The Next Big Thing out of the left is a fascinating little nugget entitled Critical Race Theory (CRT). It is the notion that being white makes you a racist and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. It functions a lot like Original Sin in the political world. There is a dump truck load of materials that support this noxious worldview aimed particularly at kids in schools. Today, it is being introduced to our children in the Anchorage School District. Hearings before the Anchorage School Board started this week.
The new program is encapsulated in the following new policies.
First is the opening paragraph of the new anti-Racism Policy:
Anti-racism is the practice of identifying, challenging, and changing the values, structures, and behaviors that perpetuate systemic racism, racial hatred, bias, and the oppression of marginalized groups. The Anchorage School Board (“Board”) and Superintendent shall work to end the predictive value of race on students’ academic success and access to educational opportunities.
Second is the opening paragraph of the proposed Instructional Equity Policy:
Equity is the fair treatment, access, opportunity, and advancement for all people, while at the same time striving to identify and eliminate barriers that have prevented the full participation of some groups. The Anchorage School Board (“Board”) believes in equity for all students to support their academic achievement.
Anti-racism adopts the BLM / AntiFa worldview that if you are not actively acting against something, you are by definition actively supporting it. Non-combatants are neither allowed nor tolerated. With the language above, if the students and their parents are not actively opposing racism using the tools, techniques and goals defined by ASD, the School Board and the AEA, then by definition, they actively support it. The way this is practiced and taught is that the only fundamentally racist Americans today are white ones, particularly white male ones, which sounds like racism to me. But what do I know?
The second new policy demanding equity is just as troubling, as equity today is a shorthand way of demanding equality of outcomes rather than equality of opportunity, something that overturns nearly 400 years of history and culture on this continent.
ASD and the School Board intend to marinate our children and grandchildren in this toxic brew of newfound Marxist ideology for 12+ years, all paid for with our tax dollars.
In other parts of the nation, parents have pushed back strongly against this claptrap. Reporting in The Federalist has been particularly incisive. They ran a story a couple weeks ago about a fight between a supportive Superintendent and opposition parents. There was an October 2020 piece about Virginia slipping this into the curriculum.
While I would prefer a Scott Adams sort of approach to racism, that doesn’t appear to be in the cards. Adams comes out of the persuasion world and is of the opinion that EVERYONE is racist, though not for the reason the political left would consider. In his view, we are racist because the human mind is a pattern recognition machine. We see patterns everywhere, a lot of times when none exist. The problem is that we are not very good at pattern recognition, meaning we get things wrong a lot. As long as you realize that physical limitation, it all works. Once you start punishing it for whatever reason, you will only get more of it.
I see two solutions to this. The first would be to stop it cold in ASD. And if the District, the School Board and the AEA all insist on doing it anyway, it is time to go all Roman on them, treating them like Rome did Carthage right up to and including sowing salt on the remaining rubble to make sure nothing grows there ever again. If they persist in going there, they have begged for and richly deserve that sort of political response. Keep this up and I predict vouchers.
The second solution is a lot more fun. If we now live in a world where we can select our sexuality at any time, for any reason, and demand to have it celebrated and supported, why can we not also select our racial makeup, changing it on an hourly, daily, yearly basis while also demanding the same sort of celebration and support? After all, it is the individual’s viewpoint that holds the only importance.
CRT is yet another way to poison the minds of our youngsters against one another and their parents. It is another way to separate one American from another, something generally used to elect democrats. It ought not to be embraced. It ought to be destroyed, summarily, on sight along with every single public employee or elected official pushing it. Other states have legislatures and governors taking action to prohibit CRT in their public schools. Alaska needs to get in gear before this gets institutionalized here in Anchorage, for if is comes here, it won’t stay here.
Alex Gimarc lives in Anchorage since retiring from the military in 1997. His interests include science and technology, environment, energy, economics, military affairs, fishing and disabilities policies. His weekly column “Interesting Items” is a summary of news stories with substantive Alaska-themed topics. He was a small business owner and Information Technology professional.
