The Backlash against Critical Race Theory Is Real

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Monday, June 21, 2021

 

Returning once again to the shallow well from which she has pulled the majority of her journalistic water, The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer suggested last week that the escalating pushback against critical race theory “has all the red flags of an dark money astroturf campaign.” We are stuck, it seems, in Stage One of the Kübler-Ross Scale of Progressive Political Grief.

 

If they wish to, figures such as Mayer can spend the next few years insisting that the resistance to critical race theory that we are seeing from parents across the country is little more than a mirage. Fingers firmly in ears, they can maintain that their detractors have invented the controversy from whole cloth, that an astroturfing effort by the Koch Brothers or the Manhattan Institute has tricked them, or that their objections ring hollow because they don’t know what critical race theory “actually” is. Sneering, scoffing, and laughing off the revolt, they can submit in anger that those complaining about the development are suffering from “white fragility” or are engaged in a “moral panic” or are just trying desperately to prevent their kids from learning about slavery and civil rights.

 

What they can’t do, however, is make any of that true.

 

Precision in language is important, and yet, after a certain point, it matters less what we choose to call a given trend than that we acknowledge that said trend exists. And mark my words: The backlash against critical race theory most certainly exists. It is being driven by real people, many of whom I have seen with my own eyes; it has been constructed atop a discrete and comprehensible set of objections; and it is being fought on behalf of a class of citizens — children — whose interests arouse the rawest emotions in all of politics. Those who dismiss this development too harshly or too pedantically do so at their peril.

 

What are the parents leading this charge angry about? In essence, they’re angry about the idea that any form of racial essentialism would be taught in schools. They’re worried by the prospect of their children — black, white, Asian, Hispanic, whatever — being told that, as the result of their immutable characteristics, they will play a fixed role within a fixed system within a fixed world. They’re worried that, instead of being told that America has often failed to live up to the beautiful ideas that informed the Declaration and the Constitution, their children will be told that the whole thing was a cynical and self-serving lie. They are worried that objective disciplines such as math will be subordinated to vague talk of “power structures.” They’re worried that rich subjects such as English literature will be so ruthlessly narrowed that all the joy will be stripped from them. They’re worried that elementary concepts, such as excellence and motivation, will be deemed not universal, but reflective of a particular worldview. And, yes, they are worried that their children will be taught to hate one another — or, perhaps worse, recruited to act out the deep-seated pathologies of a handful of oddball academics whose incentives differ considerably from the norm.

 

Put another way, America’s insurgent parents are worried about the pedagogical consequences of critical race theory, rather than about the existence or minutiae of critical race theory itself. And here’s the thing: That’s absolutely fine. Just as one does not have to fully understand the details of Modern Monetary Theory in order to be vehemently against the federal government’s choosing to borrowing tens of trillions of dollars, so one does not have to have a graduate-school-level understanding of critical race theory in order to oppose the intellectual and educational trends that it has engendered. As Columbia’s John McWhorter has observed, there is nothing at all wrong with alarmed parents describing as “critical race theory” the key premises to which they object, given that those presumptions are “descended from” the “teachings” of critical race theory, and that “their architects openly bill themselves as following the tenets of CRT.” As McWhorter concludes, the issue at stake here is “what is being done in CRT’s name, not what some articles contained decades ago.”

 

In pushing back, disaffected parents are likely to start at the bottom and work up. First, they will try to deal with their local schools — either informally, by talking to other parents and making requests of teachers, or formally, by running for school board and helping to change policy themselves. If that does not work, they will start to lobby their state governments to step in, as has happened already in states such as Florida and Texas. And if they are rebuffed there, this will become a meaningful federal issue. Some of these approaches will be more effective — and more appropriate — than others, but, they are all now inevitable. They will not be stopped by academic sophistry. They will not be stopped by epithets and insults. And they certainly will not be stopped by professional pococurantists who simply refuse to believe that anyone could possibly care about the matter at all.