“To think of some people as simply being higher achievers than others, for whatever reason, is a threat to today's prevailing vision, for it implicitly places the onus on the lagging group to achieve more, and, perhaps more important, deprives the intelligentsia of their role of fighting on the side of the angels against the forces of evil.” – Intellectuals and Race
Ready or not, the National Education Association (NEA), the largest teacher union in the country, recently approved plans to promote critical race theory (CRT) and the 1619 project in all 50 states and all local jurisdictions. While the left views this as a necessary step toward teaching the real history of racist America, the right sees these courses as anti-anti-racist, divisive, and toxic for all American students.
Born of the original philosophy of Critical Theory (CT), and developed in the 1930s at the Frankfurt School, critical theory evaluates society based on its power structure, before recommending the necessary social changes, usually under the veil of fairness. Its foundation is in Marxism and the belief that societal inequalities come from class structure and hierarchy rather than from a plethora of other possibilities that include a lack of individual initiative.
Its spawn, Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a political academic movement that sees race as a cultural creation used to maintain white male privilege. The racism and the disparate outcomes that follow are a result of societal institutions and not the result of individual prejudice. That is, inequality is baked into society by Western-influenced laws that unfairly disadvantage women and minorities. CRT blames free enterprise as the source of unequal outcomes and calls for capitalism to be replaced with socialism.
In Thomas Sowell’s 2013 book, “Intellectuals and Race”, Sowell details the role of the intelligentsia in creating resentment over racial disparities that are often the result of factors other than race. Outlining how similar disparities existed among various groups around the world, and throughout time, most recently among lower-class whites in Britain who mirror the American black experience, Sowell shows the many factors that may be responsible for varied outcomes, including geography, demography, and cultural differences. Further, intellectuals tend to dismiss internal differences among people, such as behavior and destructive subcultures, while placing full blame on unproven external biases which they claim are beyond minority control.
For example, the academic-inspired social justice movement promotes the idea that disparate outcomes between whites and minorities, and males and females, are the sole results of prejudice and preference and, therefore, a political redistribution of benefits is justified. They demand equal results despite vast differences in attitudes, effort, and background. In so doing, they’ve become responsible for lowering standards, both morally and educationally, all while demonizing achievement, even calling the idea of merit, white privilege. And despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, intellectuals continue to push an ideological grievance, using racism as the default position.
But aggrievement is not a new strategy. In 1911, former slave and founder of the Tuskegee Institute Booker T. Washington noted, “There is a class of people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs – partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”
Here and abroad, intellectuals spread their ideological poison and division, by exaggerating differences among ethnic groups, and then prescribing their own strategies for reaching equity, namely welfare and quota systems. Frequently these actions create worse outcomes and greater inequalities than had existed before. Over time, these grievances become generational and more difficult to overcome. Where minority achievement occurs, it is dismissed or ignored.
Success has never been equally distributed among any group, race, gender, or even, within families. And while one’s location of birth and rearing may result in an unequal beginning, the need to develop skills, knowledge, and personal agency, are all part of the process of succeeding. There are no shortcuts. Miring children in victimhood and resentment only delays the work necessary to achieve prosperity in life.
While all Americans should learn the true history of our country, so as not to repeat the evils of the past, there is no place in honest academic learning for politically charged materials used for partisan gain.
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