Mediaboss Marketing

It feels like yesterday that my wife and I were shopping for grade schools for our daughter the same daughter who just graduated from high school.

We visited a bunch of private schools where the children of Washingtons elite get turned into the feedstock of the meritocracy.

The most remarkable thing about the experience was how nearly all of the schools were obsessed with diversity and all the pedagogic and social issues attached to the term. Many pitched diversity not merely as important but as their sole comparative advantage. The headmaster of one prestigious school even advised a group of parents to look at the mission statements of other schools. Youll see a lot of buzzwords like academic rigor and scholarship,' he warned, making scare quotes in the air with his fingers. Well, we want you to know that we consider our social justice mission more important than academics.

I often tell this story to point out that school choice isnt the solution to political correctness that many conservatives think it is. Parents who can afford to send their kids to private schools dont need vouchers; theyve got cash. Im bringing this up for different reasons.

Proponents of critical race theory and antiracism (the idea that being nonracist isnt good enough; you have to embrace an antiracist agenda) as an approach to classroom instruction believe America is shot through with structural racism and white supremacy and that white people must atone for their privilege somehow.

Taking this approach, they claim, will usher in a long-overdue reckoning with our past and present. They make it sound as if before 2021, it never occurred to anyone that kids should be taught about racism or the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

Currently, most k-12 students already learn a kind of Confederate Race Theory, whereby the Daughters of the Confederacy long ago imposed a version of history wherein slavery was not so bad and had nothing to do with the civil war, and lynchings and violence never happened, MSNBC host Joy-Ann Reid recently tweeted.

Well, I can report that this is otherworldly nonsense, going by my daughters experience or that of the children of people I know in Washington. At affluent K-12 schools, public or private, teaching about racism, slavery and civil rights has been central to social studies curricula for decades.

But you know what? This has also been the case at most non-elite schools. The idea that, absent a critical-race-theory lens, most students would be taught American history through the prism of Gone With the Wind or The Birth of a Nation is preposterous.

And parents know it. Which is why the debate over this new political hobbyhorse has people talking past each other.

Comparisons to the tea party protests of 2009 are imperfect but instructive. For liberals, the protests ignited by Barack Obamas stimulus package seemed illegitimate. For some, it was a racist backlash against a Black president. For others, it was a fake movement fueled by astroturfing political grifters. (The grifters eventually took it over, but that came later.) And some saw it as hypocritical. George W. Bush had his bank and auto industry bailouts, and conservatives went along. Why rediscover fiscal restraint now? But for increasingly populist conservatives at that time, more government spending by any administration was a last straw.

When proponents of critical race theory say they are merely proposing a belated corrective to the way American history has been framed, many parents dont buy it, having seen what their children are taught now.

The current battle over critical race theory is a wonderful gift to the Republicans in the short term. The GOP would love to win back white suburban parents with culture-war issues, now that it has no credibility on fiscal matters. But in the long run, this could be disastrous for the party and the country, because the last thing anyone needs is to redefine the culture war as a racial conflict.

Today's breaking news and more in your inbox

View post:
Battle over critical race theory won't benefit GOP in long run - Martins Ferry Times Leader