If you think you’re in a safe area where Marxist/BLM Critical Race Theory doctrines are not being taught in your schools, maybe you’d better check again.
TOO CLOSE TO HOME
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| cover of the spring 2021 issue of Teaching Tolerance |
White supremacy affects every element of the U.S. education
system. Find out how students, educators and other stakeholders resist it
daily.
Maybe you’ve noticed that the enemies to freedom and civilization frequently
change the definition of words to the point that they have no meaning. White
supremacy traditionally has referred to a fringe group of racists, so separate
from normal society that you’d have trouble finding them and may not have met
one in your entire life. There was a time when what few numbers there were of
them congregated around a couple of small towns in northern Idaho. We fostered
a teenage girl briefly, over 30 years ago, from that area, whose father was one
of them. She didn’t even understand his beliefs, let alone share them. Even though
she was in a pitiable condition herself, her situation wasn’t the fault of
non-whites—few of whom had ever been part of her life, so why blame them? White
supremacists are marginalized even further to the fringes today.
So the enemy is changing the definition.
There’s a quote you may be familiar with; I think it may
have once become a song. Anyway, Edwin Markham wrote:
“He drew a circle that shut me out-
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle and took him In!”
It’s a Venn diagram, possibly reversing the purpose of that quote. The circle of white supremacists was so small—and yet so delightfully toxic—that the Critical Race Theorists drew a circle around all whites, with those actual white supremacists in the middle, and labeled the larger circle all white supremacists. Like this:
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| normal view (left) and Critical Race Theory view (right) |
The handy thing is, the stigma of that tiny subset is still
there; it is just smeared on the whole set.
So, how do you stop being a white supremacist? Stop being
white. If you fall short of that (and what choice do you have?) then at least
be anti-white and bow down to the supremacy of non-whites—blacks in particular—as
penance for your inherited skin color sin.
The first inside page of the online magazine—before the table
of contents—advertises a film for grades 6-12. Here’s the
blurb:
Our new streaming classroom film, Bibi, tells the story of
Ben, a gay Latinx man, and his complicated relationship with his father and his
home. The 18-minute film can inspire critical conversations about identity, culture,
family, communication and belonging.
Further in, they mention that the title of the organization/publication
is being changed to Learning for Justice—so if you look for the Teaching
Tolerance title, you won’t find it much longer. And, just as they weren’t
teaching actual tolerance, the new publication will have nothing to do with
learning justice. We’re told, on page 5, that in this issue,
We highlight stories across a wide spectrum of education,
examining the ways systems and institutions perpetuate racism and white
supremacy.
That doesn’t sound like it covers a wide spectrum of
education; it sounds like it covers a tiny, narrow band of something irrelevant
to our children in our very “diverse” neighborhood schools.
The new definition of “white supremacy” is “related to a
society that historically had a majority of white-skinned people.” So Shakespeare
is a white supremacist—and therefore unworthy of being taught. Even Greek
classicism, along with any of its wisdom, is white supremacist and unworthy of
being taught. (See p. 46, “The Classical Roots of White Supremacy.”
One discussion in the magazine mentions how horrible it was
to read the classic novel The Scarlet Letter (see p. 24):
Like many products of the U.S. education system, I read The
Scarlet Letter in high school. My English teacher practically danced around
the classroom—she loved the story so much. I remember feeling conflicted. I
knew some of my classmates had children. Others had unmarried mothers. The
discussion felt unfair. I was left feeling dejected by a book that did not
speak to me and by a lesson I knew could harm my classmates.
I did not love this book either. But it’s a style problem,
not any problem this author notes. The lesson of the story was not that the
woman deserved to be marked for life with a scarlet letter for bearing a child out of wedlock; it was that the
hypocritical priest who had gotten her pregnant was not held accountable for his sin.
She was seen as the more virtuous character, and he was despicable. This author
misunderstood the story and missed the “lesson.” And I don’t think it’s because
the theme is lost on someone with a different skin color from the person in the
story, or from the book’s author, or even a different skin color from the
teacher; it’s because this author is obtuse. Making an assumption that anything
that comes from a white person must be unworthy of being taught sort of skews
one’s ability to see value in stories from various cultures—something that
Western civilization does remarkably well by any objective measure.
If this author had understood the book, she might have
noticed that the message was that sex outside of marriage is not an act of love
by the man; it is an act of self-indulgence at the expense of the woman. If only
the author’s classmates had gotten that message early and often before they got
themselves pregnant during high school! That message could have helped them,
not harmed them, as this author mistakenly claims.
As the article’s author misinterpreted the book and its
meaning, Critical Race Theory is a purposely obtuse misinterpretation of actual
history. If you notice and disagree, you are, ironically, labeled with a modern-day
scarlet letter—as racist, and probably also homophobic, transphobic, or
whatever else they put in the Venn diagram, deeming you unworthy of
participation in society.
WHERE HAVE WE SEEN HISTORY CHANGED BEFORE?
Let me remind you of the character Winston Smith from George
Orwell’s 1984. Dr. Larry Arnn talked about this in a Constitution Day
speech last year (reprinted in the December 2020 issue of Imprimis):
The protagonist of 1984 is a man named Winston Smith. He
works for the state, and his job is to rewrite history. He sits at a table with
a telescreen in front of him that watches everything he does. To one side is
something called a memory hole—when Winston puts things in it, he assumes they
are burned and lost forever. Tasks are delivered to him in cylinders through a
pneumatic tube. The task might involve something big, like a change in what
country the state is at war with: when the enemy changes, all references to the
previous war with a different enemy need to be expunged. Or the task might be
something small: if an individual falls out of favor with the state,
photographs of him being honored need to be altered or erased altogether from
the records. Winston’s job is to fix every book, periodical, newspaper, etc.
that reveals or refers to what used to be the truth, in order that it conform
to the new truth….
Winston’s awareness of this endless mighty effort to alter
reality makes him cynical and disaffected. He comes to see that he knows
nothing of the past, of real history: “Every record has been destroyed or
falsified,” he says at one point, “every book has been rewritten, every picture
has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed,
every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and
minute by minute…. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party
is always right.”
Dr. Arnn then asks, “Does any of this sound familiar?”
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| illustration from Teaching Tolerance, spring 2021, p. 56 |
There’s this insidious infestation of a “new” history (based neither on history nor scholarship) claiming that the real beginning of this nation is 1619—supposedly the year African slaves were first sold on this continent, as though this is the seminal moment that led to the country.
If only black or Muslim Africans had never captured and sold
their fellow black Africans to people on other continents! If only none was
ever sold in the Western hemisphere! Then the world would have been free of the
slavery that has plagued pretty much every part of the world throughout
history. Except—slavery was already here—and of course all those other
countries. So whatever happened in 1619 was absolutely irrelevant to what
became the nation that was based on the revolutionary moral idea that God
created all human beings as equal—an idea that birthed our nation in 1776, when
we declared independence from a tyrannical monarchy. It was the birth of that
idea of freedom that led to the end of slavery—even at the cost of a painful
Civil War.
And, according to Mary Graber in Debunking Howard Zinn
(p. 92),
The Civil War not only led to the emancipation of American
slaves but inspired leaders in the slave-holding nations of Cuba and Brazil to
take steps to end slavery and avoid a similar outcome.[i]
To gloss over the moral antipathy to slavery, the very thing
that made black Africans more free—and offered them more opportunities—than
anywhere else in the world is nothing short of the darkest lie.
Pretending that all people without a certain amount of skin
melanin are evil and shameful is not only a lie; it is racist. They call it “anti-racist,”
because they like to control words. But in thought and deed, it is simply
racism. It does not heal old wounds—wounds that in almost all cases were not
caused by any living person toward any living person. It stirs up hatred and division.
You can’t get to civilization by heading in this savage direction.
AGAIN, TOO CLOSE TO HOME
This evening I happened upon a video about Critical Race Theory at Brigham Young University, my alma mater. BYU is a large private religious
university with an excellent reputation. It’s one of only a few universities
that still required a core curriculum when we sent two of our children there. I
was saddened to learn that the problems of other universities are happening here as well,
where we ought to feel safe from the infestation of these Critical Race and
Intersectionality lies.
The podcast talked about how, after you’ve prepared your
child with four years of early morning seminary (scripture study classes before
school), family home evenings (weekly home gospel study), church youth
programs, church attendance, and everything you can think of to prepare your
child spiritually, you’re so happy to send them to this wonderful school where
the gospel is taught as part of every subject. But you might be disappointed.
The video is from Cwic Media, which offers helps for family
scripture study, often related to the standard reading for the week, which I’ve
watched from time to time. I’m uncertain who the speaker is, or whether it’s
always him on this channel. But he says, after all your preparations, you send
your child off to BYU,
And within a couple of weeks of being at BYU, a teacher
starts telling you about some aspect of Critical Race Theory, and asks you to
do a report, let’s say, on race issues. And they begin to talk to you in a new
language that you’ve never heard before, for that student. They bring up words
like anti-racism and ideas like intersectionality. And they start introducing
you into new authors and ideas. This could be in any class. This could be in
your English class—especially in the humanities. This could be in your history
class. This could be in your religion class.
And it becomes obvious throughout the semester that, with
that teacher who’s there at BYU, that they support this ideology. And you start
thinking to yourself, because of the way the teacher presents it, that this is
part of the gospel. That this is good. Right? This has to do with race
relations, for example.
And all of a sudden, all of the effort you’ve put in for 18
years with that child, in their home, starts to turn to an ideology that is un-Christlike.
To an ideology that takes away from the complete doctrine of Christ. And that,
as people pursue it stronger and stronger, begin to doubt their own testimonies.
This is a reality, folks, happening all the time at Brigham
Young University.
Last September there was a discussion, on Instagram, with people sharing their challenges with Critical Theory—and just plain anti-gospel opinions—being taught at BYU. Here’s a sampling:
Something interesting the speaker said on the Cwic podcast was that it starts with empathy. You want to have empathy; you should have empathy. So they use that as a hook. But then they extend that: If you don’t think blacks should be given preferential treatment above all other races, then you must hate blacks; you’re not a good person. If you don’t think gays should have the right to marry—thus changing the definition of what marriage has meant for 6000 years—then you must hate gays; you’re a bad person.
Instead of defining “good” the way God defines it, suddenly
this Critical Race/Intersectionality doctrine redefines what you must believe
to be “good.” No heresy from their doctrine is allowed.
WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT? STAND UP.
If standing for something that all the people around you
agree with was enough, it wouldn’t take any courage, or stamina. But we’re in a
time when it does take courage—not so much because you’re standing up to your
enemies, but because sometimes you’re required to stand up against friends, neighbors,
and family. Still, you have to do it. Not shrilly. But resolutely.
My friend, Bill, who informed us about this CRT publication being
sent to the teachers in Cy-Fair ISD, already came up with an action. He says,
I am working with constituents in my precinct to meet at the
Cy-Fair Board meeting on June 24th, to understand and get them on record if
they are supporting CRT or not. There
are 3 board seats up for election in November.
We need to understand where they stand on this Marxist propaganda. If you want to get involved or can support me
anyway, please let me know and I will do my best to keep you posted.
He also already contacted his state representative to ask
for support.
Meanwhile, in the Texas Legislature this session—which is
nearing a close in a week and a half—there’s a bill that has made it through
the House, and out of committee in the Senate, and looks like it might get a
floor vote: HB
3979 by Rep. Steve Toth, from Montgomery County, just north of here. It
would outlaw Critical Race Theory from being taught in any form in our public
schools, and would require the teaching of real history, including source
documents.
I hope it passes. But the people who simply change words at
will are likely to call their lies something not yet invented so they can say, “Oh,
that’s not Critical Race Theory.” They did that when we outlawed Common Core;
they just slapped a different label on it. And upped the ante with Critical
Race Theory and Intersectionality.
I might as well mention one more thing you could do:
homeschool.
[i] Graber
includes this footnote: Paquette and Smith, “Introduction: Slavery in the
Americas” in The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas, ed. Robert
L. Paquette and Mark M. Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3-17.
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