In a narrow sense, this is correct. The media's adoption of "Critical Race Theory" to refer to all so called "anti-racist" or DEI material in school curricula or professional training is actually the result of a calculated strategy by conservative activist Christopher Rufo and others to discredit such ideas by giving them a single, unappealing moniker. Until around 2020, Critical Race Theory referred to a branch of academic legal theory that applied the roughly post-modernist Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School to the role of race in American law and economics, including issues such as redlining and mass incarceration. Critical Race Theory in this sense, whatever one's other views on it, would not be appropriate for K-12 simply because students would lack the philosophical and legal background to approach it.
With that said, much of the educational material branded by the media as "Critical Race Theory" should not be taught in K-12. For example, the New York Times' 1619 Project, and proposed curricula based on it, run counter to both historical fact and the basic principles of historiography. The 1619 Project, particularly Nikole Hannah-Jones's flagship essay, argues that the arrival of the first slaves in the British colonies in 1619 should be interpreted as the true beginning of the United States as a political entity. Jones further argued that the Revolutionary War was fought to preserve the institution of slavery, before that part of the essay was removed without a proper retraction. This idea is not supported by historical evidence. Slavery was never a significant economic force in the northern states, and Pennsylvania for example abolished slavery *during* the Revolutionary War. The northern states were also not economically dependent on the slave economy of the southern states, even indirectly, as was demonstrated to great effect during the Civil War. While Lord Mansfield's Judgement in Sumerset v. Stewart in 1772 did call into question the legality of slavery in England, it would be decades until slavery was abolished in the remaining English colonies, and revolutionary literature of the time, including the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, Thomas Paine's Common Sense, and the Olive Branch Petition, did not generally express concern for the preservation of slavery. This all stands in stark contrast to the Confederate states' various declarations of secession from the US over 80 years later, which explicitly identify preserving the institution of slavery as their reason for seceding. American slavery was also not unique in its brutality and intergenerational status, which it shared with slavery in French and Spanish colonies in the Caribbean.
Even if this idea of slavery as the defining element and origin of the United States were not blithely unhistorical, it would still be detrimental to education. Historians work extremely hard to disabuse their students of the idea of a "true beginning" to some political entity or historical trend. The study of history is will always be a struggle against simplifying and teleological narratives, but what's important is that students understand this struggle and continually question their understanding of history without projecting their own political biases backwards in time to people living in a vastly different world. The 1619 Project's attempt to "center" slavery in the history of colonial America is the antithesis of good historical study for precisely this reason. It intentionally distorts a fascinating and complex period of American history into a childishly simplistic black and white narrative to suit modern political trends, and for this reason it should absolutely not be taught in K-12 schools.
Before I go on, let me briefly say that my utter contempt for the 1619 Project should not for a moment be taken as an endorsement of the so-called "Patriotic" education being advanced as a response to it in certain conservative states, which is constructing likely worse false narratives downplaying the atrocities of slavery, the treatment of American Indians, and other black marks in our nation's history, in order to promote American exceptionalism.
Even worse than the Times' historical butchery is the toxic zero-sum worldview of anti-racism promoted by the likes of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. Kendi maintains that it is impossible to be simply "not racist", and that all people at all times are engaged in either racism or anti-racism. He defines racism in this context to include inaction on racial issues, inaction on any issues that disproportionately affect people of color, "not seeing race", or generally any behavior that is not "anti-racist". Anti-racism in Kendi's cosmology is the act of producing equity of outcome between races. Anti-racism demands that its practitioners constantly evaluate themselves and others in racial terms and identify structures around as racist or anti-racist on the basis of whether they produce equity of outcome. This is the framework in which standardized testing, for example, has been decried as racist because black students routinely score lower as a group on standardized tests. The idea that black students have worse access to education, and that this disparity in inputs would naturally produce a disparity in outputs in the form of test scores, is irrelevant in the anti-racist framework. The testing is racist, by definition, because it is not equitable. One might protest that even if anti-racism might be useful as an approach to public policy, or a call to individual action, children should still be taught the fundamental virtue of treating people of all races equally. Kendi vehemently disagrees in his lesser known work, Anti-Racist Baby. To quote
"Anti-racist baby is bred, not born. Anti-racist baby is raised to make society transform. Babies are taught to be racist or anti-racist - there's no neutrality. Take these nine steps to make equity a reality."
No this is not from an Onion article. I really wish it were. K-12 curricula based on Kendi and DiAngelo's work are currently being taught. They should not be. Children should not be taught to see each other in racial terms. They should not be taught to see the world as a zero-sum game of racial competition.
While these and other elements of K-12 curricula do not meet the academic definition of Critical Race Theory, and have been described as such in a calculated and quite successful political strategy to discredit them and galvanize the American conservative voting base against them, they are incredibly destructive to our already deficient educational system and deeply frayed civil fabric, and should be kept as far away from our schools as possible.
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