“But Where is Critical Race Theory Actually Being Taught?”

Modern versions of CRT conflict with the Civil Rights Movement for these reasons:

A) CRT and antiracism are obsessed with dividing people into “colors” and treating them differently on the basis of “color.”

B) The Platform of CRT and antiracism have no meaningful mechanism for improving the lives of the poor minority populations they pretend to serve.

C) CRT and antiracism excel at denying data relating to their mission (including police statistics and economic facts, such as the fact that 60% of Americans who identify as “black” are middle class or above).

D) CRT and antiracism advocates do not extol the teachings of Martin Luther King.  In fact, King’s teachings are barely mentioned in training materials.

There are other difference too, but this is a sampling based upon some of the articles I’ve written recently.

Increasing numbers of people are starting to understand that CRT and “antiracism” conflict with the traditional Civil Rights Movement. In reaction, apologists for CRT and “anti-racism” are taking the position that CRT and “antiracism” are not being taught in schools. I see this as motivated reasoning based on the fact that most of these people (the ones I know) are only exposed to left-leaning legacy media that refuses to cover the fact that obsessions with skin “color” and other divisive poisons are increasingly being taught in K-12 and colleges. Left-leaning media admits of only a few outliers and deny that CRT or antiracism is a significant problem in the U.S. I disagree, based on these news reports:

The recent case of Dana stangel-Plowe, former teacher at a school in Englewood.

The recent case of Paul Rossi.

The observations of Andrew Gutmann, a former parent at Brearly School.

Christopher Rufo’s reports based upon leaked training materials at numerous schools.

Chloe Valdary teaches a good-hearted program to diminish bigotry she compares to the CRT programs of which she is knowledgable.

Numerous reports by Parents Defending Education.

Numerous reports of attempted cancellation based on CRT here.

Reports at businesses by Counterweight.

Many more reports here, by Princetonians for Free Speech.

I have also been personally contacted by approximately a dozen people who work in academia who are afraid to speech honestly on issues because CRT permeates the campus

More reports here (Stanford) and here (Rutgers).

John McWhorter’s receipt of numerous complaints (see the comments) here.

Another recent resource is Christopher Rufo’s “Critical Race Theory Briefing Book.” 

There are numerous other reports, more of them surfacing every week. I will update this list periodically in the comments.

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Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.

This Post Has 59 Comments

  1. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth December 13, 2021 Reply

    Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), and Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education.

    For example, Holyoke High School is one of four schools that DESE says “are leading efforts in Massachusetts to establish culturally responsive schools and classrooms.” Yet Holyoke High School’s academic achievement level is far below the state average. While MVRCS is ranked the 11th best public high school in Massachusetts by US News, Holyoke falls somewhere between 303-348. Of course, MVRCS is a charter school, so it is not surprising that it outperforms ordinary public schools like Holyoke. But it is nevertheless notable that DESE holds up Holyoke—which is, by the numbers, one of the worst-performing high schools in Massachusetts—as a paragon of culturally responsive teaching done correctly, while one of the state’s best high schools, MVRCS, is having to fight for its very existence because its pedagogical approach conflicts with culturally responsive teaching.

    https://fairforall.substack.com/p/cultural-literacy-or-cultural-destruction

  3. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth December 22, 2021 Reply

    Real Clear Investigations has published “No Critical Race Theory in Schools? Here’s the Abundant Evidence Saying Otherwise.” Here is an excerpt:

    [There is] overwhelming evidence – documented by class lessons, school curricula, focus groups, teacher surveys and public statements by educators – that CRT is not only taught in class, but is also heavily promoted by the K-12 education establishment.

    Some high schools are already teaching lessons and units on CRT, where students write papers demonstrating their facility with applying the theory, while other schools are introducing CRT concepts, such as systemic racism, white privilege, microaggressions, implicit bias and intersectionality.

    Public and private schools are also training teachers, staff, administrators – and even parents – on the elements of critical race theory, which school administrators see as an indispensable tool for dismantling what activists describe as America’s racial caste system.

    A July survey by EducationWeek found that barely a year after the murder of George Floyd by a Minnesota cop, 8% of K-12 teachers said they have taught or discussed CRT with students; the figure for teachers in urban schools is much higher: 20%.

    Meanwhile, the Association of American Educators found in July that 4.1% of teachers were actually required to teach critical race theory, and 11% said that teaching CRT should be mandatory.

    If those percentages hold true for the nation’s estimated 2 million secondary school teachers in public and private schools, that would translate to more than 150,000 middle- and high-school teachers who teach or discuss CRT.

  6. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth April 4, 2022 Reply

    New Version of CRT is SEL. Indoctrination disguised as therapy. In the meantime, students are being deprived of high quality instruction in the basic subjects such as math and reading skills. National Review reports:

    Since conservatives at all levels of government embraced the fight against critical race theory, dissenting parents nationwide know how to recognize and counter racially divisive curricula. But a broader suite of radical ideas, couched in therapeutic language, is quietly being advanced under the banner of SEL, parents whose children have been exposed to such programming told National Review.

  7. Avatar of
    Anonymous May 16, 2022 Reply

    “Nova High School in Seattle describes its pedagogical approach as “decentering whiteness, patriarchy, [and] hetero- and cis-normativity.” 80 percent of its students identify as “LGBTQ+, non-binary, and transgender.” The school does not issue grades.” https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1526321366521237504

  8. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth May 31, 2022 Reply

    “Oak Park and River Forest High School administrators will require teachers next school year to adjust their classroom grading scales to account for the skin color or ethnicity of its students.

    School board members discussed the plan called “Transformative Education Professional Development & Grading” at a meeting on May 26, presented by Assistant Superintendent for Student Learning Laurie Fiorenza.

    In an effort to equalize test scores among racial groups, OPRF will order its teachers to exclude from their grading assessments variables it says disproportionally hurt the grades of black students. They can no longer be docked for missing class, misbehaving in school or failing to turn in their assignments, according to the plan.”

    https://westcooknews.com/stories/626581140-oprf-to-implement-race-based-grading-system-in-2022-23-school-year#.YpZPwcms9K5.twitter

  9. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth June 2, 2022 Reply

    Excerpt from “UPenn Med School Leaders Turn on Former Dean over ‘Racist’ Affirmative-Action Criticism“:

    Senior administrators at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine recently leveled a reputation-destroying accusation at a former colleague who was, up until a few years ago, a member in good standing of America’s elite medical community . . . Goldfarb’s offense? Publicly questioning whether racial discrimination is as pervasive in medicine as the conventional elite narrative suggests. Responding last week to a study which suggested that systemic racism explains why minority medical residents tend to receive worse performance evaluations than their white peers, Goldfarb asked: “Could it be they were just less good at being residents?” . . .

    Goldfarb first waded into the topic in 2019 with an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled Take Two Aspirin and Call Me By My Pronouns, arguing that medical education has suffered as activist administrators lacking any medical background rejected scientific rigor in favor of social-justice-infused curricula and admissions standards.

    Drawing on his decades of experience in medicine, Goldfarb expanded on the op-ed’s thesis in a book of the same name published in March, in which he argues that the medical field’s commitment to anti-racism — the use of present racial discrimination to remedy past discrimination — has resulted in a loosening of objective standards of qualification. Instead of leveling the playing field for racial minorities, elite medical schools have upended the field of play altogether by reducing the importance of the MCAT and other standardized tests in favor of subjective race-conscious criteria that elevates unprepared applicants, he argues.

    The book relies on Goldfarb’s analysis of some 2,700 studies purporting to show systemic racism embedded in the medical field. When Goldfarb reviewed the studies he found that they, like the study he commented on in his tweet, ignored a troubling possibility: that racial performance disparities are not the result of systemic racism but rather the consequence of efforts to combat it.

    Goldfarb argues that affirmative-action programs have elevated unprepared minority students in the service of crude racial admissions quotas, inadvertently harming both the field of medicine as a whole and the minority applicants themselves, who may have thrived at less selective institutions or who may be legitimately qualified for the positions to which they were accepted, but who are now forced to work under a cloud of suspicion about their qualifications.

    Critics of medical-school affirmative action have pointed out that in order to expand the pool of qualified minority applicants, the process must begin with encouraging their interest in science and mathematics as early as middle school, rather than simply accepting more minority applicants into elite medical schools.

    In order to push back on the dangerous trends he describes in the book, Goldfarb recently founded Do No Harm, a nonprofit whose mission is to “Protect healthcare from a radical, divisive, and discriminatory ideology.”

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