Critical Race Theory is the new segregation across schools nationwide

By Wai Wah Chin

Published March 6 2024 in the NY Post

Since the public became aware of critical race theory a few years ago, it’s subverted almost every aspect of America’s fabric. 

In operative terms, CRT, a neo-Marxist dogma, reduces every interaction between individuals into a collectivist conflict, between the oppressor race (the guilty villain) and oppressed race (the righteous victim). 

And the kids are not well. 

CRT is not just a war on kids — it’s actually a war on the entire Western civilization as characterized by the Enlightenment values of individual agency and freedom. 

Even at the Department of Defense’s K-12 schools for the children of US service members, CRT indoctrination was found to be so divisive and toxic that the organization responsible for it, the Education Activity Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, was shut down — though this indoctrination remains in use, and the DEI office was caught last month reincarnated as the DEI “Steering Committee.” 

The collectivist race reductionism of CRT indoctrinates kids — even young ones still “reading” picture books — to despise all whites as privileged oppressors and rally to all blacks as helpless victims. 

Beginning in full force next year in California but already introduced in some locations, for example, the state’s recently mandated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum instructs kids that they belong to either the oppressor group or the victim group, due only to their individual race. 

Former young friends of different races now can only regard each other with suspicion, if not hostility. CRT creates sullen racist kids from nothing. 

And now we see CRT fueling antisemitic eruptions in schools from Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco in California to New York, Boston, Washington and Philadelphia on the East Coast — because CRT’s race essentialism pits “indigenous” people against “settlers” just as easily as it pits blacks against whites, with course modules indoctrinating the fake history that Palestine was conquered by invading Jews over the backs of Muslim indigenous people. 

Don’t be lulled that “ethnic” means inclusion and acceptance — Manuel Rustin, who helped draft California’s curriculum, stated, “Ethnic studies without critical race theory is not ethnic studies.” 

CRT says individuals cast into the oppressed class can do nothing about their condition. 

So forget achievement, delayed gratification, belief in progress, punctuality, meritocracy, the written word, math and science — they are all “whiteness.” 

Learned helplessness 

CRT replaces agency in kids by learned helplessness. 

According to activist Ibram Kendi, who’s made a career off this, oppression is never a question of whether, but how, so kids are taught to find oppression in every interaction, even when it is microscopic or nonexistent — which means CRT implicitly promotes exaggeration and fabrication. 

So CRT teaches kids facts don’t matter, only “your truth” of “feeling safe” and “lived experience” — all unchallengeable. 

CRT replaces fortitude against adversity by fragility to imagined slights. 

You’d think the mental-health profession would intervene, but it, like education, has been taken over by CRT and is making things even worse. 

Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn vividly portrayed how communists diagnosed dissidents as mentally ill, thus weaponizing psychiatry.

Today, CRT in America uses “social-emotional learning” on already fragilized kids to manipulate them into further docility to CRT. 

If you object to anything, you’re the one who is wrong. 

No disparate outcomes 

Because everything is racism under CRT, disparate outcomes by race can only come from racism and must be eradicated. 

This is called “equity,” a marketing name for CRT, which says that because blacks underperform whites and Asians (and increasingly Hispanics) in school, racism is the cause and academics must be dumbed down. 

This happens in multitudes of ways.

First, inflate grades into meaninglessness: not just general grade inflation, but racially targeted grade inflation, on top of outright grade fraud. 

Next, dumb down the curriculum.

Ban algebra from middle schools and calculus from high schools!

No exaggeration — it’s happening from California to New York, despite opposition from parents and brave educators, despite obvious damage to America’s national security and prosperity. 

Their replacements are hollowed-out, easy-to-ace courses infused with CRT indoctrination, like faux data science and “culturally responsive” ethnic studies. 

Courses that haven’t been purged are also quietly dumbed down, infused again with CRT indoctrination, not just in math and science but across all areas; professors confide that they can no longer teach at the same level as 10 years ago. 

Finally, replace meritocratic admissions to better colleges, magnet schools, gifted and talented and other academic acceleration programs by procedures incorporating one or more of “top percent” schemes like Gov. Hochul’s “top 10% plan” for the State University of New York, lotteries like that used by the New York City Department of Education and set-asides like New York state’s Science and Technology Entry Program. 

The goal is to favor those less academically deserving but more likely to be of the “victim” race over those more academically deserving but more likely to be of the “oppressor” race: This not only enables those institutions and programs to dumb themselves down but also lets the pipeline feeding them hide the embarrassing direct consequence of their policies. 

Attack on the family 

That the traditional family is the last fortress of individual liberties against neo-Marxisms (including CRT) is well known to neo-Marxists as diverse as Mao Zedong and György Lukács; the former instituted mass state takeover of child-rearing from parents and the practice of kids denouncing their parents to authorities, while the latter instituted gender perversion programs, all of which, then as now, alienate kids from their parents and destroy the institution of family. 

Kids need healthy families to grow and thrive. 

An entire generation is being taught to feel guilty about who they are, or believe they are a victim — and in both cases children are told there is nothing they can do to change that. What a horrible lesson. 

There’ll be no future for America if the kids are dysfunctional, dumbed down and hateful of their neighbors. 

Wai Wah Chin is the founding president of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance Greater New York and an adjunct fellow of the Manhattan Institute.