Critical Race Theory is one of those distracting sideshow issues that Republicans and Democrats love. It’s designed to make you fight over which side gets to indoctrinate your children. Instead, we should be fighting to get government out of education completely.
— Libertarian Party (@LPNational) July 8, 2021
I am no fan of multiculturalism or the affirmative action industrial complex. I know Youngkin (the new Virginia governor) made critical race theory part of his winning campaign and Florida Governor DeSantis is doing much the same except through law instead of an executive order.
What exactly is "critical race theory"?
Critical race theory (CRT) is a school of social theory that argues for the inseparability of racial repression and many of Western society’s social institutions and ideas. Critical race theorists are highly skeptical of the theory that Western culture, as emerging out of the Enlightenment and continuing to the present, is capable of adequately addressing or eliminating racial inequality. Rather, they see modern institutions and culture as enabling repression.,,,Rather than focus on the prejudice of individuals, critical race theorists are more focused on the ways that institutions and daily interactions create and reinforce racial distinctions...When reading critical race theory texts, it is important to realize that critical race theorists often use terms in ways that are different than are used in everyday speech...critical race theorists are not primarily focused on extremely xenophobic groups such as the Ku Klux Klan or the National Socialist Party. Rather, they want to argue that Whites in modern societies still benefit from privileges related to their color even when institutions claim to be color blind.Make no mistake: we libertarians reject CRT:
CRT writers often argue that ideas like property rights and free markets are complicit with White domination....CRT writers and classical liberal and libertarian social theorists often agree that racism is a horrendous problem, but disagree on the link between racial domination and economic institutions like markets and property rights. The dispute hinges on the evaluation of markets, individual rights, and limited government...CRT writers believe that these ideas and institutions are easily subverted in the service of racial repression, or they are used as pretenses to maintain inequality. In contrast, libertarians and classical liberals tend to believe that minorities have been repressed by states and that minorities need to participate in the market economy to improve their social and economic well‐being.
I'm not going to go into the specifics into the left/right conflict over CRT-influenced public school curricula, the leftist response that the right wing has created a caricature, that CRT is in fact not being taught, and the real intent is to whitewash the racist history of America's past. The populist right wing dislikes dubious constructs like "white privilege", ideology and propaganda in public education being forced onto their children without their knowledge or consent, breakdowns in the rule of law and what they see as double standards in public policy applied at their expense. And over and beyond CRT-influenced curricula being imposed on the consumers of public education by remote, unaccountable administrators,teachers and bureaucrats, taxpaying parents feel disconnected from real decision making impacting parental responsibility and authority.
Leftists allied with the CRT movement tend to view such resistance as little more than white snowflake complaints, uncomfortable with the reality of America's xenophobic past and even ongoing injustice that merely pays lip service to equal opportunity and justice under the law.
The issue, from my perspective, has to do with the values, emphasis and motives behind the presentation of content and related role playing/exercises, the elitist judgmental imposition reinforcement of collective white guilt. For parents teaching their kids individual responsibility and accountability, this is a problem.
Now in academia this involves just a subset of disciplines, like history and civics. When I was in academia, I taught mathematics and then MIS (information technology from a business perspective). Politics really doesn't intrude onto content (maybe in a peripheral sense, like populist antitrust issues against Big Tech, but in a certain sense they've always been there, e.g., AT&T, IBM, Microsoft, the browser wars, etc.) But I've never had a class that I've taken or taught where any relevant topic was ever discussed. Oh, there were other ways politics played out; for instance, my academic career ended in a recession where the market for faculty was very tight, and I found myself locked out of multiple positions from schools looking to increase female representation on their faculties. But whereas everything I did in the classroom was subject to university review, I had autonomy in the classroom, even to the point of choosing/changing textbooks. I presented content in accordance with my professional knowledge, experience and judgment, and I did not indulge in discussing my political views, and nobody tried to influence me to present unrelated topics.
(I did experience office politics in academia but did not involve salient political issues). Politics did enter the picture in other ways. In prior posts, I've mentioned a case when I served on the UWM MBA Admissions committee, and the business school dean pressured us to admit a black woman who fell far short of minimal upper-division GPA and GMAT score criteria; we had routinely rejected candidates with higher scores. I refused and the committee vote was split. The committee chair then announced the dean would replace me on committee with a faculty stooge.)
The libertarian tweet at the beginning of the post makes the salient point that the real political issue is one of power in the public education monopoly. We pro-liberty folks don't see the solution as more of the same top-down regulation leaving parents without real alternatives of education choice. I believe in increased transparency to school curricula and the principle of Subsidiarity, of increasing teacher autonomy and accountability and teacher unions have served to protect ineffective teachers along with seniority policies. I suspect most parents would reject politically motivated criteria in a liberalized competitive education market. Elitist leftists will argue in a self-serving fashion parents aren't competent to judge education matters. I don't think that argument carries in a competitive market.
