The Great Parent Revolt: How Parents and Grassroots Leaders Are Fighting Critical Race Theory in America's Schools

By Lance Izumi, Wenyuan Wu and McKenzie Richards

The instruction of critical race theory in America's schools, popularized through controversial curriculum such as the 1619 Project, has disrupted classrooms from coast to coast and impacted families from every ethnic, cultural, and income background. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pacific Research Institute
• Release date: Feb 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9781934276518

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

The introduction of critical race theory (CRT) and race-based instruction in schools has disrupted American classrooms from coast to coast and impacted families from every ethnic, cultural, and income background. This book tells the story of individual parents, students, and school board members who are fighting this ideological indoctrination.

To start, one must ask the question: what exactly is critical race theory? The answer is clear, but also murky and obscure.

While there is great scholarly debate, critical race theory was born in the academy and can be viewed as a variation of Marxism.

Under classical Marxism, people were separated into categories based on their economic class status. The wealthier classes were designated as the bourgeoisie, which oppressed the working-class proletariat. Under critical race theory, economic class is replaced by racial categories.

African-American author and former Princeton and Vanderbilt University political science professor Carol Swain and researcher Christopher Schorr have written, CRT views American society and government through a Marxist analytical lens, emphasizing group power and group conflict. They observe:

In CRT and in related fields . . . racial and other social categories substitute for economic classes. White people (but also, men, heterosexuals, and Christians) are thus defined as oppressors and people of color (but also, women, gays, and religious minorities) are defined as oppressed. Given that, again, per Marxism, society and government are understood in terms of the domination of oppressed groups by oppressor groups, CRT treats racism as the organizing principle of society. Like their ideological forebearers, CRT proponents aim to overthrow the social order on behalf of the oppressed.¹

In this context, they say, terms such as ‘white supremacy’ and ‘institutional racism’ are not restricted to historic systems such as Jim Crow or apartheid but are used to describe contemporary Western, and especially American, society.²

Further, CRT asserts that slavery and racial segregation were never contrary to American values; instead, America was always and remains a white supremacist wolf cloaked in a universalistic, (classical) liberal sheep’s clothing.³

Therefore, Core American values such as individualism, liberty, meritocracy, property rights, and even procedural equality are viewed as expressions of white supremacy and/or fig leaves to obscure white supremacy from public view.⁴

If it seems clear what critical race theory is, then why is it so hard to detect in schools? The reason is that CRT proponents know that such a Marxist-based theory would never garner the support of a majority of the American people so they have disguised it.

Writing in The Federalist, Washington, DC mom Julie Barrett, noted, The left avoids the term ‘critical race theory’ and instead uses terms like social justice, equity, diversity training, anti-racism, culturally responsive pedagogy, anti-bias, inclusion, and more.⁵

That is why it is impossible to put an estimate on the exact number of schools and school districts that are implementing critical race theory in the classroom.

Students of all ages, says Barrett, are being taught racism under the guise of equity, social justice, and the rest. She recalled:

"Why don’t you want justice? Don’t you think equity and inclusion are a good thing?"

I’ve had this exact conversation with the high school principal at the school two of my children attend. Yes, I want justice. Yes, I want to include people. But that’s not what is going on here.

What the schools are doing is making children pay for the sins of their ancestors.⁶

Unlike a specific curriculum such as the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which caused controversy over its much criticized claim that the United States was founded when the first slaves came across the Atlantic and which had been adopted in more than 4,500 schools by 2020, Barrett points out that CRT does not always show up in schools in the form of a specified curriculum:

Sometimes the district isn’t using a specific curriculum, though. In my experience, teachers can be left to source their lessons from any resource they see fit. This is particularly dangerous, considering many school districts are hiring activist teachers, who are self-proclaimed experts in racial education and are usually involved with movements like Black Lives Matter.⁷

What can parents do when faced with this faceless menace? Talk to your children, urges Barrett. The best thing we can do is instruct our own children, she says, and, Teach them the truth and arm them with facts about CRT so they know how to identify it in school and can report back to you.⁸

Once parents find out that CRT-inspired instruction is taking place, she recommends that parents attend school board meetings and speak, inform other parents and ask them to get involved, and post on social media.

The parents and others profiled in this book are doing just what Julie Barrett recommends. They are fighting back, whether it is at school board meetings, in court, or through elections. These brave people are ordinary Americans who have taken on the extraordinary task of defeating the most divisive doctrine to ever threaten America’s children.

Other books on the topic have analyzed relevant scholarly aspects, with their authors rightfully warning the readers about the inherent contradictions of the theory’s Hegelian logic, Marxist underpinnings, and illiberal impulses. Our work departs from the intellectual debates and seeks to document a grassroots movement in the United States that started in late 2020 to challenge the cultural dominance of race-based thinking and public policy making.

To accurately present this genuine movement, we profiled 13 remarkable individuals to understand their unique circumstances and motivations. These are parents, grandparents, education practitioners, students and community leaders who have been affected, directly or indirectly, by the sweeping forces of thought conformity and political indoctrination culminating in CRT’s ascent in their schools and local communities.

Breaking the stereotype, these real-time, grassroots agents of change come from vastly different backgrounds and subscribe to both liberal and conservative ideological persuasions.

Among them, there are first-generation immigrants from the Middle East and Asia, whose homelands bore the marks of truly repressive political regimes. There is a college dropout of Italian descent who was dismayed by his nieces and nephews’ education programs in New York’s public schools and started an effective organization to help elect anti-CRT school board members. We also talked to two full-time mothers whose instincts to protect their children have led them to create national networks of fellow parents to expose and challenge ideological hijacking in K-12 education. Some are scholars and former corporate executives who have found altruistic callings to proactively engage in what they consider the fight of our generation to hold the education bureaucracy accountable.

The diversity of backgrounds and viewpoints of our interviewees show the broad-based nature of this movement. Through their activism and advocacy work, each one has demonstrated exceptional moral courage to stand up for fundamental values of equality, liberty, and freedom and for the shared future of our next generation. Almost none of them is an expert on political philosophy or social sciences but they are motivated by a common desire to stop a fringe, nihilist, and divisive dogma from preying on our society and its most fragile members: America’s kids.

Our book intends to amplify their inspiring stories and by doing so give contextual human characteristics and nuances to a misreported and misunderstood movement, key points of which were activated around the same time in American living rooms and local gathering places. While these cases only represent a small portion of ordinary Americans fighting these destructive policies, these individual profiles are a faithful snapshot of the movement.

These courageous individuals are not daunted by the forces arrayed against them. They believe that they will overcome this poisonous movement and will unify our nation.

CHAPTER 1

A Scholarship Review of Critical Race Theory

In 1987, the year when one of the authors of this book was born and two decades before she made the trans-Pacific journey to America, philosopher Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind , a literary masterpiece critiquing the higher education system in America. In it, Bloom grounded his keen observations, as a teacher dedicated to liberal education, ⁹ of contemporary cultural and ideological trends threatening the liberal orientation of education:

Civic education turned away from concentrating on the Founding to concentrating on openness based on history and social science. There was even a general tendency to debunk the Founding, to prove the beginnings were flawed in order to license a greater openness to the new. What began in Charles Beard’s Marxism and Carl Becker’s historicism became routine. We are used to hearing the Founders charged with being racists, murderers of Indians, representatives of class interests.¹⁰

What Bloom identified as a moralistic assault on the American political traditions of constitutional neutrality, rationalism and equality under the laws has not dissipated. The political and cultural temptations to radicalize democratic thought with relativism and intolerance for dissent has been even greater in the present, with many sectors of the public life being mobilized as change agents. The threats to a liberally minded society extend beyond Bloom’s original subject inquiry-higher education and bleed into the corporate world and public K-12 education.

The battle for ideas is most fierce and consequential in our nation’s public schools, where competing proposals for virtue, justice, and ways of life clash with potentially life-changing impacts on impressionable young minds.

In Cupertino, an affluent majority-immigrant city in Northern California, third graders were forced to participate in a math class where they had to deconstruct their racial and social identities based on power and privilege.¹¹ An inner-city Philadelphia elementary school demanded that its 5th-grade students partake in a social studies curriculum to celebrate Black communism and a Black Power Rally, while only 9 percent of the school’s students can read at the grade level.¹²

This thought experiment to anchor learning in ideology, subjugate education under indoctrination, and viciously target dissenters is being conducted systemically. A pilot research project surveying 44 school districts in Southern California in late 2021 revealed the large scale of the problem. A majority of these districts have adopted policies promoting ideologically-based racial justice, hired personnel advancing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), and introduced curricula on controversial subjects such as ethnic studies and social emotional learning. ¹³

These initiatives are based on two central tenets: 1) Most observed adverse outcomes and disparities in educational attainment, health, and wealth in our society must be attributed to institutional or systemic racism and 2) To dismantle inequitable structures caused by racism, students and other participants must answer calls for political action, including ideological anti-racism learning, critical consciousness building, DEI learning, and so-called action civics. In other words, the new learning paradigm is closely linked to main tenets of critical race theory, a contested and politicized hypothesis that examines all social relations, economic life, and policy outcomes through the lens of race.

Proponents of the new-age learning experience adamantly deny their connections to CRT and purposefully confuse public conservations with esoteric conceptualizations and elite talks. In San Diego Unified School District, for instance, district officials insist on every occasion that its schools are not teaching CRT, even after a civil rights complaint was launched regarding the district’s mandatory employee trainings titled White Privilege, Critical Self-Awareness, Anti-Racist Leadership and Abolitionist Teaching.¹⁴ Ibram X. Kendi, a nationally recognized popularizer of CRT ideology, smears the opponents of CRT as bad-faith conservatives who have buried the actual definition of critical race theory,¹⁵ despite the fact that the spontaneous, bottom-up reactions to the propagation of CRT in America has been demonstrably bipartisan and broad-based. Across the country, parents, private citizens and un-conforming educators have taken notice of this alarming trend.

This chapter surveys the intellectual debate on CRT and the doctrine’s various crystallizations in schools and workplaces, respectively.

A Brief Literature Review on Critical Race Theory

An increasing number of American students today are being taught to recognize their skin color and obsessively define their identity by superfluous group characteristics.¹⁶ But to satisfy the scholarly rigor required to critically examine CRT as a theoretical construct with tremendous real-life consequences, we offer a brief literature review in this section.

Emerging from the arena of American legal scholarship in the early 1980s, CRT is defined by the American Bar Association as a practice of interrogating the role of race and racism in society that emerged in the legal academy and spread to other fields of scholarship.¹⁷ While many observers insist that CRT is a strictly law-school academic concept¹⁸ and that debates on CRT’s impacts on the broader society should be consequently dismissed, one does not need to venture out of the pro-CRT camp to pinpoint its far-reaching implications beyond its academic origins and confines.

CRT has deep academic roots in Marxism, neo-Marxism, radical feminism, critical theory, post-modernism and constructivism. University of San Diego law professor Roy L. Brooks defined CRT as a collection of critical stances against the existing legal order from a race-based point of view.¹⁹ This tailored conception was then expanded by critical race theorists Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic to include a collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power.²⁰ The two further explain: Critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.²¹

Contemporary CRT scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term intersectionality as a key building block of the theory, has taken a further step to correlate CRT with an ongoing battle against white supremacy, arguing that it is an approach to grappling with a history of white supremacy that rejects the belief that what’s in the past is in the past, and that the laws and systems that grow from that past are detached from it.²² As a pedagogy or a teaching method, CRT is the introduction to a particular form of life, serving "in part to prepare students