The Parent-Led Challenge to Critical Race Theory

good afternoon i'm coleman hughes manhattan institute fellow and contributing editor for city journal today we are discussing critical race theory a group of legal scholars came together in the 1970s and 80s because they were dissatisfied with the way of thinking about race that came out of the civil rights movement scholars like kimberly crenshaw gary peller and derek bell became the founders of a new movement called critical race theory one of the core claims of critical race theory is that objectivity is not possible anything that claims to be objective whether you're talking about knowledge or the standards by which we judge academic achievement is actually white supremacy in disguise where the civil rights movement defined racism concretely in terms of racist individuals whose minds could be changed and racist laws which could be overturned critical race theory defined racism abstractly in critical race theory white supremacy became an abstract society-wide skewing of opportunities white supremacy it alleged is all around us but we're like the proverbial fish in water too close to see the racism right in front of our noses for years critical race theory remained confined to the academy but in recent years it has spread kipp the nation's largest network of charter schools a few months ago changed their slogan from work hard be nice to get rid of the work hard component because it implied that hard work was enough for a black person to succeed even more concrete example the smithsonian museum of african american history in washington dc released a document condemning rationality um and hard work as quote white values so many people have been alarmed by the spread of these counter-intuitive ideas about how to approach race that have recently been seeping into the k-12 curriculum at many people's schools and so we've gathered a few experts on the subject to discuss this alarming trend we have uh john yu john yu is the emmanuel s heller professor of law at university of california uh professor ew is also the director of the law schools program in public law and policy and the director of the korea law center and the california constitution center and we have christopher ruffo christopher ruffo is a writer filmmaker and researcher as well as a contributing editor of city journal he's been carefully documenting the spread of critical race theory within government agencies private organizations and schools as well as leading the legal challenges to critical race theory in schools so before i begin the questions i just want to remind the audience that you can ask questions we'll have a q a session for the last 15 minutes of our chat and you can ask questions wherever you are watching whether that's on youtube or on the other stream and we will try to get to as many of those questions as we can and please if you are on slido uh please write your name so that we can identify you when uh when we are answering your question okay so gentlemen thank you so much for being here it's good to be with you okay let's start with you john um one thing i've noticed studying critical race theory is that it's very difficult to find any critiques of critical race theory from within the academy within the academy i think i know of one paper by randall kennedy from from the 90s which actually criticizes this very controversial set of ideas which you would expect there to be robust criticisms of so is there a critique of critical race theory from within the academy and if not why not well clemen there is first let me say thank you very much to the manhattans too for inviting me and it's great to be with you coleman uh great to be mr roof i've never who have not met before uh and i'm really pleased to be participating in other manhattan institute event i think so highly of the institute and all the great work it's doing i'm just sorry well actually i'm not sorry i'm not in manhattan today because i hear there's freezing rain there and yes you know this is the one time the electricity works in california but not the rest of the country so i'm happier to be in california today i but on the i'd much rather be visiting with my friends in the institute and in new york city so it's a great question coleman because you've really noticed and as a someone who's not in the legal academy you can speak more honestly in a way about the problems we have dealing with critical race theory than those of us on the inside because you're right if you were to ask scholars give me a good example the leading example of a critique of critical race theory they are few and far between and the article you're referring to by randall kennedy written it's got to be 20 more than 20 years ago now is one of the few prominent examples uh i can think of just one or two others a book by dan share uh dan farber and susanna sherry called i think it was called beyond all reason that came out in the early or mid 90s an article by jim chen both these are friend friends of mine called unloving and one reason why coleman you don't see more writing more criticism is of crt is to look at the responses those articles and books got there were simple symposia held about each of those three articles where several scholars accuse them of being racists accuse them of fraudulent scholarship uh accused them in some cases of accusing them of you know my friend jim chen who's asian and he was asking is there such a thing even as asian-american critical studies that accused him of not really being asian uh and so uh there's a huge backlash within the academy against anyone who questions critical race theory on the other hand in this response to the first prior question coleman the there's a lot of points to raise there's a lot of criticism to be leveled at crt and it actually would be even good for crt to engage with critics to become better uh rather than to sort of be in an echo chamber where you don't hear critical scholarship and discussion so uh some of those points uh you know those who are uh more philosophically or political theory-minded which is a lot of people i know who are involved with the manhattan institute will know that critical race theory is just sort of the latest descendant of marxism it specifically comes from a school called critical theory which is associated with something called the frankfurt school a frankfurt approach to history and then that turned into something called descended into the legal academy so i called critical um legal studies and from that came critical race theory now uh marxism uh and the frankfurt school just put very briefly uh you know said that most institutions and rules in society are about oppression uh you know marxists like to think it's about oppressing people based on their class which derives from their role in the means of production the critical theory people move the ball a little bit farther and said well the oppression is primarily ideological critical race theory said well the oppression is really based on race and so when you see things like the new york times is well known 1619 project that's just a sort of rough journalistic attempt to bring critical race theory to the masses but the basic idea is a critical race here idea if you remember the 1619 project says you know the america's not founded in 1776 with our revolution it's not founded in 1788 with the adoption of our constitution it's really founded in 1619 when the first african-american slaves are brought to united states and our history ever since then has been one of oppression now there's a lot of problems with this many historians the leading historians in our country of uh conservative and liberal bent have said the 1619 project is fundamentally wrong if race is the single variable that accounts for all of american history i think that's also true of critical race theory in general race is an important factor in our history it's an important factor way people think but to say it's the single thing that explains everything in our society politics uh law culture is i think mistaken another main criticism uh familiar to the ones people who've criticized marxism too is that what's the solution uh you know when marxists got in charge they wanted to put in place and this idea of marxism or quick illegal size of critical race there is to we have to burst through radically upset and revolutionize society to get rid of all this oppression well look what happened when true believers got in charge with this is their mission they tried to centralize power so profoundly in a government to establish and enforce their rules of a just society and marxism led i think to the worst human suffering and death and waste of the 20th century and i think crt still has that problem that marxism has is what are you going to do about a society that you claim so fundamentally and centrally racist to make it better that doesn't involve handing power over to an elite group of people who have their own ideas who may very well make things far far worse than a society that has and this my counter is yes has tried to live up to its own principles of equality and freedom and has gotten better and better every decade and is aware of its faults but tries to correct for them and nothing is ever perfect the union is not perfect our nation's not perfect but i i think the market speaks for itself there are millions and millions of people who would gladly trade their places to come and live here rather than any other country on earth thanks a lot sorry i went on a great lake but you got me too excited and i couldn't stop myself but thanks not at all that was a great answer um so i want to pivot a little bit from the philosophy of critical race theory to how it's manifesting in people's lives right now and this this will be more in in your wheelhouse christopher uh you know as i said crt remained confined to the academy most people had never heard of it in the in the 80s and 90s unless they were actually writing unless they were actually a part of the movement itself but now we're seeing it influencing administrations of universities government agencies private workplaces and k-12 so what are the dangers of crt becoming widespread and accepted what's at stake here yeah i think john laid out the theoretical case uh about crt and um i think a lot of my most recent investigative reporting work is really looking at it as it's manifested itself in institutions and i think this all does emerge from uh the frankfurt school uh kind of theories of marxism and the idea was that um you know maybe seizing the means of production and for the physical economy like factories and and other manufacturing facilities that's not necessarily the way we need to actually seize the means of cultural production that's the way we can get kind of past the bulwark of of of a large and rising american middle class and you know frankly 50 years after they marched after they announced the their idea to to do a long march through the institutions uh echoing of course chairman mao um they've largely done so in my view that i think now kind of with this astonishing speed critical race theory has kind of jumped out of academia and now is becoming the default operating ideology of american public institutions and uh i've reported in dozens of federal agencies that are conducting critical race theory-based trainings everything from the fbi conducting intersectionality workshops to taking the white male engineers from our national nuclear weapons laboratory sequestering them in a resort for three days forcing them to deconstruct their white male identity telling them that their identity is consonant with the kkk with lynchings uh with you know maga hats um and then forcing them to apologize uh for their kind of inborn racial and sexual identities um and these kind of programs are reported now on dozens are happening everywhere from the smallest kind of school districts in the midwest i reported for example on a middle school in missouri that was forcing teachers to locate themselves on an oppression matrix dividing the white male christian english speaking middle class teachers into the oppressor category and then the kind of racial and ethnic minorities religious minorities women and and sexual minorities into the oppressed categories ignoring any of their own kind of individual stories or behaviors or um or beliefs and this really crude separation is happening uh everywhere and i think it's it the same reason that that as john outlined it it it really gets has gotten very little push back in academia it's the same reason it's getting very little pushback in other institutions whether government or corporations or schools because people are afraid to stand up against it and i think critical race theory did something that i think is intellectually dishonest but but justified by their view of power and actually very very clever they constructed their argument like mouse trap and you know uh ibrahim kennedy or robin d'angelo the kind of new kind of uh corporate hr gurus of this movement um uh basically have constructed this argument where if you oppose critical race theory um that's evidence of your own guilt of your own white fragility of your own internalized white supremacy um so they they make an argument that the only possible opposition is interpreted as as essentially the truth of the theory or or kind of false consciousness again derived from marx and you know on a very practical level a parent in a school district that sees some of this stuff coming in is saying am i going to be called a racist or a white supremacist and and and people i think don't have the language or the vocabulary and then i think in many cases don't have the courage because they will truly be the first people standing up and the only to wrap up my introductory segment the only bright spot that i've seen is actually the asian american community in states like washington state and california has been remarkably successful in pushing back against critical race theory and related ideological programs i think in part because there is a a commitment to the meritocracy i talked i've reported on people who said look we left communist china to come to the united states because we think the cultural revolution that we experience in our home country is bad we came here because if you you know as you as you talked about if you work hard you study hard um you have a little bit of luck you can succeed and i think also they're in some ways almost immune to the criticism of being you know white supremacists on the face of it it's ridiculous right um critical racers make the argument in some cases that asian americans are white adjacent or kind of you know have assimilated into whiteness but i think most people reject those out of common sense so i i think that it's really going to take people banding together and pushing back in local institutions as well as a kind of counter institutional response from think tanks academics and legal foundations so you've been doing you mentioned some examples you've been doing some investigative reporting on critical race theory in k-12 classrooms and i know this is one of the topics that is i think closest to the hearts of of many people because people worry understandably about their children being indoctrinated at an impression of impressionable age with the totally unnecessary uh belief that doesn't come naturally to children who tend to have a more colorblind orientation that their race their race separates them from their classmates and determine should determine how they think and how they engage with the world and what their values are and so forth very much you know the opposite spirit of of martin luther king's dream of white children and black children effortlessly being friends and viewing each other not as stand-ins for their race but as individual people to be judged on their individual qualities so can you talk a little bit about what you've seen especially at the in k through 12 classrooms with with critical race theory yeah and i'll i'll use some very specific examples from my reporting you know first i think um critical race theory the kind of analogous movement in education is uh from a brazilian marxist theoretician named paulo freyr and he wrote a book called pedagogy of the oppressed that's actually being used in curriculum design and school districts all over the country including one that i'm going to be reporting on for city journal in portland oregon and the idea is that um that you know teachers should use the kind of their their kind of primary pedagogical aim should be to instill critical consciousness in their students to show them who the oppressor is to educate them in their their experience of oppression and then as they get older they'll be able to transform that critical consciousness into revolutionary activism actually naming and overthrowing oppressive systems and institutions and they're applying that to the american context basically saying the american constitution american law american social uh customs are are fundamentally illegitimate dating back to 1619 and they have to be thrown overthrown through revolutionary activity that's the theory what does it look like in practice it looks like first graders in cooper catino california being forced to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities and then rank themselves according to their power and privilege again first graders being taught intersectionality theory and then forced to apply it to their own lives um it looks uh like fifth graders in a uh a school uh in a public public uh elementary school in philadelphia being forced to celebrate black communism and simulate a black power rally to free angela davis from prison um again kind of very politically uh politically aggressive tactics um in a school that out eighth grade only fifty only thirteen percent of students uh are are literate um so you know 87 percent of students are functionally illiterate um but they are being educated not in learning but in political activism um and uh it also looks like a story that i just did right where you are coleman in new york a mixed middle and high school principal um sent an email to parents denouncing uh conservatives as racists and white supremacists and then providing white parents at the school with a a color-coded kind of gas dial that said these are the eight identities of whiteness and that white parents at this school again public school should aspire to become quote white traders and eventually advocate for quote white abolition um and uh you know this is the kind of language and and kind of crude distillation of critical race theory um and i think it's really dangerous even the the language veers on stuff that i think is quite scary i talked with a number of families through my reporting uh one from iran that said it remind who said it reminded her of uh of the kind of ideological fervor and the run-up to the revolution in 1979 and again uh asian-america chinese-american parents who said uh it reminded them of what happened to their parents uh during the cultural revolution of the 1960s so for those who are invested in the legal opposition uh to critical race theory what does that landscape look like right now are you asking me comment i'll defer to the uh did the distinguished law professor on that one i don't embarrass myself in front of john no no no i mean you know the like i think the primary solution is the one that the founders created which was federalism which forces a lot of decentralization on the country i think in a positive way forces jurisdictions to compete and ultimately if the problem is that you know these examples are terrible you know i notice a lot of them go on in the large coastal cities in large coastal states like california right here or new york where you are that's going to encourage people in texas or florida arizona you know other states to retain a more traditional curriculum based in you know history and facts and science rather than teaching and mr ruffa is quite right this idea uh at crt uh that truth itself is just socially constructed there is no objective truth you really worry what's going to happen when that point of view becomes adopted in the sciences engineering and so forth so you know the the primary response is i think competitive federalism uh the second response i think there is a legal angle um beyond you know people organizing and changing their school boards and fighting uh to change the curriculum in their classes or even the competition which may ultimately be the more healthy one but by private providers of education like charter schools and home school and so on uh is the effort to use uh several examples that mr we've talked about the idea the crt idea to use diversity or to use race as a criteria to decide who gets into schools there's a criteria to decide who's uh who teaches who gets promoted who gets hired because it's not just it's the uh curriculum it's all part of a it's a larger program in which these uh this idea that race has to be or is the primary deciding variable that explains everything in american society well the ironic thing is that critical race theory wants to use race to turn around and use race then to make all kinds of other decisions in society and luckily that i think is prohibited when the government does it by the constitution and the 14th amendment or the fifth amendment it's a federal government or when private employers do it it's prohibited by title vii of the civil rights act as you call when you start out by quoting martin luther king and the civil rights movement was great achievements as the civil rights acts of 1964 and 1965 and those require colorblind treatment in hiring employment promotions and if critical racers are going to try to take over institutions and inculcate some the use of race in decisions at schools who's going to be a teacher who's going to be a principal why did we choose this book rather than that book that i think does make that uh those institutions subject to legal challenge yeah so a question that could be for for either of you um john you mentioned that you know the civil rights act requires colorblind treatment and it does you know it's you can read the plain language right there it even says in the act nothing in this law is is requiring any kind of preferential treatment based on race right there's no reason to make decisions based on race that's the spirit and the text of the civil rights act and yet we've seen in the in the ensuing 55 years the the proliferation of policies and laws that take race into account and so it's easy to become cynical about the the efficacy of of writing good laws even you know important monumental laws like like the civil rights act so why is it that we haven't seen in the past half century america more and more reflect the text and the spirit of the laws that we all celebrate on martin luther king day and during black history month and so forth well part of it is uh cultural you know as you say a lot of things you point out might not be things that the law can reach you know if corporations are going to say you know start saying we're going to use diversity in our hiring or we're going to use diversity in our programming that's much harder for the civil rights acts to reach than outright uses of race uh the other thing is and this was i think an important fight in the courts and actually the judicial appointments particularly to the supreme court over the last few years are going to really make the difference here i think which is that the courts open the door to allowing the use of race in admissions to schools and you know manhattan institut the last program i was on with you was about the use of race in the magnet schools in new york city uh by mayor de blasio and the head of the school board there and why i thought that was inconsistent with the constitution and civil rights laws i think that what's going to happen is that there have to be more parents more communities involved challenging these kinds of efforts to use race explicitly in the schools or in their local governments and those will generate the cases that get to the supreme court and the supreme court can make clear as i think it should that race is just never to be used in the government and in state and local at all for whatever reason whether it's been allegedly benign or it's for malign reasons uh but you're right cohen the you haven't seen the legal system really swing fully behind the color blind principle because of the fight the courts have been divided but i think that division uh is going to end given the most recent appointments to the supreme court yeah so uh you mentioned as well uh john that you thought the solution is competitive federalism and this is again a question either either one of you can answer uh does that imply that the the legal battle is best fought at the state level or local level or is there also is it is it best fought at at the federal level my preference would be at the state level i think it's a mistake for uh the federal government to start establishing a nationwide curriculum whether even if it's the curriculum that i might prefer i don't i think it would be a mistake for the federal government to say no critical race theory in any school anywhere in the country because sooner or later people who believe in critical race theory will take over the federal government at some point and then they'll do the exact same thing in the other direction i think the better answer is let people vote with their feet if some states like california again in new york try to impose this heavy critical race theory curriculum in their schools people will leave now right now people have a lot of other reasons to leave new york in california they might just add these to them but you know people can decide the policies that they like they can decide the schools they want their kids to go to maybe that means they'll move to other jurisdictions that are already gaining your you know a lot of citizen residents like texas center florida or in arizona where the schools might be more resistant political leaders are more resistances i don't think it's necessarily legal cases that will be the main dynamic it'll be you know people you know participate in the political process within their states to get their curriculums to be more neutral and balanced based on you know history objectivity science and then people hopefully will move to those states because they don't want their children as mr roof russia learning ideology uh radical ideology in kindergarten to 12th grade all right so for for for chris um you know one thing i've noticed is that there's a huge divide between the elites and everybody else and and by elites i mean people who are in politics in journalism in media in uh you know ivy league universities in silicon valley in corporate america and everyone else and the you know this this was brought home recently in california where they tried they tried to overturn uh prop 209 which banned all racial preferences and affirmative action in in state-funded institutions and it was it was shot down by by popular vote and in fact every majority latino county in the state voted against racial preferences uh but you know if you look at the corporate backing for each side you know on the side of racial preferences was every corporation you could imagine you know facebook yelp united um reddit and you know all twitter and there was no corporate backing on the side that actually won the side represented by the sort of the citizens of california um so is this something you've noticed in your investigation that there's a there's a huge divide in in the perception we get of how popular critical race theory is by looking at elite spaces and how popular it actually is yeah i i think it's a it's a huge dichotomy and i think there are really two dynamics at play first as you've outlined this is you know what christopher lash might have called or did call a kind of elite revolution against the people i mean this is an idea that circulated in very small groups always in elite institutions that explicitly seeks to undermine the kind of traditions and beliefs and patterns and practices of middle and lower class americans again of all racial backgrounds and i think that what i've noticed as a kind of functional matter is that there is a the kind of in my mind i guess i would call it the kind of moral crime of critical race theory is that in practice it serves best as a as a as a means to expand and then solidify the social status of multi-racial elites that profess this theory so critical race theory is great for the robin d'angelos and eben kennedy's and chief diversity officers and corporate leaders seeking to maybe divert attention away from other kind of kind of bad practices it really is kind of cocktail party status builder but in my view has really nothing to offer middle class and even working class people in the country uh i spent five years uh directing a documentary for public broadcasting pbs um in a in three of the poorest american cities and talked to thousands of people and you know the the kind of gulf between the the concerns and beliefs and aspirations of poor people in the united states again of all racial groups has nothing to do with the kind of intellectual and political aspirations of critical race theorists also of all racial groups and i think that critical race theory offers really nothing for people that are struggling in our country and in fact um seeks to undermine the three core uh institutions and practices and habits that actually uh create the foundation for upward mobility you'll you'll remember in their literature the critical race theorists uh reject the nuclear family as a white supremacist institution of kind of western patriarchal domination although that although every scholar even someone like raj chetty um by no means a conservative at harvard and then i think now stanford says actually family structure is the key driver of poverty at the individual and community level something we've known for a long time critical race theorists also reject the idea of entry-level work they reject the idea of a kind of blue collar labor or service level labor as a tool of capitalist oppression you know they had a symposium years ago about reclaiming the welfare queen and they said the welfare clean is not an example of society and public policy failing to provide avenues for success it's actually the welfare queen is a social status that we should celebrate um and elevate as a kind of uh subversive ideal again ignoring you know what i saw in my in my filmmaking work the really desperation of of people who are stuck at the bottom of the economic ladder in our society and finally critical race theirs have had a lot of success lately as a matter of public policy demolishing the idea of achievement based academics or achievement based education they think that showing up to school on time turning in homework grades standardized tests are all again kind of eugenics based um kind of kind of scientific racist methods of oppression and they say we should abolish all of those pathways abolish magnet schools abolish charter schools and abolish any of the alternatives that have been uh coming up to provide a kind of a safety valve or or an exit strategy from in many cases failing public schools and the the end of that recipe is fairly simple what do you get you get a society like ibram kennedy described in a piece for politico he said we need a um a kind of permanently funded uh politically kind of political fourth branch of government a department of anti-racism that's not accountable to the executive not accountable to congress that can invalidate any law at any level of government anywhere in the united states and suppress speech from policy-making institutions that don't kind of bow down to the tenets of anti-racism and and this is the kind of endpoint goal and i think that that's what you get that's what we got you could see in the kind of history of the 20th century when you try to have this kind of radical kind of uh radical kind of marx-inspired ideology of kind of flattening and leveling and eliminating any of those institutions that are deemed as oppressive you get a kind of totalitarian regime that takes forth and tries to basically manage limited resources and apportion them according to politics and uh we're not there yet obviously um you know but i think that that this is the natural sequence the natural outcome and we should have no illusions to the to the danger of this ideology and i think the the kind of fervent radicalism um and fanaticism of its main proponents all right so with that let's move on to the audience questions so we can get through as many as as we can so first question this is from ryan monroe ryan says a lawsuit has been filed in nevada in nevada that challenges the use of critical race theory in public schools are critical race theory programs unconstitutional does this lawsuit stand a chance there are you know four or five different versions of this question so john i'll take that one and maybe maybe i hadn't told you but i'm actually leading a coalition of law firms and legal foundations that are challenging critical race theory this is from one of our partners um he's actively fundraising so john if you're listening i hope that people can can find you at schoolhouserights.org but i think the argument that john outlined and we're trying to put into practice with this coalition is that critical race theory trafficks in three main conceptual practices i guess you could call them one is race essentialism that you can reduce uh human beings to a racial essence either called whiteness or blackness i haven't seen asian-ness but i think that might be down the pike and then you can essentially layer on top of that a series of racial stereotypes our attorneys are confident that uh these racial stereotypes um if they uh are harmful can actually be violations of the civil rights act um the critical race theorists also um i think in many of the training sessions where they're actively hostile to people forcing them to apologize conducting struggle session style training programs create a hostile working environment that's another avenue for for legal action and then finally a lot of these institutions i've reported on more than 10 now are actually hosting racially segregated training and educational programs a whites only space a blacks only space a kind of poc space for a kind of smorgasbord of other non-white non-black identities and this too i think is a kind of blatant violation of of the law so we have three lawsuits that are going through the courts we're gonna be filing another one in the coming weeks um and we're gonna we're gonna test it i think that uh i'd love to get john's perspective but my sense is that um this is also new that it hasn't had a chance to work its way up to courts um and i'm very optimistic and excited to see eventually where the courts come down on these issues i think that uh these cases uh have good chance uh i'm all for them i think uh chris is right the courts haven't really dealt with this yet and so it's hard to say the courts will reject them or accept them it seems to me that uh you know school districts or state agencies or governments that use training programs where people are segregated or distinguished by race is going to have hard sledding in the courts constitution just says the government is not allowed to act according to race if it uses race in any way to favor or disfavor anybody i think that's unconstitutional the curriculum is a harder question whether critical race theory itself is unconstitutional to teach in the schools i don't think the federal constitution the free speech or 14th amendment would intervene and say any particular curriculum is constitutional or unconstitutional i think these lawsuits have the best chance of success if they proceed under their own state constitutions a lot of state constitutions have a provision that talks about or grants a right to an educate a public education sometimes they grant right to something like a free you know free educate public education and so courts in those states can interpret try to recover the meaning of what a public education is and to say well you know for example a political party couldn't take over a state in an election and just require that the republican party principles or democratic party principles are taught in school i think most people agree that would be unconstitutional at least under state constitutions and so you could argue that presenting critical race theory in a sort of unquestioned or universalist way uh violates that right to an education uh so but i agree these cases are so new it really isn't any uh you know prominent case law which means actually that the lawsuits really ought to be brought to see whether the courts will try to supervise and stop the use of ideological means to achieve these ends in the schools okay so a question from freda and this one's for chris have you ever spoken to those who are required to take this crt training is there some level of backlash or hidden resentment or anger at being forced to attend these trainings yeah absolutely fred i've spoken with hundreds of people in my reporting that have attended these trainings um and leaked documents to me and assisted me and and and finding out what's happening within the institutions and absolutely there's there's uh fear there's resentment there's division i've heard from hundreds of people that uh these training programs that that kind of on the surface seek um to to to celebrate kind of diversity and common purpose uh actually end up end up undermining that that that goal and creating a kind of hostile working environment um the department of treasury for example has an office of diversity inclusion um that was described to me as a uh as a internal intelligence service bombarding employees daily with these kind of hard left ideological messages and then seeking to root out shame and invalidate and eventually chase out any employees with with kind of open conservative sentiments and uh i i think they're you know the the kind of political offices in a lot of ways uh create a lot of division and you know the other question is i think an important question not the most important question but a corollary is do these diversity and inclusion programs actually work um and the answer from the kind of literature seems to be no there was a harvard uh professor that had studied 800 different organizations over a time span of 30 years looking at their diversity training initiatives found that they offered no benefit and in some cases actually caused harm so i think that you have to really listen to people's experience and hopefully in the coming years provide them the kind of vocabulary and tools and practices uh and and institutional support uh for them to resist and fight back against it the one other thing i would i would add to this is that it's not only that these kind of training sessions create resentment among white people for feeling that the fingers being pointed at them constantly as racist it's also i've been in these training sessions and been very frustrated as a black person because of the a the assumption that because i'm black i would agree with everything that's you know being taught to me by the so-called diversity experts and and just just the idea and the sense of being spoken for right and this is one of the main ways critical race theory gets its moral legitimacy is to say that there is a black point of view that most or all black people agree with and the moral thing to do is just for everyone else to just get on board with what what we black people already know to be true and you know just poll after poll refutes this notion right just the just the one example that's always at the front of my mind is only 20 percent of black people in america told gallup they want less police in their neighborhood 60 want the same amount and another 20 want more police right but you you ask a crt perspective and they'll say well black people want to defund the police right that's the whole implicit and that gives them an an enormous a semblance of moral legitimacy that makes it very difficult to argue against and so it can be frustrating to be one of the people being spoken for as well as as one of the people being blamed in such contexts okay so let's get a question from uh john sindell uh this is for john do you anticipate legal challenges to the teaching of critical race theory based on the equal protection clause and or federal and state non-discrimination statutes if so what are the prospects of success of such suits oh i think you're muted i'm sorry yeah i don't think that a case that said that claimed the teaching of critical race theory or any you know sort of any subject or set of values is going to violate the 14th amendment instead what i think the vulnerability is uh how it's done so in fact coleman you just suggested actually one of the problems with critical race theory is at the one hand it argues that minorities uh were historically excluded and treated poorly but at the same time critical race theory often stereotypes those very same minorities and doesn't understand the full diversity individuality of people of all different races if you if a school district or government tries to intervene not just in the selection of subjects as to what's to be taught but who's to teach them so for example one part of critical race theory is uh only authentic minorities sometimes are seen as the people who can write about critical race theory uh there's a lot as i mentioned uh i mentioned asian-american scholar who's heavily criticized by other asian americans for being inauthentic uh in a way for his writing uh so if it came to school districts saying well we're going to favor you know teachers from certain races or books written by uh people of certain races because those are really the only authentic minorities i think that would definitely give rise to 14th amendment uh problems the other and i think this is more of a stretch but again my example of um could a school district or state government say we're only going to teach you know this this political party's views i do think that at some point um there could be a claim that what the government's doing violates the first amendment but that's a real uh stretch this when it comes to schools and what they teach the courts have been relatively deferential but you can imagine some very extreme cases where states would not be allowed to use the schools as kind of ideological training grounds and like the you know the provision i would think that the courts might look to would be the first amendment in some way okay so question from vicki manning i'm a mom of two high school students and a school board member fighting against critical race theory in my district when i speak against it i'm called a racist i fear the constant white privilege white supremacist narrative is causing racial division racial division i'm advocating for school choice but what more can we do as parents yeah i'll i'll take that well first of all thanks for thanks for uh pushing back and you know i think that we're in this strange place where um i've seen articles recently that that square dancing logic rationality math i think today was organic food are all manifestations of white supremacy and uh we've reached to a point of kind of white supremacy at absurdum where anything that the kind of political left and media don't like they label white supremacists because frankly it's a very a powerful word representing a very evil ideology um that that achieves political aims of intimidating people and i think first of all have the courage uh to stand up um you're going to be kind of labeled and harassed and slandered um you have to break through that and and stand strong second i think that the the success stories that i've seen um are always establishing uh [Music] usually a multi-racial coalition of people it's very interesting it's very easy to say well we'll look at you know susie over there she's the kind of one person we can marginalize we can we can insult we can intimidate we can shut down it's it's a lot harder to say uh to shut down a group of five or eight or ten families that are actually saying we care about these issues we represent a kind of diversity of backgrounds and experiences this ideology is wrong for our district for these reasons and we propose a better way forward um i know there are a number of groups that are going to be kind of popping up in the next couple months that are seeking to provide resources that are seeking to kind of give you the arguments and form letters and knowledge and vocabulary in order to fight back but i always think that the number one tip that i've gotten and uh in seeing successful campaigns is is always strength in numbers it's always cobbling together a coalition of people that can't be dismissed okay uh let's go let's go to a question from heather have any of you research the role of the national association of independent schools nais in promoting critical race theory ideology in the private school sector their annual people of color conference and other materials they publish are heavily crt based so this is actually something i i know i know about first hand because i attended the annual people of color conference when i was 16 years old my private school sent me off to this conference uh heather and that's where i first heard the concepts of white privilege internalized depression it was like a two or three day workshop which indoctrinated something like a thousand high school students from across the country and many of the kids there were you know they were gay and struggling with their identity and from places that were less tolerant so there was a very kind of spiritual uh sense to the whole event but there was also this very doctrinaire don't ask questions learn about intersectionality but but in in in a very in the kind of environment you just can't you know you can't challenge anything and then everyone brings those ideas back to their respective schools so i think you're you're right to point to this as a kind of uh this is something that's been going on for decades but a sort of yearly way uh uh in which critical race theory has been that the tendrils of critical race theory have been um spreading uh uh throughout the nation okay so because there are so many questions in the chat about how many about parent what parents can do can we just let's just end by giving parents one or two action items to do right now you know a website to visit or you know something that they can follow or support or donate to just so we can sort of give people something to do the moment that this stream ends i guess i'll go first so you know one thing that i found to be really persuasive is to provide specific examples so there are a lot of examples i have uh in my reporting at city journal uh citydashjournal.org you can look up my author archive and to show people exactly what it means because in the abstract critical race theory has i think a good brand it's saying hey we need to take race into account and how we look at society and institutions i agree with that that seems great but let's look at it actually in in practice in concrete terms and the more specific examples of what happens when you institute these programs in many cases i i think persuades people it puts the other side on the defensive it puts it puts people in a position where they have to justify this um and i think that's tremendously helpful and john maybe you have some other resources to share i don't know if i have resources i um i'm on the board of the pacific legal foundation which is a libertarian public interest group and they have i think done a very strong job in challenging the end of sort of meritocratic methods for choosing students for k-12 magnet schools and efforts by school districts to use race i think they might well be interested in cases where school districts are go the next step and start trying to require critical race theory teaching or principles especially when it comes to the selection and promotion of teachers and books and so on so i'd recommend people look at the pacific legal foundation and there are other few other groups like the institute for justice and then each region actually has a sort of similar libertarian legal foundation that you could look to that could help talk through whether it makes sense to bring a lawsuit or to organize as a way to make sure that crt doesn't seek to seep into the classroom and just to add to john's point you know anyone listening that has either an experience they want to share that might be good for my reporting or an experience to share that they might need to talk to an attorney we do have a network of volunteer lawyers and law firms so anyone can reach out to me uh directly my email is just chrisrufo protonmail.com uh there's a lot of email traffic i can't get back to everyone but um certainly if you have a direct experience and and and you need uh to either leak documents that are that are so outrageous they must be reported or have a potential case just contact me directly all right with that i would like to thank chris and john for joining us joining us today for this important discussion and thanks so much to our audience today for tuning in of course if you like what you saw i invite you to subscribe to receive the latest updates and research from manhattan institute and follow the manhattan institute on twitter and you will find the link to subscribe in the chat thank you so much for tuning in with us today thank you thank you

Channel: Manhattan Institute

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Length: 59min 51sec (3591 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 18 2021