What ‘Critical Race Theory’ Critics Are Actually Criticizing | Opinion

These could be isolated incidents, but dozens of parents to whom I and other reporters have spoken see the same things happening in their own schools. Last summer’s “racial reckoning” impacted all American institutions, inducing a crisis as well-meaning school leaders scrambled to avoid accusations of racism. Perhaps for want of a better alternative, they embraced as their solution the peculiar and often-toxic hodgepodge of concepts that inevitably produce such insanities as those aforementioned.

That set of ideas takes different forms, but tends to coalesce around agreement on a few key principles: America is a constitutionally and structurally white supremacist society; achievement disparities between races are a byproduct of that essential white supremacy; and the only way to undo this structural white supremacy is through explicitly race-conscious “discrimination,” as well as therapeutic exercises meant to disinter internalized oppression and “implicit bias.”

It is these principles that inspired New York City public schools to segregate teachers by race to discuss last summer’s protests; that has the nation’s leading public magnet high school dropping its merit-based admissions test; and that has led multiple schools to incorporate mandatory social-justice activism into their curricula. Rather than trying to help every kid succeed, school becomes an elaborate morality play in which students and teachers “do the work” to banish racism from their minds, whether they want to or not.

These ideas are not everywhere, and they do not always take the most extreme forms. But they often do and combating that phenomenon is why critics have deployed the label “critical race theory,” in order to give parents a way to neatly label the craziness unfolding right before their eyes.

via www.newsweek.com