"In America, I can do anything I want and I teach that to my children. And the person who teaches my little pecan-colored kids that they're somehow oppressed based on the color of their skin would be absolutely wrong and absolutely at war with me."
There are two competing philosophies right now:
• One says America is systemically racist and your skin color determines your outcomes.
• Another says America is a land of progress and you can chart your own future through your human agency.
Choose one—and choose wisely.
I've created the Critical Race Theory Briefing Book, which includes everything you need to know about critical race theory and how to fight it in your community. christopherrufo.com/crt-briefing-b…
The man speaking is running for state assembly in North Carolina. More here:
As recently as a few years ago, French called critical race theory "racial poison" that "leads to sheer cruelty and malice." He said its practitioners were manipulative "preacher-like personalities" and its followers were "vicious" activists who even sent him death threats.
Whoopi Goldberg said on television what critical race theorists have been saying in print for years. philpapers.org/archive/BERCWS…
It's the same logic with Asian-Americans: they are categorized as part of "multiracial whiteness" in order to maintain the critical race theorists' pre-conceived hierarchy of oppression, which, by definition, puts "whiteness" at the top.
The ultimate problem with critical race theory is that it's essentialist and reductive: it seeks to subordinate individuals into crude racial categories, which are used to justify its political program of race-based neo-Marxism.
This story is fake news: the book was swapped out from the 8th grade curriculum, not "banned." The board voted to find a better book for the Holocaust and said they'd even use Maus again if they don't find a good replacement.
Judd Legum is the Jussie Smollett of journalism.
The Left is always using the ratchet method of argumentation, which ends up as: "If this thing we like isn't mandatory and subsidized by the taxpayer, that's censorship/banning/fascism." It's bunk. Don't fall for it.
I personally wouldn't have a problem with my child reading Maus in 8th grade, but I respect that other communities have different preferences. The journalistic culture of the NYT shouldn't colonize the curriculum of a small school in Tennessee. Pluralism means difference.
The brilliance of Glenn Youngkin's executive order on critical race theory is that it merely clarifies and strengthens existing civil rights law.
Now the Left has to take the unenviable position of opposing the principles of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The "centrist" argument that anti-critical race theory legislation is "censorship" is bunk for the same reason. The Civil Rights Act already restricts speech in schools and workplaces. Do the centrists support abolishing it? And if not, are they, too, enemies of "free speech"?
The real innovation for the New Right is to strengthen civil rights laws to protect *all groups* and stop ceding administrative authority to the left-wing bureaucrats who dominate the existing civil rights apparatus. Youngkin is executing on this beautifully.
In 1968, UC Berkeley hired Eldridge Cleaver, a convicted felon and Black Panther leader who called raping white women "an insurrectionary act," to teach a course as part of its inaugural Black Studies program.
The left-wing revolution has always been subsidized by taxpayers.
The "coddling of the American mind" thesis is dead-wrong. The precursors to "wokeness" were already in place during the 1960s. They simply adapted the language of "white privilege," etc., as a method of social manipulation. It's feigned weakness as a strategy to accumulate power.
In a sense, Cleaver and the other antecedents of "wokeness" were at least honest about their intentions and their methods. They advocated pure revolution, which has now been passed through the language of HR and psychotherapy.
The ethnic studies director for Seattle Public Schools created a fake identity as an oppressed Latinx, married a convicted child molester, and pressured her child to become transgender.
It's not an exaggeration to say that woke politics is driven in significant part by mental instability, personal pathology, and sexual deviancy. Activists such as Tracy Castro-Gill project their own neuroses onto society and hijack public institutions to "cure" everyone else.
Washington State designated this woman Teacher of the Year. And, under the current moral framework that dominates big-city public education, they made the logical choice: fake identity, personal pathology, and identity-based grooming are rewarded.