Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth
2022-05-29 · Guest: Jonathan Butcher (Heritage Foundation Fellow) · 51:31
Critical Race Theory and the War on Truth
Bob Zadek interviews Jonathan Butcher, the Will Skillman Fellow in Education at the Heritage Foundation, about his book Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth. They explore the intellectual origins of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in Marxism and the Frankfurt School, its transition from legal academia into the K-12 education system, and the practical implications of shifting from equality of opportunity to coerced “equity.”
Topics: Critical Race Theory, Marxism, Frankfurt School, K-12 Education, Systemic Racism, Equity vs. Equality, Teachers’ Unions, Civil Rights Act of 1964, Disparate Impact
Speakers:
- Bob Zadek: Host
- Jonathan Butcher: Will Skillman Fellow in Education at the Heritage Foundation and author of Splintered
Defining Critical Race Theory [00:00]
Bob Zadek: Welcome to the Bob Zadek Show. Thank you so much for listening. The subject this morning is a phrase that probably all of you have heard, and probably none of you understand exactly what is captured by that phrase, other than you know either that you hate it and it’s bad, or you love it and it’s good. And beyond that, I don’t think the voting public, the citizenry of our country, knows all that much about Critical Race Theory.
Well, we can’t have that. It’s too much in the news. It’s too important. It’s important to every listener of this show and podcast. It’s important to every parent in America. And unless you understand it, you will not really know if you support it or it doesn’t matter all that much. I’ve asked Jonathan Butcher to join us to explain Critical Race Theory. He has written Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth. Wow, that’s an in-your-face title. Well, Jonathan, this title alone seems to have your chin out and your fists clenched. So this has gotten your dander up, thinking about, let alone writing about, Critical Race Theory. Jonathan, what is Critical Race Theory, and why did it get you so agitated?
And before you answer, Jonathan, let me just help the audience understand that you are the Will Skillman Fellow in Education at Heritage, a wonderful think tank in Washington, and you have written, as I said, Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth, which has just been published. The ink isn’t even dry on your Kindle edition yet, and here it is out there. Jonathan, Critical Race Theory—as I said in my opening, three words hooked together appear in print and in broadcast media all the time. What is it, and what does it get people so agitated?
Jonathan Butcher: Well, thank you for having me on the show. So, Critical Race Theory is—it’s been in the news because CNN and the mainstream media have talked about this as though it’s just something to describe race relations in the United States. Or it has been described as something that will help us better understand the differences that people from different ethnicities share in the US. And that is flat false. And it is so false because the actual theorists themselves, the Critical Race theorists themselves, describe it completely differently. And so the mainstream media and others, particularly those in policy today, are, frankly, misrepresenting the theory.
So, Critical Race Theory is a worldview that believes that everything in public and private life should be viewed through the lens of race. But that’s only the start. It is rooted in Marxism. So one of the original Critical Race theorists, a law professor named Angela Harris, said that Marxism’s dazzling analysis of capitalism and his conviction that the laws of historical materialism would bring on the revolution of the proletariat as inevitably as the sun rises are still riveting to contemporary theorists. Another Critical Race theorist, Kimberlé Crenshaw, said that they are adding discussions of race to social justice and adding discussions of social justice to race. So the idea here is to take this theory, built on Marx’s idea that there is a conflict between classes, add race to it, and then apply it to everyday life.
The Prism of Race and Systemic Disparities [02:58]
Bob Zadek: You said view events in public life, all relationships, through the—and your phrase was “prism of race.” Flesh that out a little bit for us. What does that exactly mean?
Jonathan Butcher: What I mean is that everything that we see that happens around us is the result of some sort of racial conflict. So, the difference in economic classes between white individuals and black individuals is not the result of personal decisions or behavior; it’s the result of racism. The difference in the percentage or share or number of children who receive suspensions or expulsions in K-12 schools—that is not the result of the children’s behavior or the fact that you have children from minority ethnicities concentrated in inner cities like Chicago, Atlanta, LA. The difference is because of racism. It is a racist system that is causing all of this. You have schools who are now separating children by skin color into what are called “affinity groups” to provide them different content and material. This was proposed down in Pickens County, South Carolina. We saw this in large cities like just outside of Evanston, Illinois. We saw it up in Wellesley, Massachusetts. So this kind of approach is happening really all around the country today.
Racism as a System, Not an Act [04:39]
Bob Zadek: Let’s distinguish in this conversation social relationships and relationships between citizens on the one hand and government on the other. Does Critical Race Theory offer some explanation of how people react between themselves? And if so, why does anybody care if one person privately behaves, I’ll say, boorishly, whether the bias is against people who are obese or people who are a different race or a different ethnicity or a different birth history, this country or another country? While it’s boorish and it’s unpleasant, and we will choose our relationships based upon those views, other than that, it’s a private matter. On the other hand, in your examples, you have selected schools—obviously, and we’ll spend a lot of our time talking about schools—but if we are talking about public schools, or as I prefer, government schools, if we’re talking about government schools on the one hand and attendees on the other, now it’s how government will behave. And that we care about because government is acting as our representative, we control government, government is operated through laws, and it’s a totally different relationship. So, put us in the context of whether we are talking about citizen versus citizen, government and citizen, both, and how does that theory apply in each of those circumstances?
Jonathan Butcher: So this gets to an important part of Critical Race Theory. So the original Critical Race theorists—so Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado—they argued that racism is not an act; it’s a system. So there are no racist acts, individual acts of racism today; there is only a system that is meant to oppress an entire class or ethnicity of people. So they would say it’s not true today that there are simply individual acts of racism that we must condemn. There is an actual system of government and cultural institutions, whether it’s schools or entertainment or healthcare, that is set up by a powerful group of white individuals to oppress ethnic minorities.
And that is what distinguishes Critical Race Theory. See, Critical Race theorists are built off an idea called Critical Legal Theory. And Critical Legal Theory argued that law is not neutral, that law is set up by the powerful to preserve their power. Critical Race theorists, many of whom were law professors themselves, said that, well, Critical Legal Theory goes far, but it doesn’t go far enough. It’s not just the powerful; it’s power because of race. And so they added race to the ideas that Critical Legal Theory developed, and they said that there is a system set up by powerful white individuals to preserve their power. And so it is not individual acts of racism that must be condemned; it is a system that must be taken apart.
And here is the partnership between Critical Legal Theory and Critical Race Theory. Both theories believe that American law must be taken apart, either piece by piece or all at once. And I’m paraphrasing a quote there from a professor named Duncan Kennedy from Harvard, who was one of the original Critical Legal theorists who made this argument about American law. And so this is really what—if there is anything I think that this audience really should take away from this discussion of Critical Race Theory, it is this: remember that Critical Race Theory is trying to take leftist radical thought to entirely new places. They were critical of both conservatives and liberals in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and today by saying that they haven’t gone far enough. The goal of Critical Race Theory is to be more radical. And that is why I wrote my book. That is why I believe that the mainstream media is misrepresenting Critical Race Theory when they say, “Well, it’s just a discussion of race in the United States today.” That was not the objective. When you read the words of Critical Race theorists, they argue almost as much with conservatives as they do with liberals and say that the left hasn’t gone far enough.
The Radical Roots of CRT [07:59]
Bob Zadek: Does Critical Race Theory have as one of its tenets that this is something new which has—because I don’t recall ever hearing the words “Critical Race Theory” before, let’s say, I’m making this up, seven years ago, five years ago. I never heard the phrase before. And this is a question for which I’m asking a somewhat expansive answer because it puts everything else in the right context for our friends to follow. It sounds like you’re saying that, much like the 1619 Project, that Critical Race Theory has as a tenet that from the creation of our country, there has been a fatal, a flaw in the construct of our country. So it’s like original sin writ as large as it can be writ, going back to the founding. Is it that nothing is right in America, or all we need is a bit of legislation and things will be all right? How does Critical Race Theory view the whole concept of our country?
Jonathan Butcher: Well, and that last part of your question is really what I can answer that will help to solve this. And the answer is no. The original Critical Race theorists do not believe that there’s simply a bill that we can pass or some laws that we can pass that will rectify what they see as systemic racism today or systemic injustice. That’s why they argued so much with Critical Legal theorists. That’s why they felt like they had to develop their ideas outside of Critical Legal Theory.
Because, see, Critical Race theorists said that the liberals and conservatives in law in the 1960s and ’70s held within the confines of the Constitution and American law. They said, “You’re having these debates about civil rights in the United States, all within the confines of the law, and you’re just saying if you change the law and say, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, that that will make America live up to its potential of providing equality under the law and freedom and opportunity to everyone.” And the Critical Race theorists said, “No, no, no. America is systemically racist and will always be that way.”
Derrick Bell is known as the godfather of Critical Race Theory. He was a Harvard law professor, taught a couple of other places as well. He wrote a book called Faces at the Bottom of the Well, and the subtitle of his book points at the permanence of racism. So he doesn’t believe it’s going to go away. And that’s why the connection between Critical Race Theory and Marxism is so important to make, right? Marxism, right—socialism, communism—these ideas are completely antithetical to representative democracy. And Marxism is at the heart of Critical Race Theory. And so there is no repairing of the American system that Critical Race Theory thinks will be enough, right? It must be taken apart.
From the Frankfurt School to American Law [14:11]
Jonathan Butcher: And what the Critical Legal theorists said—and if I may, all of this really goes back to Germany in the 1920s, where there was a group of Marxists who were frustrated that the Bolsheviks had been successful in Russia, but that the working class in Germany had not, at least in the ’20s and ’30s, overthrown the system in the way that these Marxists thought should happen, right? So they had what they called their first Marxist Work Week, which was a gathering of Marxist academics and writers to talk about where Marxism needed to go. And so they created the Frankfurt School, which was an institute at the University of Frankfurt to discuss the future of Marxism and to flesh out what became known as Critical Theory.
Some of these original Critical theorists—Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, several others—they wanted to connect Marxism to culture. And so they added Freudian ideas of relativism and the idea that there is no objective truth. They were suspicious of the Enlightenment, of the rule of law. They put all these ideas together, and then—and here’s the kicker—they were chased out of Germany in 1937 by the Nazis and landed at Columbia University, the Teachers College no less, in 1937. And that is where Horkheimer, Adorno—they attracted several others, Herbert Marcuse—and they disseminated their ideas and developed their ideas of Critical Theory in American higher education.
And so that is how it bled over into, especially, law schools. Because law schools were easy to pick up on this idea that there are systems of oppression, there are an ongoing conflict between economic classes, and that they believed was brought on at least in part, if not completely, because of American law, right? Law is not neutral, according to Critical Legal theorists. It’s meant to establish power and maintain power. As opposed to, remember the ideas of our founders, right? Law was there to protect rights, right? Government had within it, within our Constitution, within our laws, it actually built in limitations to what government was able to do. And we as Americans have wrestled with those limitations and seen the ebb and flow of those limitations and boundaries on American power even up until today. But that’s the unique feature of our system, right? The Critical Legal theorists said, “No, this constant struggle, this economic struggle between classes will always be with us as the result of American law.” And then the Critical Race theorists, right, who themselves, again, many were law professors—Delgado, Bell, Crenshaw, etc., Harris—developed the Critical Legal Theory idea and said it only explains it up to a point. We must add race to the equation, and we must make it more radical. That’s the objective.
Capitalism, Racism, and Coerced Equity [17:43]
Bob Zadek: Marxism, while it’s not an economic theory itself, it brings to mind, it carries with it socialism, an economic theory; communism, a political and economic theory. But yet Critical Race Theory does not seem to be an economic system at all. I’m trying to put it into a box. I’m trying to put a label on it so I can understand it. And is the goal of Critical Race Theory government owns the means of production? Is the goal of Critical Race Theory that we have a fascist government, that we have a communist system, that we have more democracy, less democracy? Critical Race Theory, when you use the phrase “racism,” it either means boorish, ignorant treatment of one human being by another—that’s the social level—or it means laws, government, or institutions such as higher education, employment, and the like, having a bias in selection against or for one race or another. Now, none of that sort of fits neatly into what you have described. So, what does Critical Race Theory have to do with racism?
Jonathan Butcher: Oh, well, I mean, it has everything to do both with racism as well as Marxism. Because remember, the modern-day Critical Race Theory expositors, mainly people like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, but especially Ibram X. Kendi, who wrote the book How to Be an Antiracist—he also wrote the book Stamped—Kendi says that capitalism and racism are conjoined twins, right? So he’s making a direct comment on the capitalist system in that statement. I mean, that’s straight from his book, How to Be an Antiracist.
And also in that book, he says that racial discrimination is necessary because of past discrimination. So present discrimination is necessary because of past discrimination; future discrimination is necessary because of present discrimination. Those are all quotes straight from his book. So both this idea that capitalism and America’s institution, right, of free markets is racist and so therefore must be taken apart and disrupted, if not destroyed. And then you have this also strangely incongruent belief that discrimination actually is necessary in order to meet his anti-racist definition of how the world works.
So this is one of the many ways in which Critical Race Theory actually doesn’t make logical sense, because on the one hand, they say that capitalism and racism are conjoined twins, ergo they should be disrupted and destroyed. But then on the other hand, they immediately say that actually we do need discrimination. And this kind of discrimination that they’re talking about is what leads us to yet another concept that Critical Race Theory uses all the time, and that is “equity.” And so they talk about equity, which is the coerced form of equal outcomes, right? As opposed to equality, which means that everyone is treated the same way under the law regardless of their color of their skin or their ethnicity, right? Under equity, which is what Critical Race theorists use all the time, they are saying that government should create systems that provide the same outcomes for individuals. So that’s why they are in favor of affirmative action, although they believe that affirmative action hasn’t gone far enough. That’s why they say that standardized tests are inherently racist—that’s what Ibram Kendi says—because standardized tests actually do measure people’s behaviors and abilities. And so he argues that that is a racist institution. So these are the forms in which Critical Race Theory is both inconsistent and frankly illogical, but also dwells on the conflict between individuals from different classes as well as different ethnicities.
CRT in K-12 Classrooms [22:21]
Bob Zadek: Now, Critical Race Theory is most often publicly discussed in the media and the like in the context of education. And even in that context, it’s discussed, it seems to me, mostly in K-12 education, also in institutes in colleges and universities to some degree, although I think most of the attention seems to be in K-12 because that’s where parents sort of seem to have a greater involvement into exactly what their children are taught. In colleges, parents seem to have less involvement, less control over what their children are taught. So, why is the discussion of Critical Race Theory so much being discussed in K-12 education? What is going on there, and why is that getting so much of our attention? And in answering, please help parents who struggle to get accurate, good information—why parents are justified in caring if they care, and if they don’t care about this being taught, why they should care.
Jonathan Butcher: Well, Critical Race Theory started in higher education. I mean, that’s how it came to the US by way of the Frankfurt School, when I was talking about the past and the origins of these ideas. And then Critical Legal Theory, which of course was a theory in law schools. Critical Race Theory also came out of law schools. It moved pretty quickly to colleges of education. And today it’s very common. You can find the words “Critical Race Theory” in descriptions of classes in law schools around the US. I wrote a piece a couple of months ago about a music professor that was hired at Arizona State University to teach music in higher ed from the perspective of Critical Race Theory. And they, again, they use the words “Critical Race Theory.” So it is found throughout higher ed; it’s very common.
In K-12, it is also increasingly common. You have, as I explain in my book, Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth, you have the Hayward Unified School District, which is located right across the bay from San Francisco. They put out a memo to their school community a couple of months ago that said that they will keep Critical Race Theory by name, the words, in their school curriculum as a part of the ethnic studies program. You have the Portland public school system puts videos on YouTube of a Critical Race Theory working group. You have the teacher training programs in Loudoun County, Virginia, contracting with companies that use the words “Critical Race Theory” in their training programs. And on and on, and there are more examples like this in my book.
Why Parents Should Care [25:56]
Jonathan Butcher: So parents should care because Critical Race Theory believes that discrimination is appropriate. So it is violating a moral issue that the United States has wrestled with for many years, but we believed was settled from an institutional level in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and culturally through the civil rights movement. I mean, we believe today that racism and discrimination are utterly abhorrent and wrong. And that’s why they make headlines every time that there is an act that appears to exhibit some form of racial prejudice, right? It is something that we believe deep down in our hearts violates our founding ideas that we are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights, among those life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
So when you teach Critical Race Theory, you are not just saying, “Well, we should make sure that we teach about slavery in America’s past, or we should teach students about redlining during the Jim Crow era.” Critical Race Theory is saying that individuals should receive benefits or punishments based on the color of their skin. You are saying that because you are white, you are oppressive just based on your ethnicity, and that you are guilty of oppression because of the actions committed by generations before you. Critical Race theorists also argue that the Civil Rights Act only passed into law because of what was called by Derrick Bell “interest convergence.” They said that civil rights only succeeded in the United States to preserve white power. That was his theory along with Richard Delgado of interest convergence. And so you’re teaching these ideas to students which are completely opposite of the idea that the American dream belongs to all of us, right? There is something that unites us about the ideals that our founding fathers laid down of equality under the law, of freedom, opportunity, and prosperity. Of the idea that Benjamin Franklin, even before the 19th century, created the idea of abolitionist politics. A historian named Sean Wilentz, who is highly critical of the 1619 Project, argues that that’s one of the main things that the 1619 Project has gotten wrong is that America was meant to be racist and oppressive through slavery, when in fact, Sean Wilentz argues that no, abolitionist politics actually originated in the United States. There were other nations—England for one—that abolished slavery before we did, but this political movement of abolition is uniquely an American feature. And that is what is so special about the American experiment. These are the ideas that hold us together, that bind our culture together.
The Long March Through the Institutions [28:19]
Bob Zadek: I’m puzzled by how Critical Race Theory—maybe this is going to make me seem naive—how Critical Race Theory acquired any momentum whatsoever. We all can recall our own education, and I grew up kind of proud. I liked what I learned. Sure, I learned about slavery, and even as I look back in my earlier life, there were parts about growing up in the ’50s and in the ’60s that are painful as I think back and kind of embarrassing that my country behaved in such a way. But in general, I felt proud, and it wasn’t a struggle for me to embrace American values. So where did this disaffection come from? Why wasn’t it a stillborn in our country, which had such a strong feeling of pride, a part of our DNA, I would like to believe, embraces the values in the Declaration as guaranteed us in the Bill of Rights? What was the petri dish that nourished the growth of this movement? Was it always there like some sleeper cell just growing somewhat invisibly? Was there an event? Was there a person? How did it get such traction, and it seems so recently?
Jonathan Butcher: Well, I think it had deep roots in higher education for one. I mean, I think because law schools had spent so long developing both Marxist ideas as well as Critical Legal Theory and then leading into Critical Theory, that led to institutions that became public policy. So when President Obama took office, you have to remember that some of the ideas that he put forward around, say, school discipline, for example, were based in ideas that were a part of Critical Race Theory, if not Critical Legal Theory. One of those being “disparate impact,” which is a legal theory that predates Critical Race Theory, but it’s this idea that any policy that results in different outcomes for individuals based on the color of their skin is inherently racist or prejudicial.
Well, the truth is that just because a policy results in different impacts on people because of the color of their skin, it doesn’t mean that it was intended that way. There are explanations for why students, for example, may receive different punishments in different areas, right? So, for example, let’s take this issue of—there is an argument today that individuals who—students who are black or Hispanic receive higher levels of suspension or expulsion just because of their ethnicities. Well, there are a lot of things going on here. One is that black students in particular are more likely to be from single-parent homes. They are also more likely to be living in poverty, as well as neighborhoods that are dangerous in more areas that have higher concentrations of black families, right? And so when you put all of those things together, you’re creating a situation where students from black families are attending many of the same schools, and so yes, you’re going to have higher rates of discipline for those students compared to white students.
So this idea that we should limit how we suspend or expel or discipline children in K-12 schools—that was in place during the Obama administration. That was something that he disseminated among schools. And as policies like that—that’s just one example—but as policies like that were put into place, there obviously were clearly cultural events that have happened in the past few years around race, whether it was the murder of George Floyd or the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. All of these things were ready to capitalize on these different ideas that had been seeded into culture. I don’t think there’s an easy explanation to say, “Gosh, why now have we suddenly all hearing about Critical Race Theory?” I mean, it’s been in colleges at least since 1989, if not before. Critical pedagogy, which is the application of Critical Theory to teaching—I mean, that has been in colleges of education for decades now. So I believe that they have seized on some cultural moments. I mean, I think that is one explanation.
The Role of Teachers’ Unions [33:05]
Bob Zadek: Now, the teachers’ unions get a lot of attention in so far as their relationship to the teaching of the tenets of Critical Race Theory. It seems somewhat complex to me on several levels. What is there about the profession of teaching per se that seems to encourage teachers, K-12 teachers around the country—unless I’m wrong and certain teaching groups are getting all the attention and the others are invisible, the silent majority, if you will, in a manner of speaking—what is the relationship between teachers’ unions and maybe it’s unions per se, teachers’ unions and the profession of teaching that there aren’t as many teachers, unless there are, who oppose this theory, who haven’t signed on to Critical Race Theory? Why are the teachers almost universally in support of this theory? What is there about teaching that makes them embrace it so much?
Jonathan Butcher: Well, I think for one, it’s not all teachers. I know that there—in fact, there’s a lawsuit against the application of Critical Race Theory in Evanston, Illinois, that was filed by a teacher. There’s another that’s been filed by school administrators in Missouri. So there are teachers who are speaking out against the application of Critical Race Theory because they recognize the diversity training programs that they’re forced to undergo as part of professional development days require, compel them, force them to affirm ideas that violate their consciences about America’s founding ideals. So I don’t believe that it’s all of them, and I think some of the lawsuits demonstrate that.
As far as teachers’ unions go, look, teachers’ unions are radical institutions. Make no mistake about it. Teachers’ unions are radical institutions. They support not only the discriminatory ideas of Critical Race Theory, but they also support the radical ideas that come from Critical Gender Theory, which is a close cousin of Critical Race Theory and also develops from the original Critical theorists. Teachers’ unions support the idea that schools should not tell parents when students go to school and choose to assume a different gender. Teachers’ unions support those policies, which are now in place in schools in New Jersey, California, Kansas. So teachers’ unions are in line with Critical Race Theory because of they share this radical worldview on America’s institutions. Why is it affected K-12 so much, just as it has changed the way that campus life has operated? It’s because I believe that the Critical theorists, who again base their ideas on Marx, understand that once you get a hold of the institutions of learning, you can change the future of a nation. So it’s in effect getting into the school system, getting access to the kids’ minds when they are most impressionable, planting the seed, and then long game, wait—and it’s kind of happened—wait for those seeds to sprout in college or after college, and then you got them. And then you then get control of the conversation. So it’s not K-12 as the goal; K-12 is the tool by which you achieve the greater goal.
Jonathan Butcher: Oh, sure. Because the Critical Legal theorists and the Critical Race theorists, the original theorists, they didn’t say, “Well, we just want to change instruction in the United States.” No, they said they wanted to take apart American law. They wanted to disrupt American culture. And they wanted to disrupt it with Marxist ideas. They wanted to take left-of-center political thinking to whole new radical places. And one of the ways that they could do that, one of the institutions that they could work through, were and are schools. And so that is how they are accomplishing their goal of changing our culture as well as changing our political institutions.
Crowding Out Core Education [37:36]
Bob Zadek: My question may be too general to provide an answer that is helpful, but is the teaching of Critical Race Theory, as it is being taught and working its way into the K-12 curriculum, is it crowding out basic education, STEM education? Is it supplementing it? Are students being exposed to Critical Race Theory at the expense of being exposed to perhaps I’ll say more useful education? Is it just parallel with the other education? What is the effect on overall quality of education? And if you have examples, that would always, of course, be helpful. What is the effect on core education of reading and science and math and, dare I say, civics, on the overall education of students?
Jonathan Butcher: Well, sure. And that’s a great question because Critical Race Theory is not its own subject in K-12 schools. It is a worldview that is meant to be applied, and so it can be applied to any subject. And frankly, has been. There is a curriculum in California that was developed by school district officials from around the state as well as funded through the Gates Foundation that says that math is a tool of white supremacy and that you should use math to dismantle white supremacy, and that math is a tool of capitalism and that you should use math to criticize, if not disrupt, capitalism and capitalist thinking.
You had the Critical Race theorist Gloria Ladson-Billings, who is a professor at a Teachers College in Wisconsin—she was the keynote speaker for the National Council of the Teachers of Mathematics, the largest association of math teachers, in 2019. Just a few years ago, during COVID, when teacher associations were putting together virtual platforms to talk about different subjects and teaching, a science association, or an association of science teachers, hired a Critical Race theorist to deliver remarks about critical affinity spaces in science teaching. Like I was saying before, Arizona State University just hired a professor to teach music through the Critical Race Theory lens. You have literature teachers in K-12 who are using a hashtag called DisruptTexts, which is most certainly in line with Critical Race Theory, where they want to remove any classic works—anything from Shakespeare to the Odyssey and the Iliad and the Odyssey to even To Kill a Mockingbird—saying that you have to replace that with “anti-racist” books that have been written in more recent years. So it’s changing literature, it’s changing math, it’s changing science, it’s changing music. It is a perspective and a worldview that you insert into any subject.
So it’s crowding out. It’s a virus, or maybe a better metaphor would be a cancer that crowds out the healthy cells of education. And so the product of that educational system over time is now has this infection or this disability by not having learned objective quality education; to some degree, it has been crowded out by the teaching of Critical Race Theory.
Policy Solutions and Individualism [40:41]
Bob Zadek: In your book, which is an important read, especially for parents, but certainly for all of us, you do offer constructive suggestions and ways to be alert to the problem. So tell us—because I sit here listening to you and I, frankly, feel powerless. Oh my god, this is going on and there’s nothing—who do I vote for? What do I do? There’s no way to exercise the ballot, the only way a citizen can express their opinion or effect change. So offer the manual, if you would, in the few minutes we have left, as to how we, us otherwise powerless folks, can be alert to this and what we can do besides knowing about it, which is what I hope we have done this morning, to change it. And what are the optimistic, if there are any, prospects as you see it and as you explain in your book?
Jonathan Butcher: Sure. So this can be done at several levels. So let’s take the federal level first. The federal government should not provide federal grants to colleges and universities that are teaching Critical Race Theory to teachers to put into K-12 instruction. There are, in fact, grant programs that are funded with federal money to train teachers to teach using Critical Race Theory—not just to teach what it is, but to tell students how to apply it in K-12 schools. So the federal government should not be funding such programs. The federal government should not be funding K-12 schools to apply Critical Race Theory to K-12 instruction. There’s evidence that Fox News and others have uncovered that show that some of the COVID-19 relief money has gone to K-12 programs that are applying Critical Race Theory’s prejudiced ideas to school activities in the form of white privilege studies or mandatory affinity groups. Okay, so that’s the federal level.
At the state level, we should say that state policy should say that no teacher or student shall be compelled to affirm, believe any idea that violates the Civil Rights Act of 1964. So this means that no teacher or student, either in a diversity training program or in a instructional program, should be required to say that America is systemically racist, or that the Civil Rights Act is a racist act, or that racism cannot be removed from our institutions and our government, right? There should be no compelled speech.
At the school board level, school boards should pass resolutions that say that America was and is an imperfect country, that there were individuals in America’s past and even systems in America’s past that did not—that violated our founding ideals of freedom, opportunity, and prosperity, such as slavery, such as what happened during Reconstruction, such as the Jim Crow era. But our founding ideals are those that reject the idea that slavery is appropriate or that people should be judged based on the color of their skin. Those are our founding ideals, right? So school boards should affirm this, that America today, after the Civil Rights Act and the civil rights movement, has made it so that racism is not systemic in the United States. Rather, that there are individual acts of racism that we should condemn everywhere we see it. School boards should adopt curricular materials and curriculum and standards that affirm America as a uniquely special nation based on our representative system, that we have a self-correcting mechanism in our representative system that allows us to abolish the ideas that are antithetical to our founding creed, that we can abolish racism, we can abolish the institutional tenets of that cause racism to be a part of our government. And so at the federal level, at the state level, at the school board level, there are all things that policymakers can do.
Bob Zadek: Thank you so much for that. That’s a wonderful list. I would just add one more, which is kind of spans a lot of what you have said, and that is that if you wanted to really boil it down to one principle, and that is that any policy, law, practice that looks at anybody other than as an individual on his or her merits is presumptively bad. We are not members of any group other than a group of one. And any behavior that draws a conclusion about you based upon some group that you are in—and every human being is in like several hundred classifications and groups; we are in so many groups all at the same time—how can we possibly be judged based upon which of the several hundred groups we fit in? So that I think what you have said is that at its very core, if you drill down, it’s that the assumption that we are other than a single human being and we should go through life on that basis and that basis alone—that’s, I think, a core founding principle that Critical Race Theory crashes right into. And that’s where the clash is.
We’ve been speaking with Jonathan Butcher. Jonathan has written Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth. Jonathan, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts, and most importantly, thank you so much for the book. It is a must-read by anybody who is, used to be, or will be a parent or a child. I think that captured a large majority of the reading public, Jonathan, so I think you should enjoy at least a modest spike in book sales as a result. It is a must-read. Critical Race Theory will be with us and in the news for quite some time, unfortunately, and we have a duty to our fellow citizens to understand what it is so we can exercise our franchise and our right to vote accordingly. Jonathan, thank you so much. To my friends out there, thank you for giving us an hour of your very, very valuable time. Hope you’ve enjoyed the show.