Editor's note: This article was first published at Wirepoints.org.
Congressman Sean Casten has a new video out on how opponents of Critical Race Theory are just “right-wing fear-mongers” who are “afraid of facing hard truths…a certain subset of white men who are petrified to live in a world where they might be judged by the content of their character.”
It’s worth going through the specific claims in Casten’s video, to the extent it contains anything concrete, because those claims are now often used to defend the framework commonly labeled as CRT — Critical Race Theory.
CRT opponents are “afraid of the will of the majority,” Casten says. Opposition is from “a small minority of Americans who might want to repeat the mistakes of our racist past.”
We are now hearing much the same from other CRT defenders. Neil Steinberg of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote recently that the CRT debate is “not a debate in the educated parts of the country,” just in “red state backwaters.” And the CRT’s leading guru, Ibram X. Kendi, wrote last month that critics’ “American dream” is “that they have the civil right to kill black Americans with impunity and that black Americans do not have the human right to live.”
Do majorities in fact support CRT, as Casten and others claim? Ad populum arguments should mean nothing, but if that’s how Casten wants to make his case, let’s go there.
Start with the polls.
Recent polls by Economist/YouGov and Competitive Edge Research show that overwhelming majorities oppose CRT. The newest poll is from Fox News, which found that majorities of those familiar with CRT say it does not accurately show how America works, and they want CRT out of our schools. Most notably, independents oppose CRT by nearly two-to-one, that poll found.
And is opposition limited to “red state backwaters” and KKK-types as Steinberg, Casten, Kendi and many others say?
Maybe they should try a Google search. A day hardly passes without news of intense opposition to CRT popping up across the country, particularly at school boards, in left and right leaning communities alike. At least 23 states have passed or are considering bans or limitations on CRT in schools. Some of the most intense opposition has been in blue Louden County, Virginia and at expensive private schools in liberal Manhattan.
Here in Illinois, ultra-left Evanston is the target of what’s likely to become a landmark federal lawsuit over CRT. New Trier Neighbors, a nonprofit group in suburban Chicago, helped inspire Parents Defending Education, an umbrella group in Washington, D.C. that supports local efforts around the nation.
How about Casten’s claim that opposition to CRT is coming only from “a certain subset of white men who are petrified to live in a world where they might be judged by the content of their character”?
Tell that to the growing list of black scholars and activists who oppose CRT. Watch the splendid video of some of them released as an Independence Day message. Watch the video of Ty Smith, the black man who spoke up against CRT before a Bloomington school board, which made headlines around the country and was viewed more than two million times on Twitter alone.
Casten’s video goes on to show a segment of the recent testimony of General Mark Milley, who defended inclusion of a CRT book as recommended reading for the military by saying, “I want to understand it, so, it so what is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America?.” Not true. Far fewer than a thousand entered the Capitol Building on January 6. All were trespassers and rioters and some intended to interrupt the certification of electoral votes, but there’s no evidence to support Milley’s far more sweeping claim.
Finally, Casten invoked Martin Luther King, which took real nerve because CRT is widely and correctly seen as directly hostile to King’s views on race, particularly the goal of color blindness, which CRT rejects.
CRT is not about content of character but about skin color only. All blacks are indelibly oppressed, it holds, and all whites are indelibly oppressors. Whites are implicitly if not explicitly biased, as CRT is routinely taught in our schools. Whites, therefore, should be discriminated against. Here are Kendi’s own words: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”
But take Casten up anyway on his claim that he believes content of character, not race, should be the test. What’s the content of his character?
He’s dishonest, and so are they others trying to defend CRT in the manner he does. Dishonest.