Critical Race Theory Heads to the Courts – Christine Rosen, Commentary Magazine
The lawsuit, brought by a widowed, black mom in Nevada on behalf of her mixed-race child, William Clark, contends that when her son s public school recently overhauled its curriculum to incorporate intersectionality and critical race theory, the materials were not descriptive or informational in nature, but normative and prescriptive: they require pupils to unlearn and fight back against oppressive structures. Moreover, some racial, sexual, gender and religious identities, once revealed, are officially singled out in the programming as inherently problematic, and assigned pejorative moral attributes by teachers and administrators. Students who felt uncomfortable participating were penalized in their class exercises and graded homework assignments.
The lawsuit describes how one teacher greeted the boy s class with Hello my wonderful social justice warriors! before telling each student to label and identify their gender, racial, and religious identities as part of an independent reflection exercise, which was graded. Next, students were told to determine if that part of your identity has privilege or oppression attached to it. Privilege was defined as the inherent belief in the inferiority of the oppressed group the oppressed group being everyone who was not white. Race and sex weren t the only markers of oppressor status; as the lawsuit notes, In addition to the white racial identity, Defendants singled and assigned inherent moral attributes to pupils who fell into male, heterosexual gender/sex identities, and Christian religious categories, calling them intrinsically oppressive.
This petition contends that the CRT curriculum put students like Clark, a mixed-race boy being raised in a Christian household, in a deliberately designed, psychologically abusive dilemma: participate in the exercise in violation of his conscience and be branded with a pejorative label; or conscientiously refrain from participation, and suffer isolation from his classmates and be maligned by the same labeling regardless.
Most egregiously, the oppressor-shaming was compulsory: These assertions were not presented to students as a description of a theory with which students could disagree. Instead, they were presented as facts that the student in graded, required written exercises had to affirm as true.