McAuliffe did not help himself when, during a debate, he said, “I don’t believe parents should be telling schools what they should teach” – a line that was constantly replayed in Youngkin attacks ads. In Virginia, 14% of voters listed education as a top issue, and about seven of 10 of those voted for Youngkin. This week conservatives targeted school board elections nationwide over masking rules and teaching racial justice issues. School board meetings in Virginia and elsewhere have turned ugly, even violent, and protest signs calling for bans on masks and CRT are sometimes almost interchangeable.
It also comes after lengthy school closures during the pandemic infuriated many parents. It also can be seen as a response to America’s changing demographics, specifically the increase in the minority population. This can be seen as a rightwing backlash to last year’s Black Lives Matter protests and conversations about structural racism that followed the police murder of George Floyd, an African American man in Minneapolis. He accused Republicans of using the Trump playbook of division and deceit, a message that did not cut through in the same way. McAuliffe was forced on to the defensive and had to engage with the issue. On day one, I will ban critical race theory.” At a campaign event in Glen Allen last month, the candidate said to applause: “What we won’t do is teach our children to view everything through the lens of race. Youngkin said he would ban the teaching of CRT in Virginia classrooms. He hammered government schools on “culture war” issues such as race and transgender rights and falsely claimed that his Democratic opponent, Terry McAuliffe, called his friend, President Joe Biden, and asked the FBI to silence conservative parents. Winning Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin’s signature issue was education. What role did CRT play in Virginia’s election? This is some dangerous, dangerous philosophical poisoning in the blood stream.” In January the Heritage Foundation hosted a panel discussion where the moderator, Angela Sailor, warned: “Critical race theory is the complete rejection of the best ideas of the American founding. Last year Christopher Rufo, a conservative scholar now at the Manhattan Institute, told the Fox News host Tucker Carlson that CRT was a form of “cult indoctrination”. “It’s dividing our children into victims and oppressors and what’s a child supposed to do with that? ”Įfforts to weaponise CRT were reinforced by former president Donald Trump and a rightwing ecosystem including influential thinktanks. They use culturally responsive training for their teachers.
Patti Hidalgo Menders, president of the Loudoun County Republican Women’s Club in Virginia, told the Guardian last week: “They may not call it critical race theory, but they’re calling it equity, diversity, inclusion. They loosely apply it to concepts such as equity and anti-bias training for teachers. The National School Boards Association and other education leaders are adamant that CRT is not being taught in K-12 schools, which teach students from five to 18 years old.īut Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and other rightwing media have turned it into a catch-all buzzword for any teaching in schools about race and American history. No, it is not a part of the secondary school curriculum. They caricature it as teaching Black children to internalise victimhood and white children to self-identify as oppressors. Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, a law professor widely credited with coining the term, told the New York Times: “It is a way of seeing, attending to, accounting for, tracing and analyzing the ways that race is produced, the ways that racial inequality is facilitated, and the ways that our history has created these inequalities that now can be almost effortlessly reproduced unless we attend to the existence of these inequalities.”Ī year or so ago few people had heard of it, yet Republicans have whipped up a moral panic that CRT is being rammed down the throats of schoolchildren.