CRT Backlash Is Not Astroturf

Texas has joined Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Tennessee in passing laws to ban public schools from teaching critical race theory (CRT). Other states, such as Florida, have done so through executive rulemaking. This is a positive first step towards reclaiming American education from openly anti-American pedagogy.

The intellectual roots of CRT can be found in Marxist-influenced critical theory, which began in the academia of Weimar Germany. It developed into an “intersectional” ideology at Harvard Law School in the late 1980s, through Kimberlé Crenshaw and other supporters of Professor Derrick Bell. In recent years, however, it has metastasized into the pop psychology of bestsellers such as Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist and Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility as well as pseudohistory such as the New York Times’ 1619 Project.

CRT teaches that American ideals and institutions are mere fronts for white supremacy. It instructs its devotees to see everything through the lens of racial group identity and inherited guilt rather than treat individuals as individuals. Along with related critical gender and sexuality theories, it has increasingly colonized workplace training, journalism, and campus culture, and more recently entered the curricula of K–12 schools, where its practitioners are embraced and showered with cash by left-leaning school boards and educator groups such as the National Education Association.