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Friday, April 30, 2021

Prager U. on CRT

Schools, corporations and governments across America are eagerly jumping on the Critical Race Theory train. This doesn't bode well for the future of our social cohesion and comity, and I've occasionally explained why I think this neo-Marxian social theory is not benign, most recently here.

It puzzles me that anyone who thinks that a theory or set of assumptions about race that rejects the ideals of human equality and the belief that all human beings - not just whites - are corrupted by original sin and which promotes division, resentment, hostility and racist attitudes toward whites, is a good thing to be teaching everyone, especially children.

According to an article at The Federalist,
CRT rejects the foundational premises of classical liberalism — such as legal neutrality and individual rights — and from that perspective, colorblindness is not understood as a strategy to overcome racism but as a method to perpetuate it.

“It’s a white ideology,” Burnham said. “Colorblindness really comes into fashion as a means of denying the persistence of racial stratification in the United States.”
In other words, to endorse Martin Luther King's plea that people be judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin is a means of perpetuating racism according to proponents of CRT.

The Federalist article gives several examples of how this is working out in practice, one of which describes a lawsuit brought by two white employees of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife:
In the California lawsuit brought by the two white men, a discussion hosted by the state Department of Fish & Wildlife featured speakers who said that black people don’t use the outdoors in proportion to their population because of white racism, generational trauma, and a historical fear of lynching.

White employees were instructed on the country’s deeply racist legal system and advised that “silence is complicity” when it comes to racial injustice.

According to the lawsuit, employees were subjected to implicit bias training that amounted to compelling staff to take “loyalty oaths” to CRT ideology. The lawsuit, filed last October, is in the early procedural stage; the state’s lawyers are seeking to have the case dismissed.
Evidently, it's fear of being lynched by all the murderous racist white folks hiking the trails of our state and national parks that keeps blacks from frequenting them.

Another suit against the New York City Department of Education alleges that employees were told at a diversity retreat that “there is White toxicity in the air and we all breathe it in.” Examples given included the Protestant work ethic and being socialized to be “defensive.”
These are ridiculous to be sure, but the most insidious examples of CRT indoctrination are occurring in our schools where children are being made to feel guilt because of their race and "privilege." One mixed-race student in a Nevada charter school was actually failed in his senior year because he refused to assent to the accusation that he was racist because of his "whiteness."

James Lindsey at Prager U. agrees that CRT is a corrosive acid eating away at our social fabric and sums up some of its major problems in this five minute video:
It's certainly jarring to a generation raised on the belief that all people are equal in the eyes of God, that we have a moral duty to treat everyone the way we'd want to treated, and that one's skin color is irrelevant to be told now that this is all pernicious claptrap and that the color of one's skin is the most important thing about them, that it defines them in almost every significant way, and that if they're white they ipso facto bear an enormous load of guilt and shame.