The president of one of America’s largest teachers union made a false claim about those who don’t want our children to be taught Critical Race Theory (CRT), claiming critics of the theory don’t want children to be taught history or having any discussions about racism.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), on Sunday shared an article from The Washington Post that also falsely stated what opponents of CRT want. While captioning the article, Weingarten wrote: “Incredibly important piece from [Kimberlé Crenshaw] about why these bans on teaching history and discussing racism in the classroom are so dangerous. Our students deserve to have the freedom to learn and discuss this in school.”
The statement is factually false, as opponents of CRT, including the states that have banned it from being taught in public schools, have not attempted to ban the teaching of history or discussing racism in the classroom.
Opponents of CRT object to students being taught that America is irredeemably racist and that racism is so systemically embedded in all aspects of American culture that people of color are still oppressed by white oppressors. They object to students being singled out based on their race and other identities – essentially taught to be racist. They object to students of color being taught they are victims in need of government assistance and all students taught to blame whites for America’s problems.
Those fighting to make sure CRT is taught to children, despite the teachers, parents, and children of all races and ethnicities speaking out against it, resort to lies about what critics really oppose in order to get it implemented into school curriculum.
The Post opinion article shared by Weingarten does the same thing, predictably so, since it was authored by Crenshaw, who coined the term “intersectionality” in 1989 to explain how race, class, gender, and other characteristics all “intersect” to create unique forms of victimhood. Crenshaw doesn’t point to a single bill introduced by CRT opponents that bans the “discussion of race” or the “teaching of history,” because they can’t – because that’s not what’s being banned. Nor is teaching about slavery banned, or historical racism, or any of the other straw men activists claim when discussing bans on teaching CRT.
CRT is Marxist theory substituting race for class, something people can’t change. Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who has become the leading critic to CRT, explained how the theory employs Marxist ideology:
To explain critical race theory, it helps to begin with a brief history of Marxism. Originally, the Marxist Left built its political program on the theory of class conflict. Karl Marx believed that the primary characteristic of industrial societies was the imbalance of power between capitalists and workers. The solution to that imbalance, according to Marx, was revolution: the workers would eventually gain consciousness of their plight, seize the means of production, overthrow the capitalist class, and usher in a new socialist society.
During the twentieth century, a number of regimes underwent Marxist-style revolutions, and each ended in disaster. Socialist governments in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Cuba, and elsewhere racked up a body count of nearly 100 million people. They are remembered for gulags, show trials, executions, and mass starvations. In practice, Marx’s ideas unleashed man’s darkest brutalities.
By the mid-1960s, Marxist intellectuals in the West had begun to acknowledge these failures. They recoiled at revelations of Soviet atrocities and came to realize that workers’ revolutions would never occur in Western Europe or the United States, which had large middle classes and rapidly improving standards of living. Americans in particular had never developed a sense of class consciousness or class division. Most Americans believed in the American dream—the idea that they could transcend their origins through education, hard work, and good citizenship.
But rather than abandon their political project, Marxist scholars in the West simply adapted their revolutionary theory to the social and racial unrest of the 1960s. Abandoning Marx’s economic dialectic of capitalists and workers, they substituted race for class and sought to create a revolutionary coalition of the dispossessed based on racial and ethnic categories.
One must inevitably ask: Why do Weingarten and other Leftists have to lie in order to get CRT taught in schools? The reason may have something to do with the fact that CRT and similar ideologies are angering parents of all races. Also, only Democrats support CRT, while the rest of Americans reject its teachings.