The Patriot Post® · Teaching Racism in Schools

What could be worse than teaching American students to hate their own country? Teaching them to hate each other.

At the 1:36 mark of this 1991 video, Harvard student Barack Obama is shown speaking at a university protest on behalf of Harvard Law Professor Derrick Bell. “Open up your hearts and your minds to the words of Professor Derrick Bell,” Obama urged.

Bell, who died in 2011, is credited with pioneering the concept known as Critical Race Theory (CRT). It maintains that the legal system of the United States is inherently biased against blacks and other minorities because it was built on an ingrained white point of view. Bell believed this “institutional racism” conferred upon oppressed minorities both the right and the duty to decide for themselves what laws are valid and worth observing.

Today, institutional racism has become “systemic” racism — and CRT is being taught in American schools, beginning at the elementary level.

Exhibit A is the indoctrination disseminated in Buffalo Public Schools (BPS), using the Black Lives Matter movement as CRT’s vehicle. “The first lesson plan for BPS’s ‘First Days of School’ sequence for second-, third-, and fourth-graders asks the ‘essential question’: ‘What is the Black Lives Matter Movement and what is our role in it?’” reveals Max Eden, education policy fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “The second lesson, titled ‘Do Black Lives Matter in America?’ states as its objective that ‘students will be able to understand the need for the Black Lives Matter Movement.’”

Understanding the BLM movement has just become more difficult because the Marxist organization has scrubbed one of the more “problematic” parts of its agenda from its website. Under the heading “What We Believe,” BLM had stated, “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.”

One might think a black American community already ravaged by an out-of-wedlock birthrate pegged at 69% — a reality that precipitates increased levels of poverty, substance abuse, suicides, and juvenile detention rates — might be appalled. One might also think school officials pushing the BLM agenda would be aware that children who grow up in fatherless households represent 71% of all high school dropouts.

One would be wrong. Buffalo Public Schools referred to the elimination of the nuclear family as a “guiding principle” of the movement.

Eden explained the genesis of the effort in Buffalo, noting that it came directly from the school’s “department of culturally responsive education.” He added that New York State education officials have embraced a similar agenda, “the architect of which was an education professor who has literally said that it is white supremacism to expect black students to read and speak American standard English.”

New York is not alone. The American Association of School Administrators (AASA) announced its intent to imbue students with a curriculum “that is diverse and culturally sensitive,” aimed at “dismantling system racism and discrimination.”

In Chicago, such efforts consist of a “Say Their Names” toolkit. It contains a quote by Angela Davis, the former communist and criminal fugitive whose guns were used in the armed takeover of the Marin Courthouse in 1970, where four people were killed. “In a racist society, it is not enough to not be non-racist,” said Davis. “We must be anti-racist.”

Education Week’s “Classroom Q&A” blog takes it one step further, asserting, “Educators must realize that there is no neutral position on issues of racial justice. … There is only racist and anti-racist. Your silence favors the status quo and the violently oppressive harm it does to black and brown folk everywhere.”

In other words, as the BLM crowd warns, “silence is violence,” and you’re either with them or you’re the equivalent of a KKK member. And if that sounds like a demand for total submission, that’s because it is.

It gets worse. The National Committee on Social Studies’s Early Childhood/Elementary Community insists that stopping “the systemic pattern of dehumanization” requires “flood[ing] our children with counter messages … until there is no racial inequality in economic opportunity, no racial inequality in education, no racial inequality in incarceration rates, and no brutality from police and others.”

The Virginia Association of Independent Schools provides a resource guide for teachers composed of 40 approved books with an attached warning that reads, “White Fragiles Beware!” The guide further states that it is “time to talk about dismantling white supremacy culture and bringing folks of color (the global majority) to the center.”

In Wake County, North Carolina, a website has been launched to provide public school teachers with BLM lesson plans.

In California, State Superintendent of Public Education Tony Thurmond declared educators in that state are “going to build a training module to allow school districts to engage in training on implicit bias.” He also announced a partnership with the National Equity Project (NEP). Its executive director, LaShawn Routé Chatmon, insists that because of “evidence of racial terror being waged against Black bodies, followed by maligned indifference to demands for justice,” we are faced with a choice whereby we “take conscious action to learn about and dismantle injustice and the winding tentacles of white supremacy in our lives, families, workplaces and communities; or stay asleep, seek comfort, look away and in doing so — perpetuate racism and the racist systems that produce the inequity and injustices we face.”

What America really faces is the further debasement of public education — in service to the ultimate dissolution of our constitutional republic. And like much of the current rioting, it is also based on a series of demonstrable falsehoods that include a glaringly slanted 1619 Project presented as history, despite author Nikole Hannah-Jones’s own assertion that it is rather a “work of journalism that explicitly seeks to challenge the national narrative.”

For progressives, history itself is a narrative, and parents who countenance its orchestrated distortion in service to a race-baiting agenda do so at their extreme peril. Already the first 50-state survey on the Holocaust knowledge of American Millennials and Gen Z reveals that nearly one in five believe the Jews caused the Holocaust. Another 34% believe the number of Jewish deaths was “greatly exaggerated.” Moreover, among those same two generations, more than 63% of Millennials, and more than 50% of Gen Z, believe America is a racist nation.

Current students? The National Council of Teachers of English asserts there is “no apolitical classroom.” Thus, they intend to indoctrinate America’s children with racist, America-hating propaganda — parents be damned.

It’s time for pushback. A class-action lawsuit stating that Critical Race Theory violates the 1964 Civil Rights Act would be a great place to start. Moreover, Trump should present schools with a “Dear Colleague Letter,” warning them that teaching CRT will cost them federal funding.

Everything is downstream from education. The debasement of politics, popular culture, and society itself can all be traced back to America’s classrooms. Those classrooms were taken over by progressives.

It’s time to take them back.