A website illustrating the proliferation of CRT curricula and training in American educational institutions has shown that most elite K-12 private US schools teach their students CRT, Fox News reported on Wednesday.
William Jacobson, Cornell University law professor and founder of CriticalRace.org, observed 50 of the most elite K-12 schools and discovered that 21 of them have introduced CRT into their programs, while 40 have adjusted their curriculum to implement antiracism training.
He told Fox News that "the election results in Virginia showed that opposition to CRT in its various forms is motivating a diverse, multi-racial, multi-ethnic coalition of parents to act against the racialization of education.”
"The response from the mainstream media and Democrats to this parents movement has been to ramp up denial that CRT is taught, but that is just a word game. The principles of CRT, primarily the focus on race and skin color as the decisive and pervasive features of society, increasingly pervade K-12," Jacobson said.
According to him, racialization and antiracist teaching has “deeply penetrated education” and promotes “an obsessive focus on viewing almost everything through a racial lens."
"The economic elites who send their children to these schools at great expense have voluntarily surrendered their children to an activist and consultant educational class that sees exploiting race as a way to power and riches," Jacobson claimed.
The professor also stressed that some parents fear to speak out against CRT due to possible accusations of being “racist” despite the fact that many parents say that they reject both CRT and hate.
“At some point these parents are going to have to put their children ahead of the prestige and alumni connections of these schools," he said. "The next step in this elite private school database project is to connect with parents who can add more details and documents as to what is going on that may not be available on the internet."
CRT is based on the assumption that race is not a natural, biologically determined characteristic of physically distinct subgroups of human beings, but a socially constructed (culturally invented) category used by for the oppression and exploitation of the colored population. CRT supporters believe that the law and legal institutions in the US are inherently racist as they function to create and maintain social, economic and political inequality between whites and people of colour.
Earlier, the National Education Association (NEA) approved a plan, sometimes referred to as “Project 1619,” for the widespread adoption of CRT, and to directly counter "attempts to ban critical racial theory.”
The introduction of the theory in some educational establishments across the US has triggered controversy, especially from parents, who claim that it is no more than “brainwashing” despite the fact that some teachers say that the lessons usually come down to discussions about slavery.
Some Republican officials have organized stiff opposition to the inclusion of CRT in school curricula, even implementing a ban on CRT. So far, it is restricted in a number of states, including Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Idaho and Tennessee.
As the debate continues as to whether the theory aims to rewrite US history, it certainly has become a source of partisan struggle in several states. In Virginia, Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin defeated his Democratic adversaryTerry McAuliffe, in no small part due to his negative attitude towards the teaching of CRT in schools.