Race-Theory Rollback
President Trump’s pushback against “critical race theory” can help unite the nation and reclaim its core values. Gov. Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio would be wise to join him — but that’s unlikely.
Last week, Trump banned people and firms doing business with the government from conducting training based on this odious race- and sex-based ideology. That came just weeks after he banned its use by federal agencies and after reports by Christopher Rufo, including in The Post, exposing it. Kudos to Trump.
The theory conflicts with basic American values, especially the ideal of a race- and sex-blind society, as it openly embraces anti-white bigotry. It is “rooted in the pernicious and false belief ” that America is “irredeemably racist and sexist,” that people are automatically “oppressors” simply on account of race or sex and that “racial and sexual identities” define us, Trump notes.
It’s meant to prevent Americans from uniting, and it “threatens to infect core institutions of our country,” he adds.
CRT and “diversity training” that’s based on it (a lot, sadly) actually teach that non-minorities are
racist, and men sexist. A Treasury seminar, for instance, pushed the claim that nearly all whites “contribute” to racism.
Make no mistake: These are dangerous, antiAmerican views. They feed an exaggerated sense of victimhood that fuels riots and violence in the name of anti-bias.
Alas, in New York, this garbage has been pushed hard by schools Chancellor Richard Carranza. He aggressively targeted what he bizarrely views as a
“white-supremacy culture” at the Department of Education — which would be laughable if it weren’t so offensive, given the lifelong liberalism of most DOE officials. Yet staffers have reported firings or demotions of whites based on their race, as The Post reported last year.
More, he’s launched pricey “anti-bias” training programs that do exactly what Trump fears. “There’s been a lot of discussion” of how white supremacy “manifests in the workplace,” one official noted. It’s said to be “characterized by perfectionism, a belief in meritocracy and the Protestant work ethic.” Whites who deny their deep-rooted bias are called “fragile” and “defensive.”
A slide in one session ID’d hallmarks of white supremacy that administrators need to avoid, including (ironically for educators) ideas like “objectivity” and “worship of the written word.”
Even the coronavirus didn’t stop this absurd worse-than-waste of taxpayer dollars: Carranza just moved the training online.
This, incidentally, is important context for Carranza’s (and Mayor de Blasio’s) drive to weaken merit-based admissions to the city’s top high schools: Bigotry of some kind has to be behind everything, even when they can’t point to any actual bias in the race-blind exams.
Cuomo has also fueled the distorted notion that US institutions are racist, with incendiary remarks on the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor tarring America’s criminal-justice system.
He and de Blasio are inflicting untold damage. Yes, racism exists and needs to be fought — but not with equally pernicious idiocy.