Critical Race Theory Strikes Back: CRT Authors Blast Critics

After a string of apparent victories by anti-CRT activists, the academics who created critical race theory are slinging mud. It appears CRT advocates are on the defensive.

Summary

The academics responsible for the creation of CRT in academia decades ago are calling opposition to its teaching to children “an effort to create a boogeyman” and “a well-established theater…demanded by the right wing base.”

• School districts across the country are grappling with critical race theory in their curricula, with one suburban Pittsburgh school district turning its back on the controversial framework and announcing it will be teaching a “patriotic” education.
• In a community just outside St. Louis, several dozen parents and teachers organized a town hall style event with state legislatures in response to their school district announcing the inclusion of two elective courses in the upcoming school year: Black History and Black Literature.
• Public debates on CRT are supposedly drawing partisan lines within non-partisan institutions such as Christian churches as preachers and pastors stake public positions in the debate.
• Evidence of social justice and CRT advocates losing ground in the battle over school curriculum is growing, as it is apparent “Democrats appear to be underestimating parents’ anger”, especially as suburban moms, the new bread and butter of the Democratic coalition, are organizing against CRT.

• Salon agreed that opponents of CRT are winning, but argued they’re just a bunch of racist and bigots who believe “Black and brown people” “are plotting a rebellion.”
• The Washington Post reported on an incident in one Michigan city in which high schoolers used social media to conduct a mock slave auction of their own classmates, and how that quickly snowballed into the local schools’ passage of an “equity resolution” that calls for “comprehensive” training for teachers and “reviewing the district’s curriculum and instruction to address gaps…from a social equity and diversity lens.”
• NBC News defends schools and teachers who want to teach CRT-related and CRT-derivative courses and material, effectively saying it’s not really critical race theory, and that Republican legislators proposing bans on it are “all white and over 50.”

• The Federalist reviewed the book “Fault Lines” by African-American theologian Voddie Baucham, in which Baucham “[traces] what he calls the ‘thought line’ out of which CRT arose”, starting with Karl Marx’s “conflict theory” and argues CRT is effectively a “new religion” with a “gospel that offers no salvation.”
• The Daily Wire reported on Salt Lake City’s government passing a resolution declaring racism a public health crisis, making it “the most recent Democrat-led area to make such a declaration.”
• Newt Gingrich wrote an op-ed for FoxNews.com in which he questioned the value of teaching CRT-related topics in American military institutions when the whole point is “about forming a bond, a unit, a team working toward the same goals” compared to CRT, “which divides our own people.”

Return to Freespoke

© Dallas Gerber, 2021