Quashing Critical Race Theory Indoctrination In The Public Schools Sounds Simple – But Is It? ~ By Wim De Vriend

Quashing CRT indoctrination in the public schools sounds simple – but is it?

By Wim de Vriend

Many years ago school boards and teachers’ unions started thinking they owned America’s children, and now they have taken the next step: initiating their little captives into a cult called ‘Wokism’.  This cult preaches delusions whose sophisticated titles conceal their emptiness.  The success of these verbose ploys has again confirmed that some ideas are so stupid that (according to Chesterton) only atheists believe them, and only intellectuals according to Orwell.  But many believers may belong to both groups.

Of all Wokist superstitions, Critical Race Theory (CRT) has raised the most dust, thanks to its obvious potential for creating a new Segregation, which will crush school children’s spirits – provided they are ‘white’, so their black classmates can bully them at will.  While that’s bad enough, we should not overlook that Wokism is a hydra, a serpent with multiple heads.  Many more nasty noggins with fancy names lurk in that writhing mass, ready to bite the unwary; besides CRT, they include Affirmative Action, Disparate Impact, Intersectionalism, Toxic Whiteness, Diversity and Equity, Systemic Racism, the 1619 Project, Black Lives Matter (BLM), Cultural Appropriation, and more.  Besides those neo-racist manias, Wokism also promotes Transgenderism, a fantasy designed to mainstream the kinds of delusions that used to land people in nuthouses.

This summer the National Education Association, America’s largest teachers’ union, made a bold move that sounded like a declaration of Wokist War.  The far-left activists who run the NEA voted in late June to push CRT indoctrination in all our nation’s 14,000 public school districts.  They also agreed to attack CRT critics, who are bound to include many concerned parents. 

Many such parents are now jamming meetings of CRT-promoting school boards, whose huffy chairmen are turning defensive.  But the parents are more than just critical of a novel ideology; their more basic concern is their children’s safety.  It’s only logical that when told that CRT is fact, not fiction, black pupils will feel entitled to harass white classmates as ‘oppressors’; we have already seen this process’s results in cities like New York, where young black hoodlums feel entitled to sucker-punch elderly white ladies on the sidewalk, or knife them or set them on fire, or push other unwary ‘white oppressors’ in front of subway trains.  Incidents of such random violence amount to many times blacks’ 12% share of our population. 

It makes sense that a recently filed anti-CRT lawsuit seeks relief under the racial non-discrimination requirements of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  After all, if we have gotten rid of most or all of this country’s racial discrimination, then for Wokists to promote a new edition, no matter its fancy name(s), can only be destructive.  For it is clear that Wokism’s neo-racist dogmas, above all CRT, seek to create racial hierarchy in which those incorrigibly racist ‘whites’ must be oppressed – and take it.  This is a recipe for social upheaval and disaster.

But there is settled law from well before the 1964 Act cited in the above lawsuit that can stop CRT.  To see how, read these ringing, singing words, from a splendid decision by our Supreme Court in 1943:

If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no [government] official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.  If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.

In that case, called Barnette for short, the Supremes ruled against a school board, and for parents who objected to having their children made to endorse beliefs to which they had moral objections.  The legal issue was ‘compelled speech’, meaning the school board’s right to force unwilling children to salute the flag and say the pledge of allegiance – on pain of being expelled for insubordination, and the parents’ subsequent prosecution for fostering truancy.  Those were the consequences, no matter how absurd they sound.  While admitting that Barnette was a “hard case, because the flag involved is our own”, Justice Robert Jackson, the decision’s author, concluded that it was not the school board’s right to impose any kind of belief system on unwilling citizens, not even the flag salute and the Pledge.  And this was at a time when America was at war around the world.

 Since Barnette, further rulings have strengthened the Court’s position against compelled speech and/or indoctrination mandated by government agencies.  Maynard (1977) held that New Hampshire could not force drivers to carry the state’s motto ‘Live Free Or Die’ on their license plates.  Other such rulings include Tornillo, (1974); Ohio Elections Commission (1995), and Irish-American Gay Group (1995).  The most recent one was Becerra (2018), which voided a California law ordering pro-life pregnancy centers to tell women about the availability of cheap abortions.

In short, an anti-CRT lawsuit citing Barnette seems quite capable of producing injunctions against teaching CRT in schools.

But it’s only realistic to warn that, even with that achieved, Wokist wordsmiths may sneak CRT back into the classrooms, as ‘critical history’, or ‘social equity studies’, or another fancy name; they’re good at that.  Besides, one could hardly object to teaching history in schools; but history can be interpreted in many ways, and it’s biased, one-sided views of history that are the problem.

So if someone files a lawsuit, citing Barnette to get rid of public school indoctrination by any or all of the Woke hydra’s heads, they should ask the court for an order that, if any historical or economic discussion turns ideological, balance must be created by having an opposing view presented by someone qualified by his knowledge of the topic as well as his inclination to defend his take.  Given the leftist leanings of many schools, the Court might add that outside sources, not necessarily school personnel, may provide such balancing perspectives.

OpinionRob TaylorWim de Vriend, Critical Race Theory, Socialism, Communism, Community, Social Justice, Education, Individual RightsComment