Godspeed to the Parents Fighting CRT

‘White privilege’, ‘white rage’, ‘white supremacy’. Terms that were barely heard of a decade ago have become household terms.

The sight of a questionnaire that asks a student to identify his or her white privilege used to be an alarming sight for any parent. But what used to be easily dismissed as a rare occurrence or even dismissed as a hoax has become commonplace in classrooms as teachers fully embrace Critical Race Theory.

And now parents are taking notice. They are finally speaking up. All across America, parents have been vocalizing their concerns over the K-12 syllabus in PTA and school board meetings to take teachers and administrators to task over the matter, demanding to know why their kids are being taught to be racist because of supposedly “anti-racist” education.

And in some instances, parents are running for positions on the school boards to ensure that their kids are not subjected to the profoundly anti-American, and frankly dangerous ideology.

Not even the nation’s most prestigious prep schools have been spared from the culture war. New York City’s elite Dalton School has been the site of what Vanity Fair terms an “anti-racism tug of war.”

Despite all the gaslighting from the likes of teachers’ unions and cable news networks, which either downplay the ideology as mere history lessons, or simply deny that it’s happening altogether, the inclusion of CRT in education cannot be denied.

This pushback against Critical Race Theory hasn’t gone unnoticed. Those pushing for its adoption and normalization in schools are fighting to defend the territory they’ve silently, but slowly claimed over their long march through the institutions.

Emboldened by the social justice movement, and very much at the core of it, teachers are no longer hiding their advocacy for the ideology. At the 2021 annual meeting of the National Education Association - America’s largest teachers’ union - the organization putCRT education at the top of their agenda. Teachers are not only expected to inject it into their syllabus, but also to actively dispossess its opponents of the franchise.

Unable to contain the criticism of CRT, its proponents in the media have resorted to the tried and tested angle of dismissing its most vocal critics as conspiracy theorists. If you oppose CRT, you’re a member of QAnon. It’s Russia-gate all over again.

In an article published onNBC News, the outlet - along withMSNBC’s Joy Reid, and others - singled out some instances of QAnon proponents who said they are running for positions on the school board.

To be certain, there is nothing wrong when a parent takes an active interest in their kids’ lives. It doesn’t matter if their parents have fringe beliefs as that has little to do with their contentions against the woke ideology.

At best, it’s disingenuous to conflate concerns over Critical Race Theory with the propagation of fringe ideas. At worst, it’s a way to marginalize anyone with legitimate concerns over the issue. It’s a way to disenfranchise parents, not just those who hold fringe ideas, but all parents who are worried about their children coming home and feeling ashamed of their identities.

Parents are rightly worried about the indoctrination of their children. Kids who would’ve otherwise grown up to love and respect each other for the content of their character are now being told to hate one another for the color of their skin. Martin Luther King’s once great dream has turned into a nightmare.

Cancel culture is itself a manifestation of Critical Race Theory. No longer confined to law school students having heated debates on the potentially racialized aspects of arrests and prosecutions, Critical Race Theory is being applied in every social interaction. Its advocates and proponents cannot separate the academic from the real, nor do they wish to - and those who refuse to view the world in such a binary manner are dismissed as oppressors and racists.

Rather than explore the concerns parents have over CRT, the media has opted to simply dismiss those concerns as illegitimate, much as it dismissed even the most legitimate concerns over the 2020 election results, and the origins of the coronavirus, as fringe conspiracy theories. In the case of COVID-19’s origins from a Chinese virology lab, these concerns were at first banned as “misinformation” but have since been adopted by both the mainstream media and politicians who had casually dismissed it before as right-wing racism.  

What used to serve as a buffer between those in power and those without it has effectively become the propaganda arm of the establishment. The media no longer speaks “truth to power” - instead, it tells you who has privilege, and why you need to hate them. Simply put, the media wants you to hate those who oppose the establishment.

Critical Race Theory, a derivative of Marxism - which might as well be called Critical Class Theory - enables the division of society into oppressors and the oppressed while those who pull the strings remain in control as the rabble fight among themselves.

And children, who are the most vulnerable and impressionable members of society, can be molded by those in charge to act as foot soldiers for the elite - just as they were under the regimes of Mao, Stalin, and Hitler.

More so than simply speaking out against Critical Race Theory, parents must take the bull by the horns and instill hard values that their children can live by, and provide them with an immunity to indoctrination of any sort. Whether its traditional values, religion, or a simple set of commandments, kids must be taught absolute right from absolute wrong, and not to see the world through the twisted lens of moral relativism.

You can follow Ian Miles Cheong on Twitter @stillgray