https://spectatorworld.com/book-and-art/debunking-1619-project-exposes-the-grievance-industry/?utm_source=Spectator+World+Signup&utm_
City Journal last month released a survey that asked eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds whether they had been taught six concepts related to critical race theory. These included: “America is a systemically racist country,” “White people have white privilege,” “White people have unconscious biases that negatively affect non-white people,” “America is built on stolen land,” “America is a patriarchal society,” and “Gender is an identity choice.”
Each of these was answered in the affirmative by a majority of participants, of whom more than 80 percent attended public schools.
That’s curious given that public educators and their defenders in corporate media have been claiming for years that CRT is not taught in schools. “Teaching critical race theory isn’t happening in classrooms, teachers say in survey,” reported NBC in July 2021. The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson in June 2021 called the controversy over CRT “manufactured,” while his colleague Karen Attiah the same month called it “hot air.”
Since then, the narrative has evolved into “well, various themes associated with CRT may be taught in public schools, but not CRT itself.” A November 2021 report from PBS, for example, explained, “There is little to no evidence that critical race theory itself is being taught to K-12 public school students, though some ideas central to it… have been.”
That’s naïve if not disingenuous. Few high-schoolers know the names of the philosophical schools of utilitarianism and scientific materialism, but most of them are trained in their premises.
There’s an added dimension to this, given that the 1619 Project’s curriculum has been disseminated across the country to public schools responsible for teaching millions of students. There are other CRT-friendly public school curricula: the Southern Poverty Law Center for years has been pushing its “Teaching Hard History” program, which has been adopted by many school districts, including in my home state of Virginia.
Concerned parents need guides to effectively respond to these anti-racist curricula, and thankfully scholar Mary Grabar has written one, called Debunking The 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America.