How to oppose Critical Race Theory

This is a pretty good article that takes maybe five minutes to read (but with lots of links to follow up on).

In a word, fight it with ideas and free speech, not by trying the CRT tactic of censoring people who oppose their ideas.

A new orthodoxy has taken over our educational institutions with frightening speed. People who likely never heard the phrase “critical race theory” (CRT) before this summer are now getting emails from their children’s schools about “Decentering Whiteness at Home.” They are discovering that their children’s elementary-school teacher has read them “a book about whiteness” that teaches them how much “color matters” and encourages them to confront “the painful truth” about their “own family” — i.e., that they are being raised by racists. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

It is understandable, therefore, that the ascendancy of CRT in our educational institutions is deeply frightening to so many people. People feel like their children are being indoctrinated. In many cases, they are right. This ideology is not simply being presented as one way of looking at the world. It is being taught as the Truth with a capital ‘T,’ and you will be cast into outer darkness or punished for questioning it. Just ask David Flynn, the father of two children in the Dedham, Mass., public schools who was fired from his position as head football coach there after raising concerns about changes to his seventh-grade daughter’s history curriculum. (Flynn is now suing the school district.)

We need to fight the rise of this toxic and destructive orthodoxy if we want America to be a place where, as Martin Luther King said, our children are judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. But we have to fight it in the right way, without compromising the very freedoms we seek to preserve.

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As journalist and author Jonathan Rauch has so eloquently written — in opposition to the kinds of hate-speech prohibitions common on campuses around the country — the tolerance of hateful speech is critical to freedom and progress:

I feel more confident than ever that the answer to bias and prejudice is pluralism, not purism. The answer, that is, is not to try to legislate bias and prejudice out of existence or to drive them underground, but to pit biases and prejudices against each other and make them fight in the open. That is how, in the crucible of rational criticism, superstition and moral error are burned away.

Rauch is right. The battle against these identity-based ideologies needs to be waged in the marketplace of ideas, not through censorship. Proponents of CRT, critical feminist theory, postcolonial theory, etc. have every right to argue for the validity of their positions, just as we have the right to argue for the validity of ours. We must recognize their rights even as we try to convince the world of the dangers of their arguments.