In Biden Administration Prioritizes "Wokeism," Critical Race Theory In Schools, Kerry Mcdonald reports for The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE):
The Biden administration is taking new steps to promote Critical Race Theory and The New York Times’s controversial 1619 Project in US education programs. In a proposed federal rule issued on Monday, the US Department of Education indicated that it will be using taxpayer funds to award millions of dollars in American history and civics education grants that prioritize the belief that America is systemically racist.
The grant program seeks “projects that incorporate racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse perspectives into teaching and learning,” and refers to President Biden’s Inauguration Day executive order that explains how our country is plagued by “systemic racism” and “deserves an ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda” to address this issue.
The new federal proposed rule refers to the 1619 Project and related curriculum resources as a “landmark” model for US history and civics education, despite its agenda-driven hostility against capitalism, its flawed historical analysis that many scholars have deemed false, and the Times’s own correction of the project.
The grant prioritization also pushes for greater emphasis on “anti-racism” training in schools, and quotes the work of Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist.
The 1619 Project reinterprets the American Founding so as to cancel liberty equality and prioritize slavery, in contradiction to the plain words of the Declaration of Independence and the history of the period between 1619 and 1776, when the influences that shaped the minds of the Founding generation congealed and which is to be cancelled out. Critical Race Theory is the centralizing of “race” (skin color) as the primary consideration in every cultural and political issue. If that sounds like racism, you’d be correct. If you think that’s an exaggeration, read on.
In White House Tiptoes Into 'Anti-Racism' Culture War, The Dispatch objectively analyzes Biden’s initiative. Here are some excerpts from the article, with my annotates, which are highlighted. All italics are my emphasis.
[Biden’s] proposed Department of Education rule prioritizing civics projects concerning 'systemic marginalization' may be small, but critics are alarmed by what it symbolizes.
The American History and Civics Education programs, through which the Department of Education distributes a handful of grants per year for teachers and high school students to learn more about their country and its history, are a tiny backwater of the sprawling $74 billion department. But thanks to a new proposed rule, the longstanding program stands to become a culture-war flashpoint as the Biden administration’s first foray into the world of “anti-racist” education.
Never mind that this is "small" and "a tiny backwater." This is a dangerous trial balloon. It must be called out and stopped. Evil often starts as a trial balloon.
The rule, a draft of which was entered into the Federal Register last week, would prioritize “projects that incorporate racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse perspectives into teaching and learning.”
This is not meant as it sounds, tolerance of different viewpoints. It is the postmodern premise that there is no objective reality or facts, but only equally valid "perspectives." This is not an educational principle. It is anti-mind and anti-reason.
Anti-racism is the principle—newly in vogue among progressives in recent years—that it is insufficient for white people to simply be “not racist,” in the sense of not harboring personal prejudice against minorities. Rather, anti-racism theory states, there exists a society-wide moral imperative to actively work to fight systemic racism wherever it exists—which is, by definition, anywhere one racial group is doing better on aggregate than another.
Which means, a collectivist backdoor into Egalitarianism, plain and simple. No need to investigate the causes of the disparities. Just assume racism is the cause. “Systemic racism” is the catch phrase that announces, “I have no evidence for racism, nor do I need any.”
Scholar Ibram X. Kendi, whom the proposed rule also cites, argued in his book How to Be an Antiracist that “racial discrimination is not inherently racist.” In fact, racial discrimination can be anti-racist so long as it “is creating equity.”
“The only remedy to racist discrimination,” Kendi wrote, “is antiracist discrimination.”
Kendi’s book has become a kind of “bible” or reference for the Anti-Racist movement. Kendi reinterprets racism from a concept with an objective definition to a means to an egalitarian/socialist end. But what Kendi actually makes clear is that Critical Race Theory is openly and by design a racist theory. Biden’s “education” initiative is not only Egalitarian, but explicitly racist.
It isn’t unprecedented for the White House to weigh in on the cultural debate over how slavery and racism should be taught in schools. In an attempt to counterprogram the 1619 Project with “patriotic history,” the Trump administration empaneled a “1776 Commission” in September 2020.
Trump set the precedent. In another Fee article, Kerry Mcdonald presses this important point:
“Emboldening the federal government to execute education policy may seem appealing when your preferred politician or party is in power, but that power remains when leadership inevitably sways to another politician or party. If you wouldn’t support a Biden ‘1619 Commission,’ then you shouldn’t support Trump’s ‘1776 Commission.’ If you wouldn’t support mandatory ‘critical race theory’ taught in your local schools, then you shouldn’t support mandatory ‘patriotic education’ either.”
This is what you get when you have a thorough-going pragmatist as a stand-in for Americanism. While Trump's banning of CRT in federal training was appropriate, his foray into federal control of public education curriculum is a disaster. More harm than good. The Dispatch elaborates on this point.
But former Trump Department of Education officials point out one critical qualitative difference: The 1776 Commission entered the trenches of the history-of-racism debate, but the department under Trump never used federal funding to incentivize the teaching of either side of that debate in school curricula. “Despite clear preferences and views on what is proper or appropriate, for four years Secretary DeVos and the Trump administration steadfastly avoided putting a thumb on the scale in terms of any curriculum decisions,” said Nate Bailey, who served as chief of staff to Betsy DeVos, Trump’s secretary of education. “I can’t tell you how many times Betsy said, to friends and foes alike, ‘There is no role for the federal government when it comes to curriculum.’ That’s a local decision.”
But is that enough? Just opening the door implies the next step.
Since its inception, the Department of Education has been prohibited by law from mandating or prescribing curriculum content or standards.
It’s a prohibition that has long been accompanied by general public hostility toward top-down curricular directives. Even efforts to standardize curricula via the voluntary adoption of national standards typically fail to evade suspicion that Washington is butting in where it doesn’t belong—think of the controversies surrounding Common Core during the Obama years.
A ban on mandating content doesn’t necessarily prevent the department from incentivizing specific types of programs by including funding for them in discretionary grants. Still, it’s unusual for grant priorities to focus on curriculum content.
See what I mean? The law prohibiting the federal Education Department from “mandating or prescribing curriculum content or standards” falls apart when that same department funds education. Government funding implies control, because funding grants can’t be without conditions. If you want an effective ban on federal control of local education, you need to eliminate the grants or, better yet, eliminate the federal Department of Education altogether.
Need more evidence? Continue.
But what is unquestionably significant is what the rule signifies about what the Biden administration sees as the sort of civics education worth investing federal money in. That doesn’t mean much now—but it’s likely to become more important in the months ahead. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have been tossing around the idea of dramatically beefing up federal investment in civics education. The Educating for Democracy Act, which would appropriate $1 billion of federal money per year for new discretionary grants for teaching civics, was introduced last year with bipartisan cosponsors in both the House and the Senate.
According to Finn, the question is what will happen “if the federal money gets authorized and appropriated in large quantities and is then administered through the same political sensibility as this little program we’ve been talking about.”
“There is a larger-scale mischief on the horizon,” he said, “if we get a big bucks program on the heels of this little one.”
Exactly!
I have often stated that Critical Race Theory, aka “Anti-Racism”, is the re-mainstreaming of racism in America. But that understates the corruption of CRT. Even in the times when American culture was the most racist, there were many Americans who were not racist, and who fought against it. These genuine anti-racists were individualists. CRT, which is thoroughly collectivist, means to make everyone racist, viewing every aspect of American culture through the lens of skin color, divided between oppressor and oppressed groups. Reprising the barbarians that sacked the Roman Empire, CRT is primitive tribalism invading civilization.
We should not take comfort in the belief that this is a relatively inconsequential part of the Department of Education. It is part of Biden’s core mission to forge an “ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda.” “Equity” here does not mean fairness or justice. It means tyrannical form of socialism imbued with totalitarian Egalitarianism. No one will be safe from this evil agenda.
RELATED READING:
You Have to Read This Letter: A New York father pulls his daughter out of Brearley with a message to the whole school. Is the dam starting to break? Posted by Bari Weiss
I Refuse to Stand By While My Students Are Indoctrinated: “Children are afraid to challenge the repressive ideology that rules our school. That’s why I am.” A teacher at Grace Church High School in Manhattan. posted by Bari Weiss
‘Anti-Racism’, or the re-Mainstreaming of Racism
The ‘1619 Project’ Fraud Begins its Poisonous Infiltration into American Politics
The Collectivist Left Appropriates an Inhumane Christian Doctrine to Obliterate Americanism
Discrimination and Disparities by Thomas Sowell
Individualism vs. Collectivism: Our Future, Our Choice—Craig Biddle
1 comment:
Before the Dept. of Ed., the President had the Dept. of Health, Education and Welfare. Under that, Kennedy established federal aid to education, to the just consternation of many. I wish I had known enough to properly evaluate that at the time. My point is, the very idea of fiddling around with education by force is a very serious crime.
Infesting, infecting and displacing law and government by commandeering its physical power and using it for other purposes such as fiddling around with education, under cover of the guise, trappings, color, etc. of law and government is an even much more serious crime.
The very idea, even before any Dept. of Ed. or anything else, however the idea is come by, though not a crime, is a premonition of crime to be watched out for and preempted by private education, AND BY THE PHYSICAL POWER OF LAW AND GOVERNMENT at the first 'false move' of anybody, outside or INSIDE government, including elected office holders, trying to do it.
This is thoroughly in accord with, and necessitated by, unalienable individual rights.
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