Days before the verdict was announced in the trial of Derek Chauvin, the U.S. Department of Education issued on April 19 a Notice of Proposed Priority for American History and Civics Education programs for instructing high school students and educators. The programs are funded with taxpayer dollars through the the National Endowment for the Humanities.
In fact, Team Biden’s Department of Education intends to impose the most radical forms of Critical Race Theory on America’s schools, including the 1619 Project and the so-called anti-racism of Ibram X. Kendi, a report said.
"The woke revolution in the classroom is about to go federal," Stanley Kurtz noted in an April 19 report for National Review.
The department cites and praises The New York Times’ “landmark” 1619 Project, as well as the work of Critical Race Theorist Kendi, as leading examples of the sort of ideas Team Biden wants to spread. "In explaining critical race theory, it helps to begin with a brief history of Marxism," said Christopher F. Rufo, founder and director of Battlefront, a public policy research center. In a lecture delivered at Hillsdale College on March 30, he explained the evolution in the West of the disastrous and genocidal ideology into a modern mutation geared to race:
During the 20th century, a number of regimes underwent Marxist-style revolutions, and each ended in disaster. Socialist governments in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Cuba, and elsewhere racked up a body count of nearly 100 million of their own people. They are remembered for their gulags, show trials, executions, and mass starvations. In practice, Marx’s ideas unleashed man’s darkest brutalities.
By the mid-1960s, Marxist intellectuals in the West had begun to acknowledge these failures. ... But rather than abandon their Leftist political project, Marxist scholars in the West simply adapted their revolutionary theory to the social and racial unrest of the 1960s. Abandoning Marx’s economic dialectic of capitalists and workers, they substituted race for class and sought to create a revolutionary coalition of the dispossessed based on racial and ethnic categories.
Team Biden's Civics Secures Democracy Act would appropriate $1 billion a year, for six years, for history and civic education."Support for leftist 'action civics' is already written into the priority criteria of the bill itself," Kurtz noted. "The new draft federal rule for grant priority in American history and civics education makes it clear that this is indeed the Biden administration’s intent."
Indeed, Biden’s repeated insistence that America is "systemically racist" is cited in the new federal rule.
Rufo's explanation of Critical Race Theory continued:
Critical race theory is an academic discipline, formulated in the 1990s, built on the intellectual framework of identity-based Marxism. Relegated for many years to universities and obscure academic journals, over the past decade it has increasingly become the default ideology in our public institutions. It has been injected into government agencies, public school systems, teacher training programs, and corporate human resources departments in the form of diversity training programs, human resources modules, public policy frameworks, and school curricula.
There are a series of euphemisms deployed by its supporters to describe critical race theory, including “equity,” “social justice,” “diversity and inclusion,” and “culturally responsive teaching.” Critical race theorists, masters of language construction, realize that “neo-Marxism” would be a hard sell. Equity, on the other hand, sounds non-threatening and is easily confused with the American principle of equality. But the distinction is vast and important. Indeed, equality—the principle proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, defended in the Civil War, and codified into law with the 14th and 15th Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—is explicitly rejected by critical race theorists. To them, equality represents “mere nondiscrimination” and provides “camouflage” for white supremacy, patriarchy, and oppression.
In contrast to equality, equity as defined and promoted by critical race theorists is little more than reformulated Marxism. In the name of equity, UCLA Law Professor and critical race theorist Cheryl Harris has proposed suspending private property rights, seizing land and wealth and redistributing them along racial lines. Critical race guru Ibram X. Kendi, who directs the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, has proposed the creation of a federal Department of Antiracism. This department would be independent of (i.e., unaccountable to) the elected branches of government, and would have the power to nullify, veto, or abolish any law at any level of government and curtail the speech of political leaders and others who are deemed insufficiently “antiracist.”
One practical result of the creation of such a department would be the overthrow of capitalism, since according to Kendi, “In order to truly be antiracist, you also have to truly be anti-capitalist.” In other words, identity is the means and Marxism is the end.
The 1619 Project asserts that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery. It was immediately discredited by historians of all political stripes.Kendi's book "Antiracist Baby" includes a devil with a contract "blinding you to whiteness." The imaginary terms offer "stolen land," "stolen riches," and "special favors." It adds that "WHITENESS gets" "your soul" and "to mess endlessly with the lives of your friends, neighbors, loved ones, and all fellow humans of COLOR."
Rufo noted of the use in classrooms of Kendi's book: "Recruiting infants and toddlers into a political ideology is deeply manipulative and damaging to children. This is the kind of program that was commonplace in 20th-century totalitarian regimes such as the USSR and Communist China."
Biden’s new American history and civics rule also expresses support for "Culturally Responsive Teaching," which Kurtz noted is "the ultra-woke and utterly politicized pedagogy derived from Critical Race Theory that was recently imposed on teachers in Illinois."
The state-level grant money for the implementation of Critical Race Theory in schools "is large enough that the leftist education bureaucrats who dominate even in red states will have a clear field to apply for federal funding," Kurtz wrote. "If conservative governors push back against grants that commit an entire state’s education system to action civics and Critical Race Theory, they will be slammed by Democrats, the education establishment, and the media for refusing badly needed federal dollars. Former Texas governor Rick Perry managed to hold off Common Core by refusing to apply for Race to the Top grants, but he was mercilessly pummeled by critics for turning down that money. Few red-state politicians will have the guts to stand up to such pounding."
Kurtz continued: "That is why it is urgently necessary for states to pass laws barring action civics and Critical Race Theory from the K-12 curriculum and teacher training. Without such laws in place, it will be almost impossible to resist the carrots and sticks soon to be deployed by the Biden Education Department with the aim of forcing action civics and Critical Race Theory onto America’s schools."
Team Biden is intent on teaching young children "to feel guilt and anguish simply because of the color of their skin," Kurtz wrote.
He concluded: "And now, between the massive grant-giving machine authorized by the Civics Secures Democracy Act and the new federal rule boosting American history and civics grants that promote the most radical forms of Critical Race Theory, states would be foolish not to protect their schools from the coming onslaught. States must now adopt laws barring both action civics and Critical Race Theory from K-12 education. With the federal juggernaut bearing down, what choice do states have but to defend themselves?"
Free Press International
