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Summer: No Vacation from CRT

In August, the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) offered a Critical Race Theory Summer School called "Forbidden Knowledge," co-sponsored by the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies. The five-day online course promoted CRT and vilified CRT's opponents, meaning anyone who questions or debunks its divisive and historically inaccurate narrative. While readers may assume this type of course is new, some semblance of it was taught as far back as 1989.

Targeted attendees for the course were "students, practitioners, and stakeholders" of CRT and "intersectionality," an invented term with a complex definition that many find incoherent, but that could be construed to mean the leveraging of every victim group the left uses to destroy America. More than 50 speakers and presenters gave their two cents at the conference.

Kimberlé Crenshaw, co-founder and executive director of AAPF, was one of five "core" summit faculty members. A 90-page course booklet opens with a letter from Crenshaw that states in part:

Central to our teaching objectives is the introduction of a critical race theory as a prism to better see and analyze systemic racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry. CRT provides indispensable tools refined over decades of cross-disciplinary scholarship and political organizing that uncover the deep historic sources of present-day conflicts, the recurring patterns of backlash, and the inevitable cycle of retrenchment. Our goal is not simply to impart ideas but to activate allies, advocates, and stakeholders to engage and popularize concepts that reveal the truths that opponents are desperate to bury.

The booklet's introduction, also with Crenshaw's byline, further sets the tone.

Make no mistake: what we are seeing now is a calculated backlash to last year's summer of reckoning. The right is going to try and convince you that we need to ban Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality, Structural Racism, Implicit Bias, Diversity Training, and the 1619 Project. But understand that this organized, well-funded, and coordinated campaign isn't an honest debate about these ideas - most couldn't even define what these ideas are. And that's the point: they want to scare and silence our society back to colorblind submission, where George Floyd and Black people's killability [sic] is just a natural, everyday feature of American life — unproblematic, unchangeable, and disconnected from the history of anti-black racism.

Course panelists offered "concrete strategies and tools," to combat what the first session claimed are "the difficulties [that] other disciplines, civil rights campaigns, and community organizing efforts have confronted as they have taken up the challenge to treat racism as a systemic and structural problem." These "difficulties" could possibly consist of a failure to find enough genuine racism to justify the division and chaos their "strategies and tools" create.

The first-session's introduction promised to "leave participants with a sense of how, across different sectors of society–media, public education, political campaigns, etc.–the prospect of transformational change is short-circuited by formally race neutral rules and practices, ideologies of colorblindness, and the search for individual bad actors." But weren't "formally race neutral rules and practices" and "ideologies of colorblindness" precisely what pioneers of the civil rights movement demanded 50 years ago and which have largely been achieved, including the election and re-election of President Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012?

CRT Taught in Schools

Critical Race Theory Summer School acknowledges that CRT is being taught in schools, despite new laws against it in many states and denials by public-school officials and school board members. Page 36 of the guide promises that attendees "will learn directly from classroom educators and education justice leaders how they have incorporated CRT insights, not the theory itself (emphasis added), into high school social studies, history and civics classrooms.... We will take inventory of the significant resources available to K-12 teachers, school districts, students and parents to enliven school curricula. Participants include teachers and teacher educators with the Connecticut Anti-Racist Teaching & Learning Collective and the Zinn Education Project."

Clearly, the message is that CRT will be taught but perhaps not so called, and will therefore be harder for parents to identify, even as the indoctrination of their children continues. And CRT's meaning in the context of the Summer School course is not limited to race; it encompasses all far-left ideology currently being spoon-fed to schoolchildren.

When the news of the CRT Summer School broke on Twitter last month, Christopher Rufo, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, author, director of documentary films, and prominent opponent of CRT, tweeted this reply: "So critical race theory is taught in public schools. Got it!" Another Twitter user said: America's already bankrupt education system just got worse. Instead of classical knowledge and higher mathematics and culture, racist CRT will be the substitute. Wonderful!"

The good news is that many parents are beginning to realize there is a war on, not only for their children's minds but for their souls as well, and they are standing up to fight.

Critical Race Theory Summer School 2021
Christopher Rufo on Twitter

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