The Patriot Post® · In Brief: The White Backlash That Wasn't
Christopher Rufo has been at the forefront of opposing critical race theory, the Marxist and racist doctrine gaining traction not just in the Left but in public schools. He writes at City Journal to rebut a completely bogus news report casting aspersions on CRT opponents:
Over the past year, the left-leaning media has peddled the narrative that an emotional constellation of “white resentment,” “white fragility,” “white rage,” and “white fear” drives opposition to critical race theory in America’s public schools. Now NBC News claims it can prove it.
In a long story featuring analysis of demographic data, NBC News reporter Tyler Kingkade and data editor Nigel Chiwaya claim that the parent uprisings against critical race theory, which have occurred in more than 200 school districts across the country, are a “backlash” against “rapid demographic change” and “the exposure of white students to students of color.” Or, to put it bluntly, it’s the ugly reaction of white racism in the face of rapidly integrating schools. As left-leaning Slate concluded, NBC’s reporting proves that fear of “white replacement” and the desire to “protect whiteness” motivate the anti-critical race theory movement.
There is only one problem: NBC’s analysis is nonsense. The report, like the left-wing narrative about critical race theory more generally, fails both statistically and imaginatively. NBC News builds its narrative on the claim that “many of the school districts facing backlash over equity initiatives are diversifying faster than the national average.” The report provides data for 33 school districts, which undermine its argument in two ways: first, one-third of these districts have diversified slower, rather than faster, than the national average; and second, according to NBC News’ own reporting, there have been anti-critical race theory protests in at least 220 school districts nationwide, which means that NBC failed even to analyze 85 percent of the evidence.
Obviously, the Leftmedia’s objective is to smear millions of Americans as racist, not to honestly report the news.
Moreover, Rufo says:
NBC News’s misleading report is part of a broader campaign to confuse the public about critical race theory. Over the summer, as parent protests began to make headlines, left-leaning media initially claimed that CRT was an obscure theory found only in law schools. But parents saw the overwhelming amount of reporting about critical race theory in their schools and watched as powerful organizations, including the national teachers’ union and the U.S. Conference of Mayors, explicitly endorsed critical race theory in public education. When these and other attempts at denial and deflection failed, left-leaning activists and journalists fell back on an old sawhorse: decrying opponents as racists.
Most parents can see through this charade, and it’s not just true of whites, but of Hispanics and Asians too. And people of nearly every political stripe.
Finally, opposition to critical race theory isn’t strictly a conservative or Republican issue. For example, Loudoun and Fairfax Counties, which NBC News painted as bastions of backward-looking conservatism, are in fact quite liberal: in 2020, voters in these two counties picked Joe Biden by a 25-point and 39-point margin, respectively. And yet, according to a Public Opinion Strategies poll, they oppose critical race theory in schools by an eight-point margin, and 59 percent of public-school parents view the theory negatively.
Rufo rightly concludes:
Americans have moved past the politics of the 1960s. They are tolerant, integrated, and in agreement that malicious racial theories of all kinds should stay out of the classroom. It’s past time for the media to take note.