The insidious and divisive doctrine of Critical Race Theory ("CRT") has been rapidly imposed on the classrooms of schools throughout America, with little or no input or approval from the parents of victimized schoolchildren.
Originated by radical leftists and afro-racists, the doctrine is premised on the canard that American is a racist nation and that white persons (including entirely innocent children) are racists who must continuously make amends for the "white privilege" that exists only in the fictional America lurking in the twisted minds of the left. Young schoolchildren throughout America are the victims of this ideological distortion of school curricula, including the shaming and bullying of bewildered white children who are forced to acknowledge the fictitious white privilege that have never experienced in fact.
Better late than never, American parents and many state and local governments have finally started to push back against this toxic and demoralizing academic fraud. Some states and counties have passed laws or regulations to ban CRT or comparably racist programs from the public schools, recognizing that they are harmful for children of all races and present a false and subversive portrayal of American History.
Meantime, however, the Biden Administration is not only embracing CRT, but seeking to use federal educational grant authority to enforce its adoption by federal schools nationwide. The Department of Education (DOE) is currently considering a rule for "Proposed Priorities: American History and Civics Education." Under the cover of seemingly innocuous objectives such as "culturally responsive teaching," DOE is actually seeking to impose both CRT and the equally false and divisive "1619 Project" (desribed below) on public school curricula using the coercive power of federal grantmaking authority.
Embedded below are the written comments submitted by SR editor G. C. Smith, opposing this radical and divisive proposal and explaining some of its dangers and fallacies. Hopefully, many other concerned citizens, parents, and groups will take a similar stand against CRT, both in this rulemaking and in other legislative and regulatory forums. Whether such opposition will be successfully in the current DOE rulemaking remains to be seen, but we expect that growing citizen opposition to CRT indoctrination will ultimately halt and reverse its infestation of our nation's classrooms.
Comments on Docket (ED-2021-OESE-0033), Dept. of
Education
Proposed Priorities:
American History and Civics Education
These comments are submitted by George C. Smith, a retired attorney who has served in both the Department of Justice/Office of Legal Counsel and the Senate Judiciary Committee. I am also the grandfather of nine youngsters who would be affected by this unsound and divisive proposal.
My comments are mainly addressed to Proposed Priority 1. I emphatically reject the false premises of the Proposal and strongly oppose their content, promulgation, and adoption.
If adopted by our schools, the proposed priorities and strategies (which aim to impose the doctrine of Critical Race Theory and the so-called “1619 Project” under various euphemisms) would not only expose children to a false and racially biased portrayal of U.S. history, civics, and government; but would entail the ideological and cultural shaming, and resultant bullying, of entirely innocent white children (and other affected children as well, such as East Asians) by school authorities and teachers. This kind of in-class humiliation of white children, comparable to the kind of ideological self-criticism demanded by the Red Guards in Maoist China, is already being perpetrated under the doctrine of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and its variants in various public schools. This divisive approach will also injure the interests of children of all races, including blacks, by poisoning the educational atmosphere with falsified and racially divisive programs and policies.
The Priorities proposed under this Proposed Rule would expand and reinforce such wrongful and divisive practices using the compulsion of federal grant making and funding authority, and codify them as official federal education policy. They should be abandoned in their entirety.
Although the Proposed Priority is couched in deceptively innocuous language (there is nothing objectionable in encouraging diverse viewpoints in curricula, for example), this bureaucratic jargon obscures the true object of imposing the distorted and racially divisive CRT theory, along with the fabricated and misleading historical approach of the so-called “1619 Project.” When the true object and effects of the Proposed Priorities are identified, it becomes evident that they are not only harmful and divisive as a matter of policy, but could easily entail unconstitutional (e.g., coerced student and teacher speech violating the First Amendment and racially discriminatory educational practices violating the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection Clauses) and unlawful (e.g., creation of a racially oppressive educational environment in violation of federal civil rights statutes) effects.
The Priorities’ “Background” section exposes its radical and racialist ideological foundations and purposes.
First, the PP sets out, and is grounded upon, the false premise that the United States is a racist nation immersed in “systemic racism” which can only be rectified by what it refers to as a government imposed “racial equity” agenda, “including in our education system.” This premise is false and conclusory. It is nothing more than an ideological canard. Even President Biden and Vice President Harris recently and expressly agreed with Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) that America is not, in fact, a “racist country.” The fact, for example, that the federal and state governments have adopted and imposed racially preferential programs for blacks (and other minorities) in education, employment, housing, agriculture, and other areas since the late 1960’s and onward in itself negates the premise of “systemic racism.”
Secondly, the Priority invokes the so-called “1619 Project” as the kind of material that should be used “in the teaching and learning of our country’s history.” In short, the distorted, misleading, historically inaccurate, and ideologically motivated writing of a radical NY Times reporter is proposed to supplant the distinguished and scholarly historical writings that have long and rightly recognized the world-changing greatness of the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution (e.g., James T. Flexner’s “Washington: The Indispensable Man”). The 1619 Project falsely denigrates the American Revolution itself, and the greatness of the ideas, ideals, and courage of the heroes who founded the Nation that introduced and refined the principles of liberty, rule of law, and equality before the law that ultimately resulted in the defeat of slavery in the Civil War and the subsequent enactment of laws establishing the great principles of equal protection under the law and nondiscrimination. Adoption of the 1619 Project (or its equivalent) as the model for history education in our schools, as implicitly advocated by the Priority, would result in an insidious and misleading distortion of American History indicting our Founding Fathers and their successors as nothing more than racist oppressors. Our schools would be induced to supplant history lessons with ideological indoctrination.
Thirdly, the Priority favorably invokes the views of the radical racialist extremist Ibram X. Kendi in advocating the incorporation of misnamed “anti-racist practices into teaching and learning.” Unfortunately, the code-word “anti-racist” does not comport with its seemingly neutral and unobjectionable phrasing. Under Kendi’s approach, any policy or practice that does not produce so-called “racial equity” violates the anti-racist principle. But the “racial equity” advocated by Kendi and other radical CRT advocates does not mean the equal protection enshrined in the Constitution (which Kendi considers racist) or the equal opportunity enforced by our civil rights statutes. Rather, it demands government-enforced equal outcomes and the elimination of all inter-racial gaps in educational, professional, or economic areas of activity, regardless of actual merit or aptitude. Relatedly, Kendi asserts that all performance and achievement discrepancies between racial groups are the result of “racist policies.” This is demonstrably false, and flatly inconsistent with the equal protection and equal opportunity standards of our Constitution and laws, which are premised on equal opportunity rather than equal results. Such flawed and invalid views should not be embraced as a premise of the Proposed Priorities.
Finally, it is evident that the Proposed Priority would shift the emphasis in history and civics education in our schools from an objective and fact-based review of our Nation’s history --including recognition of its unmatched accomplishments in pioneering the principles of a constitutional democratic republic -- to an ideologically driven and unbalanced obsession with the unfortunate racial problems that have undoubtedly marred our history. While history courses should surely address those problems thoroughly and critically, they should also include balanced coverage of the extensive and far-reaching laws and programs devoted to rectifying those problems, including the innumerable remedial federal and state civil rights laws enacted and expanded since the 1960’s. It is evident, however, that the Proposed Priorities tied so closely to Critical Race Theory, the 1619 Project, and other extreme ideological approaches would provide instead an imbalanced, divisive, and educationally disruptive approach.