Eck misguided on his claims about racism

Here’s an easy litmus test for anyone claiming to be working against racism. If self-declared white nationalists and neo-nazis agree with you, you’re doing something wrong.

This is where Republican Committee Chair Dr. Gordon Eck and his band of Republican-endorsed school board candidates find themselves. As local ringleaders of the national “anti-CRT” movement, they are working very hard to convince parents and taxpayers of the following line of argument: Critical Race Theory is racist and divisive. Critical Race Theory is in our schools. Therefore, our schools are teaching racism and causing division.

There are many problems and falsehoods behind this propaganda-fueled line of thinking. But to keep it simple, let’s boil it down to the litmus test. If public schools really are teaching racism and causing division, why do white nationalists celebrate the anti-CRT movement?

Most parents and citizens who are swept up in the anti-CRT movement trust local political leaders such as Dr. Eck and his endorsed candidates to help inform their views. These parents — at least the ones I know and love — are decidedly not racist and surely would be alarmed to find themselves unwittingly aligned with white nationalists. They surely do not realize that in the dark underbelly of the internet, on abhorrent sites like Stormfront and the Daily Stormer — sites that openly oppose “race mixing” and call for a second genocide of the Jews — white nationalists and neo-Nazis are gleeful over how the anti-CRT movement has taken hold and become a mainstream issue. Why are white nationalists celebrating? Because they know that if it succeeds, the anti-CRT movement will further marginalize the populations they target: racial, ethnic, and religious minorities; the LGBTQ community; individuals with disabilities; and other vulnerable populations.

For the Republican party, the anti-CRT movement perhaps isn’t so much about race as it is about undermining public education in favor of privatization. Dr. Eck himself tells us in his recent op ed that his solution to the problem he sees with public education is not to work with schools, but to work against them by advancing “School Choice”, a platform that takes funding and resources away from public schools. It is telling that Dr. Eck and his endorsed candidates have thus far declined to attend Community Conversation sessions hosted by the West Chester Area School District. These sessions are designed to bring community members of different views and backgrounds together for an open conversation about how to strengthen our community and overcome divisiveness.

Instead of participating in the conversation, Dr. Eck and his candidates have hosted Anti-CRT information sessions where “experts” claim to have inside information about how our schools are subversively indoctrinating children. The leaders of these conspiratorial sessions push school board candidates and sell antiCRT books, not in an attempt to improve education for all students, but in pursuit of goals as old as time: power and profit.

If you do not wish to align with a platform being raucously celebrated by the white nationalist movement, here’s what you should do: go to the polls on Nov. 2 and vote for any school board candidate not endorsed on the Republican sample ballot. There are good choices — ranging from conservative to liberal — who do not buy into the anti-CRT false narrative and who want to work with our schools, not against them.