Bill to deny foundational CRT prevents hatred
Blog: Between The Lines
If nothing else, SB 262 by
Republican state Sen. Valarie
Hodges would inhibit in Louisiana racial division and hatred.
The bill, currently
passed out of the Senate into the House of Representatives, would add to
the state's Parental Bill of Rights that schools "shall not discriminate
against their child by teaching the child that the child is currently or
destined to be oppressed or to be an oppressor based on the child's race or
national origin." This addresses the use of critical race theory, or the idea
that racism is pervasive in all societal institutions shaped historically by,
if not currently dominated by, people of Caucasian ancestry, as the
foundational tool by which to shape instruction.
Similar
to Marxism, CRT bases itself on a series of unfalsifiable, if not empirically
unverifiable or logically suspect, propositions that if questioned
automatically connotes racist actions (or, if the analyzer is non-white,
axiomatic of a false consciousness), making the whole enterprise intellectually
lazy and devoid of true scholarship. It increasingly has become a tool by
those ideologically compatible with its policy aims – strong government action
to level differences in outcomes of resource allocations – for instruction from
the academy on down.
As an approach to understanding the distribution of
political power in a society, it warrants scrutiny and study as long as this
occurs in a critical and comparative fashion in the instructional environment.
When made foundational in instruction, however, it subverts the entire process
of education as a search for truth by elevating faith over skeptical inquiry
and becomes nothing more than neo-racism posing as anti-racism.
That by itself disserves children by depriving
them of the opportunity to learn factual knowledge and then engage in critical
thinking using it. And, quite ironically, applying the policy preferences of
CRT actually would
undermine the very institutions that are essential to addressing poverty and
inequality across all racial groups, providing another reason to ban its
use as a foundational instruction strategy.
But the bill's language probes to a deeper and
more sinister implication of using CRT foundationally: it spawns divisiveness, leading
to hatred, then into violence. We
only need review recent history not among non-whites, but central Europeans,
to see a demonstration of how the principles of CRT produce this perversion. In
the 1990s, ethnic conflict largely but not exclusively driven by Serbian
nationalists operating under an ideology of victimization brought war and
strife to the Balkans.
This nationalism, spawned over a century, had
mutated into a blanket indictment of certain non-Serbian ethnic groups. Identically
to tenets of CRT, it taught that a certain ethnic group, Serbs, had faced systemic
discrimination that culminated over the years that granted them special
victimhood status awarding moral status to their claims of group oppression.
Indeed, movement leaders invoked imagery and symbolism from past American
racist policy outcomes when explicating their ideology.
Shared tenets aren't difficult to ascertain: glorifying
the year of enslavement as the beginning of a national narrative (the 1619
Project), attributing sinister ethnically-based motivations and ideologies
to political opponents (the refusal of whites to become "woke" and the denigration
of non-whites on that side of the debate as captured), and calling opposition
and criticism "violence," in order to legitimize future actual violence (propagating
policies such as defunding the police as a reaction to alleged brutality and
disproportionate detainment specifically aimed at non-whites). Sadly, these
tenets constructed a narrative that inspired many to engage in sustained,
violent ethnic conflict that cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
Regrettably, at its core CRT promotes tribal
hatreds. To teach children fundamentally that their race or national origins
automatically set them at odds with those who are different – unless, of
course, racial preferencing is instituted to redress (under the theory that "[t]he
only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy
to present discrimination is future discrimination") – not only perverts the
idea of education, but fuels a dangerous powder keg if allowed to expand and
persist. SB 262 does its part to prevent this.