While colleges, government agencies and even public schools race to spend money adopting critical race theory, a new report released Monday by the Heritage Foundation concludes its goals are nothing short of “revolutionary.”
“What’s important is changing culture and changing society, and that’s what critical theory sets out to do,” Mike Gonzalez, one of the two authors of the report titled “Critical Race Theory, the New Intolerance, and Its Grip on America.” “It’s an unremitting attack, all out ceaseless criticism of the traditions and norms of the west in order to create a new social reality.”
It has found its way into k-12 schools, with some schools holding mandatory “white privilege” training sessions and “equity” audits to root out racism among faculty. The Trump administration drew national attention to it by issuing a directive banning it in federal agencies after news broke that white men in Sandia National Laboratories, which assesses the United States’ nuclear weapons, were being forced to attend race re-education classes.
It's critical for Americans to understand WHAT #CriticalRaceTheory really is.
This new backgrounder from @JM_Butcher and @Gundisalvus serves as a resource for anyone seeking to know more—and help spread the word about this racist ideology: https://t.co/hFf33M5a9q pic.twitter.com/hKJgB9JLqt
— Heritage Foundation (@Heritage) December 7, 2020
Gonzalez described to the Daily Caller how critical race theory grew from being a niche field in academia to being a subject taught in school districts, federal agencies and workplaces across the country.
The movement has its roots in the Frankfurt School, where a manifesto was created in 1937 that drew influence from Friedrich Nietzche, Georg Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx. One of the core tenets of the school of thought was to tear down Western institutions, and it claimed that “traditional theory fetishized knowledge, seeing truth as empirical and universal.”
One of the ways critical race theory seeks to achieve these ends is through identity politics, the report said. By developing identity categories, each group has its own specific claims to victimhood, which “commands attention, respect, and entitlements, seen as compensatory justice.”
The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement also suggests that critical race theory has made an impression in popular culture. Its acceptance among the media, corporations and nearly all other power centers demonstrates that the teachings have gone mainstream, according to the report.
#CriticalRaceTheory makes race the prism through which its proponents analyze all aspects of American life—and do so with a degree of persistence that has helped it impact all of American life.
— Heritage Foundation (@Heritage) December 7, 2020
Perhaps the most pernicious result, Gonzalez argued, is the dissemination of critical race theory in K-12 schools.
In December, leaked documents showed that a San Diego public school district was requiring teachers to attend “white privilege” trainings where they were expected to recognize their roles in perpetuating racism, a hallmark of critical race theory.
A slide in the training titled “White Privilege and Culture” informed teachers that “white people in America hold most of the political, institutional, and economic power,” thus benefiting from advantages that non-white people don’t, according to Christopher Rufo, who reported on the leaked documents.
Story cited here.
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