School districts across the country have pushed Marxist critical race theory, either by requiring teachers to take “anti-racism” trainings or by embracing the discredited “1619 Project” or by championing the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Learning for Justice” lessons. Yet rarely have superintendents blatantly stated that there is no room for dissent from the idea that America is institutionally racist.
Yet in a Zoom equity committee meeting on January 28, 2021, Dan Grotting, superintendent of the school district in Beaverton, Ore., suggested that if teachers disagree with the anti-racism movement inspired by critical race theory, they should look for work elsewhere.
“I do want the message to get out there that this [anti-racism training] isn’t optional anymore,” Grotting said in the meeting, The Daily Wire reported. “We’ve waited for the willing, and if you’re not willing then maybe this isn’t the right place for you to work” (emphasis added).
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“Maybe we can free up your future, because if we’re going to become an anti-racist school district, it can’t just be a few people, it needs to be everybody, to include our staff, our students, our community, eventually everyone,” the superintendent said.
This statement may violate teachers’ First Amendment protections, but Grotting’s remarks illustrate just how noxious and widespread this movement has become. Some on the Left equate any disagreement with “anti-racism” with actual racism.
The “anti-racism” movement traces back to Ibram X. Kendi’s book How To Be An Antiracist. Echoing critical race theory, Kendi claims that racial disparities are ipso facto proof of hidden racial bias or discrimination (regardless of civil rights laws explicitly forbidding such discrimination), and that people must choose sides. Those who support the status quo are “racist” while those who advocate for leftist race-based overhauls are “anti-racist.”
These ideas trace back to critical race theory (CRT), a Marxist attempt to upend society by claiming that America is systemically racist.
The Chinese American Citizens Alliance of Greater New York (CACAGNY) condemned CRT as a “hateful, divisive, manipulative fraud,” noting that CRT implies that Asians are “over-represented.”
“CRT is today’s Chinese Exclusion Act. CRT is the real hate crime against Asians” (emphasis original),” CACAGNY argued. “CRT appears in our workplaces under the cover of implicit bias/sensitivity training. It infiltrates our schools pretending to be culturally/ethnically responsive pedagogy, with curricula such as the New York Times’ 1619 Project and Seattle’s ethnomathematics.”
Even the Smithsonian briefly published a horrifying Marxist lesson on “whiteness” that “deconstructed” various aspects of American and Western culture, including capitalism, science, the nuclear family, and Christianity, as nefarious relics of white supremacy. The lesson also claimed that a work ethic, delayed gratification, being polite, and getting to meetings on time are aspects of the “whiteness” culture that must be deconstructed and rejected.
Marxist critical race theory inspired much of the destruction of the Black Lives Matter and antifa riots over the summer. While protesters rightly expressed outrage at the treatment of George Floyd, many of the protests devolved into looting, vandalism, and arson in which lawless thugs — acting in the name of fighting racism — destroyed black lives, black livelihoods, and black monuments.
The SPLC, a far-left organization best known for demonizing mainstream conservative and Christian organizations as “hate groups” and listing them alongside the Ku Klux Klan, pushes critical race theory in schools across the country through its “Learning for Justice” program. As of 2018, the SPLC claimed that over 500,000 educators nationwide use its materials. The program, long known as “Teaching Tolerance,” has pushed transgenderism for kids as young as preschool. It has encouraged teachers to teach kids about “microaggressions” in first grade.
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Critical race theory and “anti-racism” have made terrifying inroads in American society and in education, in particular. Parents, teachers, and citizens need to push back on this noxious ideology.
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