When parents reject public schools that teach critical race theory, a common response from the left is that it is a college-level analytical framework that is incomprehensible to children and therefore incapable of being taught in K-12 schools.
This attempted gaslighting of Virginia Gov. parents and conservatives. Glenn Youngkin to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis – nothing to see here! — by such false claims is destructive.
In fact, we are already seeing the horrific results in our children.
Just because CRT started as a 1970s era, law school level analysis doesn’t mean it isn’t adapted for lower level understanding.
Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton broke through barriers in understanding the laws of physics, but the vast majority of us can never technically fully understand how or what they did.
Yet the basics of natural science are age-appropriate for masses of students from elementary school to high school.
The truth is that union-controlled public schools teach kids to be racist – paid for by your tax dollars – and it makes schools more dangerous and discordant.
Instead of the promised racial reckoning growing into a racial utopia, the CRT mob is breaking America.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed of a country where children are judged by their character, not the color of their skin.
But in January, school officials forced students at Virginia’s West Springfield High School to look a racist, inhumane video about micro-aggressions.
It depicts white people as blood-sucking cartoon mosquitoes to be destroyed by non-whites wielding flamethrowers.
In Orlando, Fla., Howard Middle School black teacher Ethan Hooper proudly showed off his Black History Month video on TikTok, showing his white students bowing to, luxuriously fanning and accommodating to, their black classmates.
And in Springfield, Ohio, police reported an incident at Kenwood Elementary School where a group of black students were on the playground rounded white students “and forced them to say ‘Black Lives Matter’ against their will.”
Police say the black students could be charged with assault and threats.
What happens in real life echoes what teacher Jane Elliot from Iowa found decades ago.
Beginning in 1968, Elliot indoctrinated her students in a disturbing “experiment” where she taught brown-eyed children to despise and marginalize blue-eyed students and vice versa.
Her students reacted aggressively to those with the opposite eye color, leading to bullying and abuse.
Elliot’s unethical tactics needlessly hurt students’ academic performance.
We now have a nation of Jane Elliots from coast to coast.
It is vital to teach children to reject racism and to learn empathy.
But today’s schools introduce a new kind of racism that reduces people to captives of their race, rather than unique individuals.
Black Lives Matter and CRT fail to create effective racial healing.
In 2014, the last year before BLM rioters began burning down predominantly black neighborhoods and destroying black-owned and operated businesses, Gallup found 55% of Americans said they were “very” or “somewhat” satisfied with US race relations.
Only 35% said they were “very” or “somewhat” dissatisfied.
Those numbers flipped in 2015, with 62% reporting dissatisfaction with race relations and only 30% reporting satisfaction.
Things got worse in 2021, with 71% reporting dissatisfaction with race relations and 61% this year.
We know that CRT’s race-obsessed lens isn’t working.
So why do schools double down on this toxic, Marxist-rooted philosophy?
It stems from the Marxist-inspired Frankfurt School of the 1930s.
The German founders of the Frankfurt School, who developed critical theory, sought to dismantle capitalism and Western civilization, just as the American CRT does today.
Indeed, BLM founder Patrisse Cullors proudly calls herself “a trained Marxist.”
CRT divides people by skin color through ideologically infused methods. Despite what leftists claim, this does not teach neutral history.
It’s a political ideology based on lies, including The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” an ahistorical attack on the truth.
Tragically, the “1619 Project” is being spread to school children across the country.
CRT supporters are ignoring the fatal consequences of LBJ’s Great Society, which is plaguing black families and neighborhoods.
They ignore black conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele and Jason Riley who prove how welfare decimates families.
They are determined to dismantle capitalism, whatever good it has done, and teach young Americans to loathe their country.
America is far from perfect, but we can appreciate the tremendous progress Dr. King and the civil rights movement have made no denying progress.
CRT donors would like us to reverse that progress, back to the age of segregation.
Teachers who push this pernicious philosophy into the classroom and beyond are engaged in a dangerous experiment whose results are already clear: CRT divides us in alarming ways.
Carrie Sheffield is a senior fellow at Independent Women’s Voice and a Tony Blankley Fellow for American Exceptionalism at The Steamboat Institute.
