Perspectives on CRT in Mercer Island Schools

Perspective from the Mercer Island School District:

What is critical race theory?

• Critical race theory (CRT) refers to a broad collection of legal and academic topics that examine social, cultural and legal issues as they relate to race and racism. CRT holds that race is not biological, but is a socially constructed idea

• CRT teaches that bias is embedded within our institutions, laws, and public policy. The theory posits that this embedded bias affects each of us differently and is primarily responsible for the unequal outcomes we see in systems like education, health care, etc.

• CRT is a framework that is used to help understand why racial inequities exist in our systems and how to eliminate them. In the education system, it can be used to understand issues of disparity in school discipline, tracking and standardized testing.

Why are we hearing about critical race theory now?

While the academic and legal term has been around since the 1970s, the term “critical race theory” has begun to be used recently as a political shortcut to lump together a variety of positions and practices. Many times, the term is used without being fully understood by the user. Because of this, many important equity initiatives that are not CRT are getting swept up in the current debate.

Within school districts in Washington state, there are many efforts to increase access to opportunities for all students to be successful and to close opportunity gaps between students. These are broadly referred to as an equity focus, equity initiatives or using an equity lens. These are not the same as critical race theory, although some of them may contain similar elements, such as analyzing a school district's policies to determine if they disproportionately impact some student groups more than others. Equity in education is about making sure our systems are set up so that all students are able to succeed.

Is critical race designed to make people feel guilty about their racial identity or identify as an “oppressor” or as “oppressed.” Are we “indoctrinating” students by focusing on racial issues?

Critical race theory is not centered on blaming individuals or making anyone feel guilty. It focuses on understanding how race plays a role in how institutions like education serve people. Furthermore, there is nothing in critical race theory that promotes the idea that any race is superior to any other; in fact, most racial justice work promotes the exact opposite idea.

What about the law passed by the state Legislature. Does it mandate critical race theory be taught in our schools?

It is also important to note that the equity training required in Washington state’s SB 5044 is only about training for adults in the system, namely school board members, district and school leaders and educators. Nothing in SB 5044 mentions curriculum or lessons for students. It also does not include any mention of critical race theory or any specific curriculum for the training programs for adults.

Why is there such a big focus on “equity in education?” Shouldn’t we just treat all students equally?

Equity is about that simple and instinctive understanding that each student needs different supports, and that the same student may need extra support in one area but not in another.

School districts regularly review student outcome data to understand which students are more successful or less successful academically. District staff also review differences exist in how disciplinary actions are applied to students. Nationally and in Washington state, these gaps exist between a variety of student groups. Examples of those groups include:

• Students from low-income households

• Students with disabilities

• Students experiencing homelessness

• Students in foster care

• Students who are English-language learners

• Students of different races and/or ethnicities

The education system in the U.S. has long supported additional funding and other supports for students who have been less successful academically than others. For example, federal Title I funding is designed to support the success of students from low-income families. Another area where different types of support are provided to some students is through IDEA (the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act), which is the primary funding source for supplementing local and state dollars to support the needs of students with disabilities and special education programs.

Washington state student data shows significant disparities in a variety of student outcomes, including academic assessments, student discipline, readiness for kindergarten, graduation rates, placement in advanced coursework and college attendance after graduation. When disparities are evident in the academic outcomes between groups of students, most school leaders agree that it is the moral and legal obligation of the school district to study why those gaps exist and support policies and practices that close them.”

---

Perspective from a Mercer Island resident, Michael Bond:

What is wrong with critical race theory?

Once the exclusive domain of university professors, critical race theory is now part of our national conversation and workplace training based on critical race theory is pervasive and growing. The training is divisive and destructive political indoctrination, and if our national motto – e pluribus unum, out of the many, one – is to survive then the public ought to know what it is and why it should be resisted.

Critical theory sprung largely from the Marxist scholars of the Frankfurt School in 1930’s Germany. In 1848 Karl Marx introduced the world to an analysis of social relations characterized by oppression when he argued in The Communist Manifesto and later in Capital that working class laborers whom he called the proletariat were oppressed by those in power, whom he called the bourgeoisie. He argued for class consciousness and, in advocating radical and violent revolution, he famously argued the workers had nothing to lose but their chains.

Marx’s world view was an early form of identity politics that divides all of us into two groups. In The Communist Manifesto he wrote, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild- master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another.”

The dilemma facing the Frankfurt School scholars was why after the Russian Revolution and the wide dissemination of Marx’s invitation to a workers’ paradise was it not being realized? Industrial organization and mass communications seemed to divert the oppressed workers from their liberation. Wolfram Eilenberger refers to this phenomenon as “mass stupidity fostered by the mass media” in his recently translated work Time of the Magicians. Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School is credited with arguing a theory is critical if it seeks “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them”, and critical theory was applied to interrogate how the bourgeoisie used the levers of power to perpetuate the alleged oppression of the proletariat.

Critical theory’s origin in Continental philosophy reveals a fundamental flaw. Traditional liberalism grew out of the 18th-century Enlightenment in Britain, which gave rise to liberty within the law, pluralism and tolerance of dissent, and was firmly grounded in Biblical values. A quite different set of values came out of the Enlightenment in France. These aimed to destroy Biblical religion and morality and replace it by a manmade definition of liberty which was, behind the façade, all about power, and led to the French revolutionary terror and, in due course, to communism and fascism.

The critical theory analysis of social relations goes to the heart of the relation of citizen to the state. Are rights natural, self-evident and therefore God given as Thomas Jefferson declared, or are they granted and defined by the state? A society in which the government decides what is allowed and demands obedience to its mandates is totalitarian. Totalitarian control exercised by private economic actors, the academy, mass media, bar associations and other corners of civil society crushes freedom and liberty no less and perhaps more insidiously than state control.

Critical race theory is a variant of what began in the 1970’s in the US academy as critical legal studies. Critical legal studies applied the binary of oppressed and oppressors to look at our laws starting with the assumption that law oppresses people, especially minorities, and examined how power was used to create and enforce the law. Restrictive racial covenants in property deeds was a classic example of the use of law to perpetuate racial oppression. Denying women the right to vote and then prosecuting women like Susan B. Anthony in 1872 when she defied the law and cast a vote was a classic example of the use of law to perpetuate oppression of women.

Women gained the right to vote in Washington in 1910, in Wyoming before that, US women were enfranchised – by men it should be noted – in 1919, and the US Supreme Court declared restrictive racial covenants were illegal and unenforceable everywhere in 1948. As Martin Luther King, Jr. optimistically said, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." As a Christian, he recognized that mankind is flawed, redemption is possible and the good will in the end prevail over the bad. His was a hopeful worldview.

Nonetheless, and not withstanding adoption of the 13th, 14th, 15th and 19th Amendments to the Constitution and a web of state and federal legislation outlawing discrimination based solely on race or gender, critical legal theorists refuse to abandon the binary of oppressed and oppressors. In this dystopia, there is no arc of justice or hope, instead, they insist US history is irredeemably rotten to the core.

I implore you to reject this extreme pessimism and, instead interrogate who advances the argument that each of us is either the oppressed or the oppressors.

While accepting the proposition that race is a social construct, which would suggest that what can be constructed can be reconstructed and improved, critical race theory proceeds from the fallacy that a binary of white and black, or white and everybody else, is immutable and the only possible frame of reference for a discussion of race. Applying Ockham’s Razor to inconvenient facts, this binary ignores the history of apparent racial-like bias against the Irish, Italian, Poles, Jewish people and many others ordinarily thought of as white. Starting with this false assumed racial binary, the critical theorists contend racial bias is embedded not only in our laws, but also our language, media, political structures and culture and, like explorers entering a wilderness, they set out to look for what they believe is there.

Ignoring all the steps we have taken to eliminate racial prejudice from our laws and institutions, practitioners of critical race theory rebrand it as systemic racism. They ignore the particular facts and deploy statistics to identity groups organized by skin tone to explain allegedly disparate results. Its corollary theory holds that implicit bias exists even among those who deny any bias at all. Indeed, they argue denial of bias is strong proof one is in fact sick with bias. This demand to override a person’s reluctance to accept the fact that she is in fact racially biased is one of the most pernicious, totalitarian, and dangerous features of critical race theory. These are not mere thought crimes, they are unthought crimes detectable only by the anti-racist high priests. And ominously, the unrepentant should be treated for their mental illness like the dissidents in the former Soviet Union or the unruly psychiatric patients in the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Aside from the totalitarian impulse to control what people think and the words they speak, which is bad enough and, in the workplace, may violate state and federal laws prohibiting discrimination based solely on race, three fundamental issues should make us wary of this ideology. First, critical theory arises from the postmodern belief that there is no such thing as objective knowledge because all language is a construction of hierarchy by those in power to oppress those without power. If that were true – which it is not – then authentic communication would be impossible. Ordinary words would have no common meaning. In this world view, Descartes was misled when he claimed, cogito ergo sum. And human agency would be a chimera – we would not be free to choose whether we wish to be or remain a victim.

Second, it is no accident these theorists too often are White academics and politicians. Robin Diangelo is a White academic who’s popular 2018 book, “White Fragility,” is a lecture to White people about how they got race all wrong and ignorantly so. All while ignoring the overt actions of a political class who consciously deployed and continue to deploy race as a tool.

White men legislated poverty programs in the 1960’s that further impoverished Black communities. So much so that in the 1990’s White men legislated welfare and criminal justice reform that was directed against the Black community. The reform ended “welfare as we know it” and incarcerated large numbers of Black men. There was nothing implicit about the bias of the men who enacted these policies.

It still happens and the same people are doing it. Fanning the flames of racial resentment, President Biden falsely claimed the state of Georgia’s election law reform was “Jim Crow on steroids” and he suggested that Major League Baseball’s 2021 All Star Game consequently should be removed from Atlanta. The MLB Commissioner, a White man, agreed and moved the game to Denver, Colorado. Atlanta business, which is 30% Black owned, will lose $100 million in anticipated revenue which will be delivered to the Denver business community, which is 75% White.

White people telling Black people what they need is a not-so-subtle form of oppression. Isn’t it time for White people to stop telling Black people what they need?

Third, the critical race ideology claims all White people are infected with the racism disease and need to change regardless of who they are, where they grew up or what they were taught as children. In Diangelo’s world there are no individuals, and no person is unique; instead, she argues as a “race” white people produce and reproduce racism in lockstep marching shoulder to shoulder in every aspect of their daily lives whether they know it or not. All notions of freedom or liberty are illusory. To paraphrase Marx’s metaphor, the chains that bind us are no longer mere economic shackles to be cast off in search of liberty from oppression, they define our very being which is, not coincidentally, not capable of redemption. Led into this ideological cul-de- sac by the assumption that one is either slave or master as no other possibility exists, she is wrong on all counts.

George Orwell predicted this loss of freedom in 1940 in an essay titled, Inside the Whale, “almost certainly we are moving into an age of totalitarian dictatorships—an age in which freedom of thought will be at first a deadly sin and later on a meaningless abstraction.” He also predicted that the “autonomous individual is going to be stamped out of existence.” That is precisely what a cancel culture that brooks no dissent seeks to accomplish.

Critical race theory is by definition a racist ideology, it divides our communities, and gives cover to those who want to destroy our history and institutions. No leap of imagination is required to draw a direct line from the claim that systemic racism infects our institutions and must be pulled out by its roots to the destruction of civic monuments, attacks on the police, looting of stores and burning buildings in our cities today.

The invitation to see and form judgments about people based upon their skin tone, which is precisely what critical race theory implores us to do, tears at the fabric of our national ethos, e pluribus unum. We are one people who come from many places and stations in life, and that is why so many immigrants who are mostly persons of color swim, float and walk across the Rio Grande River, jump fences, dig tunnels and hide in trucks to seek asylum in our country.

Edmund Burke is reputed to have said, “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Nothing good will come from critical race theory or its progeny, and it should be rejected in favor of the proposition that all people are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.