If you ask your child’s school if they are teaching critical race theory (CRT), they will tell you no. There is no curriculum titled, “Critical Race Theory.”
CRT isn’t just a class or curriculum, it’s an approach or a style of teaching using the belief that racism is at the core of Americas laws and institutions. Proponents believe racism is embedded within all our systems and institutions and must be changed.
There are many curricula and supplemental curricular resources by other names that teach CRT.
These are just a few:
The Anti-Defamation League’s curriculum is called, No Place for Hate. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) curriculum is called Teaching Tolerance or Learning for Justice. Black Lives Matter’s curriculum is called Black Lives Matter at School. The New York Times’ is The 1619 Project. The curriculum producer Benchmark Education offers social justice lessons for grades K-5 that are based on the SPLC’s Teaching Tolerance, and the company Pollyanna sells a curriculum for K-8. The site Facing History and Ourselves provides curricular resources for teachers, many of them free of charge.
All these curricula and supplemental lessons make race the lens through which all aspects of American life are analyzed. All unapologetically teach children group identity, a reimagining of the United States as a nation driven by racial groups in an unending power struggle, each group with specific claims on victimization. All teach that America is racist at its core, and that our existing societal institutions must be “dismantled.” All serve to weaken the public and private bonds that create trust among Americans and bolster productive civic engagement.
All systematically train children to apply Marxism to every area of life and use CRT thinking to interpret their world.
CRT, or critical race theory, is a descendent of critical theory, which was, from the start, an unremitting attack on Western institutions and norms in order to tear them down. It built on the work of philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Friedrich Hegel and his best-known disciple, Karl Marx.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, critical race theory built on critical theory’s idea that the world is based on systems of power and claimed that American law is systemically oppressive. It went a step further then to claim that America herself is systemically racist, and that this racism produced an alliance between working-class whites and the oppressor capitalist class, which prevented working-class solidarity.
CRT and the curricula that train children in CRT thinking assert the following conclusions, presenting them as established fact:
- There is no absolute truth—only competing narratives. It sees “lived experiences” as mattering more than facts.
- Individuals are either an oppressor or victim. You are predetermined by immutable characteristics such as race to fall into either category. Culture is defined by groups exercising power over each other.
- America is systemically racist and must be dismantled. It sees America as having been founded on the system of capitalism, which is racist, and therefore America must be “disrupted.”
When followed to their logical conclusions, Marxian ideas like these inevitably usher in socialist and communist regimes that rule people’s lives in the name of “equity.” This is why CRT is often called “neo-Marxism,” because it inseminates people’s minds with ideas of fairness and social justice, breeding anger over perceived injustices and leading to destructive violence. Marxism results in people relinquishing their blood-bought freedoms and God-given inalienable rights in the foolish hope that interventionist government reach and power will achieve “equity” across the board.
This is the crux of the CRT belief system: CRT wholly rejects the fundamental principles of liberty on which our constitutional republic is based, and if left unchecked in our schools will lead to our nation’s destruction from the inside out, which is its aim.
Critical Race Theory is more than just curriculum, it’s a belief system and every American should join the battle to stop our schools from using our tax dollars to indoctrinate our children with this ideology.