Just about everything wrong with critical race theory and the badly misnamed “anti-racism” movement is summarized in one lawsuit filed late last month against the public school system of Evanston, Illinois.
It is no overstatement to say the school system’s practices are vile.
Not only does the suit, along with findings by the Department of Education, detail CRT’s usual litany of racially divisive indoctrination activities, but it also confirms that school officials use the “fighting racism” excuse as cover for teaching that individualism and meritocracy are oppressive, that the ideal of “equality” and even the nuclear family itself are both racist, and that true anti-racists will question “the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and principles of constitutional law.”
In sum, this claptrap isn’t designed to combat racism at all, at least not as that idea is traditionally understood. Instead, it is intended to indoctrinate teachers and students in service of an internal revolution against the entire edifice of Western society.
Probably the most jaw-dropping part of the school district’s curriculum says that third through fifth graders should be taught that “it is important to disrupt the Western nuclear family dynamics as the best/proper way to have a family.” For third graders specifically, a “lesson plan” says that “during our lesson on whiteness, we discussed how white culture shows up in the way that we think about family structures. There is a belief that a ‘normal’ family consists of a mom, dad, son, daughter, and pet. We’ve learned that this isn’t true.”
To repeat, this all comes on top of the by-now familiar segregation of black and white students and teachers from each other. Critical race theory also indiscriminately ascribes myriad character flaws to racial “whiteness” itself and asks teachers to read aloud from a book explicitly likening whiteness to signing “your soul” over to the devil.
These are all pushed by the school system, not as merely interesting ideas for debate but as essential and inarguable parts of the mandatory “anti-racist” agenda. They are detailed in a suit filed by Stacy Deemar, a drama teacher who says students three times evaded punishment for assaulting her, once even knocking her down and injuring her, because of school policy asserting that race should be a factor when determining penalties or leniency for student misbehavior.
Those assaults are not part of Deemar’s lawsuit, although they are part of a larger set of complaints she filed with the Department of Education. In the suit, she focuses on the school’s anti-racism curriculum, which, she alleges, explicitly treats teachers and students in racially disparate ways that directly violate the Constitution’s equal protection guarantees, along with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
Her suit finds support from an 18-page letter of finding issued in early January by the Office of Civil Rights at the Education Department. The letter was later withdrawn by the Biden administration as part of a review of all federal policies on racial and sexual “equity,” but its findings of fact are unassailable. Based on those facts, the lawsuit lays out the uncontested, hair-curling substance of the school policies.
The department’s letter concluded that the school district violated Title VI in four different ways. It was signed by Civil Rights enforcement director Carol Ashley, who took that job during the Obama administration after working for years for the Shriver Center on Poverty Law, a liberal outfit named after Kennedy in-law and Peace Corps founder Sargent Shriver.
Honest liberals will join conservatives in finding the school district’s revolutionary radicalism quite revolting. Frighteningly, the Evanston situation isn’t unique at all. It is typical of numerous school districts nationwide that are similarly poisoning the minds of children. It is a case of intellectual child abuse.
The careful delineation of facts in the teacher’s lawsuit, and in the Education Department’s letter, provide the most concisely comprehensive compendium so far on the evils of the Left’s aggressive war against American culture.
