21 May 2021 Left’s Critical Race Theory Preaches Black Failure, by Deroy Murdock

Critical race theory may be the left’s filthiest, ugliest big lie. It defines America as inherently and irredeemably bigoted, denounces all whites as racial oppressors, and diminishes all blacks as racially oppressed victims.

Deroy Murdock

Lies, lies, lies.

The third lie is the worst.

Black Lives Matter, the “diversity” police, and other “systemic racism”-mongers relentlessly claim that white privilege and white supremacy blockade black success. Blacks think, “Yes, we can.” The left replies: “No, you can’t.”

Last June, Seattle staged something called Interrupting Internalized Racial Superiority and Whiteness. This segregated brainwashing program for white municipal workers accused them of rendering people of color “unable to imagine a way forward that comes from a place of humanity and empowerment.”

So, blacks are paralyzed victims, as helpless as butterflies ensnared in a tarantula’s web of white racism.

This frightful fantasy is concocted to leave blacks cold and scared—all the better to swaddle them in the warm, loving arms of the left. Ultimately, like every liberal effort, this is about getting elected, retaining power, and controlling Americans as tightly as possible.

If this cleaves America like a log split by an ax, so be it. If whites must be vilified unfairly as bigots—to a man, woman, and child—who cares?

And if blacks feel not empowered but enfeebled within an alleged whirlpool of white hate, then too bad. The left’s insatiable thirst for political domination must be quenched, by all means necessary.

The Atlantic on April 3 wrote about Ndona Muboyayi, a mother who enrolled her son and daughter in Evanston, Illinois, government schools in 2018. She recalls that “within the first year, my children were being taught about white supremacy and white privilege and that all white people were rich and racist.”

Since age 11, Muboyayi’s son had dreamed of becoming a lawyer. But, before long, he came home with abandoned aspirations.

“Mommy,” he explained, “there are these systems put in place that prevent black people from accomplishing anything.”

“That’s what they’re teaching black kids,” Muboyayi said. “The narrative is, ‘You can’t get ahead.’”

The left deliberately preaches this gospel of black failure:

—The Smithsonian Institution published a chart last July detailing “Aspects & Assumptions of Whiteness.” It listed “hard work,” “decision-making,” “intellect,” “The King’s English rules,” and “Be polite.” Ergo, the assumptions of blackness would include sloth, indecision, idiocy, illiteracy, and discourtesy. Former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke could not have expected less of blacks.

—“By saying that this is a standard English or even an English-only classroom, we are consenting to the, you know, the master narrative,” New York University education professor David Kirkland, chief architect of New York state’s “culturally responsive + sustaining education” standard, said in a March 2019 speech at The University of Texas at Austin. “We are also reinforcing narratives of white supremacy, narratives of anti-black, anti-brown racism. … And this leads to multiple forms of oppression.”

So, black kids, don’t “act white” by embracing correctly written and spoken English.

—“Every lesson is an opportunity to talk about the legacy of systemic racism, not solely the wonder of individual stories,” Robert S. Harvey wrote last Aug. 17 in Education Week. Harvey trivialized black achievement even further: “And when we neglect to talk about how systemic racism is embedded within American structures—education, justice, employment, housing, and health care—we unintentionally teach students that ‘really good, really successful’ Black folks are exempt from racist structures.”

So, whitewash black excellence and obsess over the inescapable, racist “system.”

“In other words,” American Enterprise Institute scholar Frederick M. Hess writes, rather than “suggest that individuals can shape the course of their lives, teachers should push students to view themselves as passive victims of circumstance. Harvey is literally instructing teachers to … dismiss individual accomplishment and personal agency.”

These “anti-racist” racists are serving social cancer from huge, boiling cauldrons. They are ladling defeatism into the bowls of black people and sickening the entire nation with their evil stew.

They must be ridiculed, shunned, defunded, and dismantled.

Deroy Murdock, a member of the Project 21 black leadership network, is a Manhattan-based Fox News Contributor, a contributing editor with National Review Online, and a senior fellow with the London Center for Policy Research. A version of this commentary first appeared at The Daily Signal.