Bill to deny foundational CRT prevents hatred

If nothing else, SB 262 by Republican state Sen. Valarie Hodges would inhibit in Louisiana racial division and hatred.

The bill, currently passed out of the Senate into the House of Representatives, would add to the state’s Parental Bill of Rights that schools “shall not discriminate against their child by teaching the child that the child is currently or destined to be oppressed or to be an oppressor based on the child's race or national origin.” This addresses the use of critical race theory, or the idea that racism is pervasive in all societal institutions shaped historically by, if not currently dominated by, people of Caucasian ancestry, as the foundational tool by which to shape instruction.

Similar to Marxism, CRT bases itself on a series of unfalsifiable, if not empirically unverifiable or logically suspect, propositions that if questioned automatically connotes racist actions (or, if the analyzer is non-white, axiomatic of a false consciousness), making the whole enterprise intellectually lazy and devoid of true scholarship. It increasingly has become a tool by those ideologically compatible with its policy aims – strong government action to level differences in outcomes of resource allocations – for instruction from the academy on down.

As an approach to understanding the distribution of political power in a society, it warrants scrutiny and study as long as this occurs in a critical and comparative fashion in the instructional environment. When made foundational in instruction, however, it subverts the entire process of education as a search for truth by elevating faith over skeptical inquiry and becomes nothing more than neo-racism posing as anti-racism.

That by itself disserves children by depriving them of the opportunity to learn factual knowledge and then engage in critical thinking using it. And, quite ironically, applying the policy preferences of CRT actually would undermine the very institutions that are essential to addressing poverty and inequality across all racial groups, providing another reason to ban its use as a foundational instruction strategy.

But the bill’s language probes to a deeper and more sinister implication of using CRT foundationally: it spawns divisiveness, leading to hatred, then into violence. We only need review recent history not among non-whites, but central Europeans, to see a demonstration of how the principles of CRT produce this perversion. In the 1990s, ethnic conflict largely but not exclusively driven by Serbian nationalists operating under an ideology of victimization brought war and strife to the Balkans.

This nationalism, spawned over a century, had mutated into a blanket indictment of certain non-Serbian ethnic groups. Identically to tenets of CRT, it taught that a certain ethnic group, Serbs, had faced systemic discrimination that culminated over the years that granted them special victimhood status awarding moral status to their claims of group oppression. Indeed, movement leaders invoked imagery and symbolism from past American racist policy outcomes when explicating their ideology.

Shared tenets aren’t difficult to ascertain: glorifying the year of enslavement as the beginning of a national narrative (the 1619 Project), attributing sinister ethnically-based motivations and ideologies to political opponents (the refusal of whites to become “woke” and the denigration of non-whites on that side of the debate as captured), and calling opposition and criticism “violence,” in order to legitimize future actual violence (propagating policies such as defunding the police as a reaction to alleged brutality and disproportionate detainment specifically aimed at non-whites). Sadly, these tenets constructed a narrative that inspired many to engage in sustained, violent ethnic conflict that cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

Regrettably, at its core CRT promotes tribal hatreds. To teach children fundamentally that their race or national origins automatically set them at odds with those who are different – unless, of course, racial preferencing is instituted to redress (under the theory that “[t]he only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination”) – not only perverts the idea of education, but fuels a dangerous powder keg if allowed to expand and persist. SB 262 does its part to prevent this.