“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.

Share

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

  2. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth August 25, 2021 Reply

    Verizon is Woke. Report by Christopher Rufo. https://www.city-journal.org/verizon-critical-race-theory-training?wallit_nosession=1

    Verizon has launched an internal program teaching that the United States is a fundamentally racist nation and encouraging employees to support a variety of left-wing causes, including “defunding the police.”

    According to documents that I have obtained from a whistleblower, Verizon launched the “Race & Social Justice” initiative last year and has created an extensive race reeducation program based on the core tenets of critical race theory, including “systemic racism,” “white fragility,” and “intersectionality.”

    In the flagship “Conscious Inclusion & Anti-Racism” training module, Verizon diversity trainers instruct employees to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities and, according to their position on the “privilege” hierarchy, embark on a lifelong “anti-racism journey.” Employees are asked to list their “race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, religion, education, profession, and sexual orientation” on an official company worksheet, then consider their status according to the theory of “intersectionality,” a core component of critical race theory that reduces individuals to a network of identity categories, which determine whether they are an “oppressor” or “oppressed.”

  5. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth September 22, 2021 Reply

    Christoper Rufo Tweet:
    “@CVSHealth CEO Larry Merlo earned 618 times more than the median CVS employee salary, while simultaneously promoting the idea that America is “racist” and forcing hourly-wage workers to deconstruct their racial and sexual “privilege.”Here is the full story.” https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1440769298574704640

  6. Avatar of erichvieth
    erichvieth October 15, 2021 Reply

    Critical Race Theory is being taught at Walmart. Here is an excerpt from an article at National Review.

    The training claims that the U.S. is a “white supremacy system,” created by white Europeans “for the purpose of assigning and maintaining white skin access to power and privilege,” according to the report.

    The program suggests that white people are guilty of “white privilege” and “internalized racial superiority,” the belief that “one’s comfort, wealth, privilege and success has been earned by merits and hard work” rather than through the benefits of systemic racism. The training claims that the “white supremacy culture” is defined by several qualities, including “individualism,” “objectivity,” “paternalism,” “defensiveness,” “power hoarding,” “right to comfort,” and “worship of the written word.”

    It adds that “discussions about racist conditioning” should occur in racially segregated groups as “people of color and white people have their own work to do in understanding and addressing racism,” the report notes.

    According to the training, employees who are racial minorities suffer from “constructed racist oppression” and “internalized racial inferiority” and struggle with internal messaging such as, “we believe there is something wrong with being a person of color,” “we have lowered self-esteem,” “we have lowered expectations,” “we have very limited choices,” and “we have a sense of limited possibility.”

    This harmful internal thinking forces them to buy into the “myths promoted by the racist system,” according to the training, and to develop feelings of “self-hate,” “anger,” “rage,” and “ethnocentrism,” and they are forced to “forget,” “lie,” and “stop feeling” to survive.

    The program suggests that the solution is for white people to work on “white anti-racist development” and to accept their “guilt and shame” and that “white is not right.” Ultimately they should work toward “collective action” where “white can do right.”

  7. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth October 16, 2021 Reply

    Critical Race Theory (or, at least, the principles of CRT) are widely taught in K-12:

  11. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth November 6, 2021 Reply

    From National Review, November 6, 2021:

    The media need a fact check. When asked about whether or not CRT was taught in schools, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said simply that “It’s not.” After Glenn Youngkin’s win, Joy Reid spent a segment asserting that critical race theory is not “actually taught” in any public school.

    We’re both educators. These assertions are patently false.

    In most cases of such assertions, we assume naïveté. In others, however, schools have outright lied to parents about the issue. Indianapolis Public Schools advised their principals to tell parents that CRT is not taught in their schools while offering professional development for their teachers that explicitly outlines the tenets of CRT, recommends strategies for incorporating it, and suggests further reading — including Ibram X. Kendi.

  12. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth November 7, 2021 Reply

    MIT: To Alums urges others to stop donating money to universities such as MIT that have turned woke.

    We graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology more than 50 years ago. MIT was academically rigorous, and it taught us our crafts and the essence of problem-solving, enabling us to thrive in our careers. We owe much to our alma mater and have donated to it regularly.

    No more.

    The current MIT administration has caved repeatedly to the demands of “wokeness,” treating its students unfairly, compromising the quality of its staff, and damaging the institution and academic freedom at large.

  17. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth November 19, 2021 Reply

    The Lower Manhattan Community School

    A Manhattan junior high school plans to racially separate students while discussing identity and social justice topics next week, The Post has learned.

    The Lower Manhattan Community School will conduct the controversial exercises as part of its mission to “undo the legacy of racism and oppression in this country that impacts our school community,” according to an email sent to parents.

    Kids in grades seven and eight will opt into one of five categories, Principal Shanna Douglas wrote in the message.

    Whites, Asians, and multi-racial students have their own categories, while African-American and Hispanic students are combined into one group, according to her email.

  18. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth November 19, 2021 Reply

    University of Michigan, as reported by Reason Magazine:

    The University of Michigan opened this academic year with an academic freedom scandal. Music professor Bright Sheng showed his class the 1965 film of Othello with Laurence Olivier playing the Moor in dark makeup. Students demanded action. The university removed Sheng from the classroom and opened an investigation. The Academic Freedom Alliance condemned the university for violating Professor Sheng’s academic freedom. The university eventually relented and dropped the investigation. Unfortunately, that is not quite the end of the matter.

    Professor Sheng has not been returned to his class, though he continues to do some teaching and is scheduled to resume his normal teaching activities in the spring. The university has hardly recognized its error and has failed to adequately reaffirm its commitments to academic freedom. Not exactly an encouraging sign for the future.

  20. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth November 21, 2021 Reply

    Christopher Rufo:

    I recently concluded my ten-part investigative series on woke capital, exposing critical race theory training programs in America’s Fortune 100 companies. My reporting generated 50 million direct media impressions and led to two U.S. Senate investigations, Disney scrapping its internal program, AmEx sending its CEO to personally do damage control, and multiple financial firms preemptively auditing their “diversity and inclusion” programs out of fear of being exposed.

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

    Detroit Public Schools:

    Detroit Superintendent @Dr_Vitti:

    Our curriculum is deeply using critical race theory, especially in social studies, but you’ll find it in English language arts and the other disciplines. We were very intentional about … embedding critical race theory within our curriculum.

  23. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth December 5, 2021 Reply

    The Medical Profession, Generally: This article at Quillette is “What is Happening to My Profession?”

    In important ways, I hardly recognize my profession. Last year, the Association of American Medical Colleges, a major accrediting body, informed medical schools that they “must employ anti-racist and unconscious bias training and engage in interracial dialogues.” One of my colleagues told me that her school jettisoned lectures in bioethics to make room for the anti-racist curriculum. “Which is ironic,” she said, “because that was where students were taught about subjects like the Tuskegee syphilis experiment.” What other essential subjects will anti-racism training displace?

    The implementation of the social justice agenda has constrained collegial discourse, challenged the maintenance of standards, and suppressed honest analysis of certain problems. In her article called “What Happens When Doctors Can’t Tell the Truth?,” Katie Herzog wrote of “doctors who’ve been reported to their departments for criticizing residents for being late. (It was seen by their trainees as an act of racism) … I’ve heard from doctors who’ve stopped giving trainees honest feedback for fear of retaliation. I’ve spoken to those who have seen clinicians and residents refuse to treat patients based on their race or their perceived conservative politics.”

  25. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth December 6, 2021 Reply

    Lawrence Krauss discussing the new problem with teaching science:

    While there are many academic areas where raw political sensibilities might impact on scholarly discourse, it is hard to think of chemistry as such an area. Nevertheless, new guidelines for accepting and editing papers were recently sent to editors of the prestigious Journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

    “Following the publication of the article by (Tomáš Hudlický) in (German journal) Angewandte Chemie and the identification of a potentially offensive image in a journal, a set of guidelines has been produced by RSC staff to help us minimise the risk of publishing inappropriate or otherwise offensive content. Offence is a subjective matter and sensitivity to it spans a considerable range; however, we bear in mind that it is the perception of the recipient that we should consider, regardless of the author’s intention . … Please consider whether or not any content (words, depictions or imagery) might have the potential to cause offence, referring to the guidelines as needed. ” (italics mine)

    . . .For the moment, let’s concentrate on the italicized sentence. Considering the perception of any and all recipients, regardless of author intent, can effectively freeze all discourse. It is hard to imagine any sentence spoken in the public domain today that cannot possibly be construed as offensive to someone . . . Consider what subjects could now be reasonably censored by editors according to this new edict. Much of evolutionary biology could now be verboten, since the very subject offends the religious sensibilities of many Americans. Same too with The Big Bang. What about geology, where estimates of the age of rocks directly contradicts the hopes of young earth creationists? Much of genetic research is already the source of vocal protest, especially the genomics of diverse populations, and any investigations of correlations between race and other genetic traits.

    https://nationalpost.com/opinion/lawrence-krauss-the-offence-offensive

Leave a Reply