Melanie Collette, a black adjunct professor and member of Project 21, says the motive is to convince white students they are secretly guilty of deep-rooted racism and to convince black student they can’t succeed because of their racist classmates.
“People have been indoctrinated,” she says, “to believe this is actually a thing.”
That form of indoctrination is introduced in classrooms from kindergarten to college with buzzwords such as “anti-racism” and “white privilege” and “equity,” but by now much of the public knows those phrases can be traced to Critical Race Theory. That thesis can be tracked back to the 1980s when Marxist legal scholars suggested blacks cannot achieve success because every facet of society – education, finance, criminal justice, business, media, and politics – is controlled by whites who are racist and who want to hold onto power because they fear blacks will take over.
The premise of Critical Race Theory is intermingled with Communist ideology because it borrows directly from Critical Theory, which dates back to Marxist thinkers in the 1930s who said the poor – the oppressed – cannot succeed and improve their lives because the rich – the oppressors – are holding them back. Critical Race Theory states the same thing but replaces the “bourgeoisie” with whites and the “proletariat” with blacks.
According to Collette, white people who sit through CRT-based indoctrination are “pumped with white guilt” about issues such as slavery and what their own white ancestors did, as if that guilt has trickled down to them generations later.
What does that look like on a university campus? Mirroring the “struggle sessions” in China, when Communist leader Mao Zedong demanded absolute loyalty, a Breitbart story reports university faculty members and students are being herded into “white accountability groups” across the country.
In one example, citing the University of Texas website, the Division of Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access says members of the accountability group hold “fellow white employees accountable for oppressive behaviors and the systems in which those behaviors are tolerated.”
The same story says similar struggle sessions have been documented at the University of San Diego; Loyola University; the University of St. Thomas; the University of South Carolina; and the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.
Students told to 'look and listen'
Meanwhile, in some K-12 grades, parents are learning their children are being taught the tenets of Critical Race Theory only because the child is being instructed to document the racism of their parents. According to a Washington Free Beacon story, in a New York City middle school, one “activity” given to students was to “look and listen for microaggressions” and write them down. A similar “activity” asks students to describe how their family members “contributed to racism” in the home.
That assignment and others came from the book “This Book is Anti-Racist,” which was required reading for the 2021-2022 school year.
Reacting to that story, conservative activist Janice Crouse tells AFN the school assignment is “one of the most egregious examples of overkill that I have ever seen.”
The act of spying, however, is a common pattern of Communism.
The definition of racism in the children’s book is the “systemic misuse and abuse of power by institutions," the Free Beacon said.
According to the same Free Beacon story, parents in famously liberal New York City organized to push back against the CRT-based teaching in 2021. At the same time, far-left education officials insisted their anger and response was unwelcomed and unnecessary.
“We are not preparing young people to be activists,” Dr. Lester Young, a veteran educator and prominent New York regent, said last year. “What we are preparing them to do is be more civically aware, more civically engaged and as I just said, to be able to look at the world critically and imagine how it might be better."
However, in a lecture about the future of education last year, delivered at Fordham University, Dr. Young told the audience he was proud the New York Board of Regents had approved a policy statement supporting "diversity, equity, and inclusion" in public schools, commonly known as D-E-I curriculum.
Another initiative he touted during the speech is the Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework, which states that America's education system suffers from a "complex system of biases and structural inequities" that are "deeply rooted in our country's history."
"Not every problem that schools face is an educational problem,” Young, referring to public opposition to D-E-I programs, told the Fordham audience. “Some are political problems."
