https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/07/12/dewey-defeats-critical-race-theory/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=top-of-nav&utm_content=magazine&utm_term=title
CRT is not just an attack on the American inheritance of political institutions; it is an attack on the social function of public schools.
Moms are rising up in counterrevolutionary revolt. I’ll say it again, moms are rising up in counterrevolutionary revolt against critical race theory, “anti-racism,” the introduction of the 1619 Project into high-school curricula, and the suddenly invasive demands of diversity, equity, and inclusion consultants who are being hired by their school districts. Although progressives wish, in vain, that this movement were an Astroturf operation run by shadowy right-wing donor networks, it has been springing up in school districts in reaction to initiatives led by administrators themselves.
Tatiana Ibrahim stood up in front of the Carmel school board in Putnam County, N.Y, and denounced what she termed the “communist values” that teachers and administrators in the district are promoting. “Stop indoctrinating our children. Stop teaching our children to hate the police. Stop teaching our children that if they don’t agree with the LGBT community, they’re homophobic,” Ibrahim demanded. “You have no idea of each child’s life,” she said, before announcing, in an only-in-America moment, that she is a Christian and her daughter is a Muslim.
She’s far from alone. “Telling my child or any child that they are in a permanent oppressed status in America because they are black is racist — and saying that white people are automatically above me, my children, or any child is racist as well,” said Quisha King, a mother in Duval County, Fla. “This is not something that we can stand for in our country.” Other revolts — as in Southlake, Texas, and Loudoun County, Va. — have been even more dramatic.
As with the Tea Party movement a decade before it, Fox News, Republican-run legislatures, and the institutions of conservatism are only just catching up to a political movement that has already gone viral. And again, as with the Tea Party, one of the reasons conservative institutions are only just catching up is that this movement — a defense of public schools as they were until recently — is not entirely conservative. But we’ll get to that.
Progressives, seeing the backlash, are feigning ignorance. They snort that critical race theory is a technical discourse that developed in law schools, and that it obviously isn’t taught in public schools. But Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado, in their 1995 book trying to define that rising movement of legal scholarship, do give a definition that seems suitable for describing the ideas now filtering down to other schools under a variety of names. “Unlike traditional civil-rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress,” they write, “critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”
