The screwups behind CRT

Amy L. Wax and Richard Vedder:

A growing number of parents of K-12 and high school students throughout the country have rebelled against the teaching of critical race theory (CRT) and "anti-racism" in public and private schools. The reasons for their alarm vary, and the rhetorical battles can be confusing, but it is not hard to get to the heart of parents' objections.

They reject the presentation of our country, its history, its founding, its institutions and its present laws and practices as pervasively, uniformly, profoundly and irredeemably racist. Nor do they accept the corollary that all white Americans automatically enjoy illegitimate "white privilege"—and that they are to blame for every problem that people of color, especially blacks, experience today.

We think that these tenets are dubious at best. But in our opinion the most pernicious aspect of CRT instruction, from an educational perspective, is not its content, but the one-sided, dogmatic intolerance of any alternative point of view.

CRT banishes any classroom mention, let alone thoughtful discussion, of the full range of ideas about race currently articulated across the political spectrum. (The same thing is true in corporate America and at universities, where employees know better than to openly object to CRT's rigid dogmas.) The CRT-approved story, in a nutshell, is that white racism is pervasive and accounts for all racial deficits and disparities. What is not being taught—what students are not exposed to, and not even allowed to hear—is the contrary position that persistent racial inequalities are oftentimes rooted in cultural differences and behavioral tendencies that are not all traceable to slavery or Jim Crow, and cannot all be solved by purging the vague category of "structural racism."

One of the central elements of the "anti-racism" creed, which conveniently allows CRT to be presented as unvarnished, unquestionable truth, is that any critique, challenge or argument against it, however grounded in evidence, history or logic, is by definition a racist expression of an oppressive system of "whiteness." According to CRT proponents, that system must be wholly discredited, dismantled and expunged, both to achieve "racial justice" and to spare non-whites from trauma, exclusion and an "unsafe" environment.

These rhetorical maneuvers render it disingenuous and a classic straw man to suggest that the goal of parents' anti-CRT efforts is to suppress teaching and learning "about the role of racism in the history of the United States." Virtually no one opposes that. CRT goes much further in advancing unbalanced and unbending ideas on how race figures in our history and at present, and in seeking to suppress, tarnish and banish any alternative approach to those thorny questions.
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CRT is racist garbage at its core.  Telling young children who never oppressed anyone that they are "oppressors" is cruel and absurd.  Telling other children they are victims because of the color of their skin is also racist and cruel.  Calling the racism inherent in CRT "anti-racism" is a lie that does not change the reality of the racist core of CRT.  It is a diabolically evil system.