Feds Make Critical Decision on Racist Training

The Trump administration is calling a halt to “critical race theory” training now pervasive in federal government agencies, including the FBI. The terminology here could stand some clarification.

“Critical” is a meaningless modifier meant to impart legitimacy to a system of racist indoctrination. Critical race theory divides humankind into an oppressor class and a victim class. People from one racial group, those who look like John F. Kennedy, Rosalynn Carter and Madonna, are default members of the oppressor “white” group, regardless of anything they might have done or said.

Critical racist theory locks people into the oppressor group based on the way they were born. Guilt also accrues to the oppressor “white” group based on actions of other people centuries ago. On the other hand, nobody in the victim class has any “inherent bias” or “privilege,” like the default oppressor class. As Bruce Bawer notes, they are forced into “compulsory ‘training sessions’ reminiscent of Communist Chinese reeducation camps.” These are the sessions costing taxpayers millions of dollars, and White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo was conducting them for “$12,000 a pop.” As Peter Minowitz explains, “White Fragility falls short as scholarship along three dimensions: it stereotypes wantonly, it makes major empirical errors, and it projects contempt toward important challenges that the author’s messages will provoke.”

As Independent Institute Senior Fellow Williamson M. Evers notes, critical race theory is making a comeback in California’s “ethnic studies” curricula. The model excludes “white” groups such as Italians, Irish and Poles, along with “Jews and Armenians who were persecuted abroad and sought refuge in America.” If adopted, these “studies” will not be the only example of state-sponsored, taxpayer supported racism in California.

La Raza Cosmica, by Mexican education minister Jose Vasconcellos, was republished in 1979 by the Chicano Studies department at Cal State University at Los Angeles. According to Vasconcelos, students from English, Dutch and Scandinavian backgrounds are “slower, almost dull,” compared to “mestizo children and youths from the south.” Blacks are “uglier stocks” and part of the “inferior races.” The Mongol, “with the mystery of his slanted eyes,” is part of an “exhausted people” that lacks the “boldness for new enterprises.” La Raza Cosmica is the core curriculum of Chicano Studies and the basis for demands that public university admissions and state jobs should be allocated on the basis of ethnicity, not merit.

Systemic racism has no place in a free society. Elimination of racist indoctrination in federal agencies is long overdue, and the nation still has a long way to go.