Jul 6, 2021 4 min read

Just as we’re emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, one might be forgiven for thinking that a new plague has infected America. Everybody’s talking about CRT – critical race theory – with varying degrees of eye-rolling ennui or outrage-fueled rants.

There seems to be no chin-stroking middle ground on this one.

If you don’t know, CRT in its current use refers, in its most reduced definition, to the idea that education policies and the institutions that oversee them are inherently racist and must be rethought and reorganized according to anti-racist constructs.

Eye rollers think opposition to CRT, mostly from white conservatives, is much ado about nothing.

Rants (and I’ve heard a few) come mostly from white parents who feel their children are being brainwashed into believing they are racist by birth and guilty of the sins of their slave-owning, Jim Crow-practicing forefathers.

Both sides may be right, but we’ll get to that later.

One anti-trend deserves another, and the latest is an anti-CRT movement. Groups are popping up on social media, especially in places like New York City, where some parents heavily invested in their children’s education have had it with CRT. The Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR), founded by parents who have pulled their children from some top schools because of CRT, describes itself as opposing the “cynical and intolerant orthodoxy” being enforced in institutions of learning as well as business, government and the media.

“This orthodoxy requires us to identify ourselves and each other based on immutable characteristics like skin color, gender and sexual orientation,” the group says. “It pits us against one another, and diminishes what it means to be human.”

At Manhattan’s prestigious Dalton School, the headmaster resigned at the end of the year after a group of parents wrote an anonymous open letter to the school describing its “obsessive focus on race and identity,” including “‘racist cop’ reenactments in science, ‘decentering whiteness’ in art class, learning about white supremacy and sexuality in health class.”

Another group gathers on an anonymous watchdog Instagram account, @nycprivateschoolwatch, to share worst-case examples of CRT run amok in class. Obviously, parental concerns aren’t limited to CRT. Some of the objections just come down to being fed up with wokeness. One story concerned a first-grade sex educator who resigned when parents objected to her showing the 6-year-olds an animated video about touching themselves in private. Sheesh.

But as FAIR points out, race, gender and sexual orientation are all part of the same package, theoretically aimed at teaching children about equality and tolerance. This isn’t to say that young people shouldn’t be taught such things, but perhaps in a graduation-required ethics course at an appropriate age.

It isn’t only private-school parents who are upset. A new group called the Free to Learn Coalition is distributing ads targeted to New York, Fairfax County, Virginia, and a school district in Arizona. The ads make a lot of claims about what parents are and are not allowed to know about what their kids may be learning in school. Apparently, given national statistics that rank the United States 22nd in the world in education, there’s not enough emphasis on the basics.

This is really the crux of the matter, isn’t it? No one interested in education objects to history being accurately – and fully – taught.

As a conceptual approach, CRT is really a lens for seeing more than one race’s side of things. It isn’t intended to alter the facts but rather to more completely illuminate them. As I understand it, the lens is more like a question teachers might ask themselves: How does what I’m teaching affect minority students? Is it the whole truth? Does the lesson require a deeper context? It boils down to empathic teaching, which ought not to be controversial.

So much for evenhandedness. Now the real truth: CRT might be boring.

Preoccupation with identity, one’s own or anyone else’s, is the stuff of tedium. I can imagine students, not just white, wondering whether it’s really necessary to view everything through the lens of race, which over time risks becoming predictable, formulaic and enervating – the antithesis of what learning should inspire. High schoolers and some even younger may be not fully formed, but they’re not stupid. They’ll soon enough understand that political activists posing as teachers are working out their grown-up issues at students’ expense.

So, yes, CRT is both much ado and also deserving of rants. The eye roll is that it’s gotten this far.

Kathleen Parker is a columnist for The Washington Post. Her email address is kathleenparker@washpost.com.