNEA.
http://racialequityvtnea.org/about-us/
and
https://racialequity.vermont.gov/sites/reap/files/doc_library/Action%20and%20Allyship%20Guide.pdf
And try to understand that the perpetrators of these Marxist philosophies don’t want to ‘divide us’. They want to control us. Not because they believe what they’re doing is best for us, but because any independent success threatens their anti-individual, anti-meritocracy, one-size-fits-all dogma. If just one of us thrives in this life while exercising our personal choices, it is deemed proof positive that a collective is but one option to consider in a free society, and that individualism, freedom and liberty are reasonable options as well.
Who are ‘they’? The usual suspects. We all know who they are. They are factions warned of in James Madison’s Federalist Paper #10 and Tom Paine’s Common Sense. They are what many of us now recognize as ‘The Deep State’… an elitist class of professional politicians and ‘new world order’ corporate cronies, lobbyists, and the victim/entitlement class they’ve created to re-elect them in this tyranny by the majority.
Being ruled and indoctrinated by a public-school monopoly, and today, even more relevant, by mandates requiring an experimental mRNA vaccine, should make clear than when one-size-fits-all, there is only one size, and nothing else with which to compare it. As C.S. Lewis opined”
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
These are the irreconcilable notions. While the free-thinking libertarian tenants espoused in the U.S. Constitution protect an individual’s right to ‘live and let live’, Marxist tenants cannot afford to be as generous. Never mind that libertarian individualism has allowed humans to flourish on planet earth more so than any governance ever conceived in history.
Knowing that this philosophical and Covid pandemic has infiltrated our schools is one thing. Most of us now know. But what to do about it is the point I hope is raised in these forums. Our last chance rests with School Choice. It’s as simple as that. Let parents choose the education they believe is best for their children and trust that a free market in education will allow us to be as prosperous as free markets have allowed virtually every other aspect of our lives to prosper. After all, it has been said that ‘despair all too readily embraces the ills it perceives, while hope imagines the good that can be’.
I remain hopeful.