Critical race theory a new history curriculum or anti-American propaganda?

By Lindsey Burke, Mike Gonzalez and Jonathan Butcher | The Daily Signal

President Joe Biden wants educators to teach students that racism is endemic in America. He and his “woke” allies think students should learn that our nation was born of the desire to enslave other humans, not as a struggle for freedom. They also believe that the government should racially discriminate, today and in the future.

The president wants these things so badly he’s asked his secretary of education to prioritize grant funding for K-12 history and civics curricula that preach this revisionist history.

Public domain

Slaves aboard a slave ship being shackled before being put in the hold. A wooden engraving.

That would be a huge mistake. The vile, ahistorical teachings of critical race theory should be consigned to the ashbin of history, not taught as sacred ideology in our nation’s schools.

Like other forms of Marxism, critical race theory teaches young minds to see the world as divided into two categories: oppressors and their victims. The only difference with traditional Marxism is that the critical race theory categories consist of immutable traits such as race, sex, or national origin, not economic classes like the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

Critical race theory eschews economic classifications because they are too fluid. People can change their stations in life—and under capitalism, they often do. Critical theorists readily concede this point as being one of the downsides of trying to start a revolution with classes that are not immutable.

Critical race theory wants to solve this problem by adding race to Marxism. Critical race theory teaches young minds to focus on nothing but skin color and power, and how one influences the other in public and private life. It promotes racial stereotypes and assumes that humans act according to their category, not as individuals.

This pernicious ideology is already making its way into classrooms across the country—even without the proposed stimulus of federal grants. One example is the Learning for Justice curriculum, a K-12 civics program created by an organization of the same name that operates under the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The Learning for Justice curriculum teaches that “White supremacy culture … appears in any organization that is not actively and effectively working to dismantle it.” Educators, it insists, must acknowledge how racism “is embedded into the fiber of our nation and our schools.”

The proposed rule from Biden’s Education Department goes much further. For example, it recommends material created by the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The museum’s website hosted a chart claiming that “hard work,” “objective, rational, linear thinking,” and following “rigid time schedules” are racist values, mere appurtenances of white culture rather than human practices that lead to success.

The museum, a Smithsonian institution funded through your tax dollars, didn’t remove this racist chart until officials received blowback for such propaganda.

The proposed rule also praises Ibram X. Kendi, one of the nation’s best known critical race theory trainers, who has written, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” This, one therefore assumes, is what the Biden administration wants American children to be taught.

The rule also approvingly cites The New York Times’s 1619 Project, a mendacious series of essays on race that historians spanning the ideological spectrum have denounced.

The project derives its name from its misleading contention that America’s birthdate is not signified by the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, but by the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in 1619 on the shores of what would later become the United States. The project rejects the document that outlines America’s creed that “all men are created equal.”

The project couldn’t even meet basic standards of accuracy. Spanish conquistadors first brought slaves to what are today South Carolina, Florida, and New Mexico starting nearly a half-century before 1619. Another of the 1619 Project’s errors—one from which The New York Times later backed away—was its claim that the colonists fought the Revolution because they feared that Britain would end the practice of slavery. This is flatly false.

Let’s hope the president and his education secretary weren’t fully steeped in the tenets of critical race theory when they issued their proposal to subsidize this anti-American propaganda. If that’s the case, you can help straighten them out. If you agree that these pernicious ideas should not be taught to our children, you can submit your comments about the administration’s proposed rule (as we have) here.

Image courtesy of Public domain

5 thoughts on “Critical race theory a new history curriculum or anti-American propaganda?

  1. I am sorry we started a free republic that had slavery as an economic viability. I consider it to be our nation’s birth defect. The framers of the constitution. mostly from the north, were dead set against it and tried their hardest to abolish it that summer of 1787 in Philadelphia. But compromise had to be adhered to if the north and south states were to be as one nation. However; racism is not just an American thing. And America is probably one of the less racist countries compared to others. (Be a black man or woman in Russia) Critical race theory smacks of cultural revolution which could get wiped out with mid term elections as I believe the vast majority of Americans aren’t buying it.

  2. Actually this whole thing has two roots. The first is not Karl Marx, but Karl Adler’s, take on Marx – or, so-called vulgar Marxism. Adler’s aim in the struggle over oppressors was to use social action w/ politics (things Marx eschewed) for constant change in society for human conditions – though the benefit here was dubious. Adlerian Marxism was adopted in the US in the 1930s and infected elite universities filled with guilty rich kids gazing out their windows at Jim Crow America. Adlerian Marxism aided the downfall of the Austro Hungarian Empire, a faction ruled monolithic empire; all that it’ll do in a multi-factional society like the US is be avoidable faddish nonsense: send your kid to private tutors/home teach, or use religious schools. The other thing is the “work” of Jacques Derrida, self-professed systematic philosopher (denied by other philosophers) who was extremely popular over his “revisionism” theory, rewriting history to “sanitize it” from racial stigma. Only problem with changing history: you’re doomed to repeat it. The mighty genius of helping persons didn’t consider that.

  3. CRT is nothing more than a made up Marxist fairy tale to try to divide the nation and destroy the Constitution to control the populace.

  4. Of all of the dangerous and idiotic ideas promulgated by the “Left” in my lifetime, this has to be the worst!! Teaching white kids to hate themselves, hate their skin color, hate their history, and that there is nothing that they can do to overcome their racist discriminatory ways. Teaching black kids that they are perpetual victims and that their white oppressors are evil to the core and nothing can be done to change that. To teach these impressionable young blacks that systemic racism means that the entire system, and especially the cops, are out to hold them down, oppress them, and kill them. What could possibly go wrong as a result of these teachings? Instead of working to bring one race up, they work to tear one down and give the other excuses for failure. Good God what morons!!!!

  5. Well, what to make of this? A bizarre theory that says that it’s not a theory at all, but the truth, and that all white folks are racist whether they know it or not because they’ve been conditioned by language and culture to see through white eyes.

    I doubt it. Many men and women now and in the past noticed that treatment of blacks and other races was wrong: they somehow broke through their conditioning. They somehow saw injustice with their own eyes, and they spoke up and/or they worked to right the wrongs they saw. Most people don’t live merely by doctrines or language; they live by seeing and understanding for themselves. They have intuition, not just “conditioning.”

    This theory wants to give power to the woke and take it from the rest of us who refuse to confess that everything we say, everything we see, and everything we do is racist if we don’t adhere to the doctrine that all people with a certain skin color need to be corrected. This doctrine assumes that people with white skin walk around blindly and never see, and don’t have a moral compass or a conscience: they’re automatons conditioned by their language and their culture (except, that is, if you’re woke: then you see everything all the time, and you’re right, and there’s no room for arguing.)

    What practical steps can we take to right the abuses of the past, which are real and which echo into the present? First of all, it might be a good idea to stop flooding poor neighborhoods with heroin and fentanyl (more policing? Or is the idea that people– of any color– shouldn’t be strung out half the time and looking for a fix, “racist”?) It might be a good idea to ensure that schools in poor neighborhoods are high-quality, with good teachers and resources as needed for local conditions– and yes, learning the value of reason is important, as those hypocrites who espouse this pseudo-philosophy and can write articulate sentences know full well. It might be a good idea to ensure that there are jobs for everyone who wants one, rather than simply handing money out to people. The point is, the good people of this country can see, too, and we can see that there are specific problems that need work.

    What we don’t need are holier-than-thou preachers insisting that we have no place at any table except the one of constant shaming because of the color of our skin. A simple philosophy of judging people by character instead of skin color, and a default attitude of respect for all people no matter what they look like, makes a lot more sense than indoctrination with the philosophy, and an assumption, that skin color determines your unconscious character and morality.

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