Critical Race Theory’s Destructive Impact on America
Under the guise of a venture called the “1619 Project,” revisionist history about race in America is being introduced into classrooms across America without undergoing the normal peer review expected of educational materials. August 2019 marked the birth of the project, a publication of The New York Times Magazine and the Pulitzer organization, containing a collection of essays and artistic works to commemorate the 400-year anniversary of slavery in America. The project has mushroomed into a movement to re-educate Americans via newfangled claims about how deeply racism is embedded in America’s core.
As of February 2020, five public school systems had adopted the 1619 Project’s curriculum district-wide, and its free teaching materials had reached 3,500 classrooms. This rapid progression for the distribution of teaching materials created by journalists and scholars has been done without proper vetting....
What has ensued is a new racial narrative that places black America’s struggles at the feet of the nation’s white Founding Fathers. This requires a new birthdate for the nation. Instead of July 4, 1776, when the Founders signed the Declaration of Independence pledging to risk their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to found a new nation, the 1619 Project scholars place the inception of the nation more than 150 years earlier — at 1619. That’s when the first Africans came to Virginia as indentured servants before becoming free blacks.
Curiously, and inexplicably, the revisionist narrative skips over the 42 years of indentured servitude that enabled the former slaves to gain the freedom and resources to become the foundation of the free black population in America....
Conspicuously absent from the dominant historical narrative is the fact that free blacks and Indian tribes were right there alongside whites, buying and selling slaves after slavery became legal in 1661....
Historian Philip Foner, in his book “History of Black Americans,” provides critical details that American students should know about the origins of slavery in America:
“The fact that the early Negroes imported into Virginia held the status of indentured servants is shown by the records of some Negroes’ receiving the customary ‘freedom dues’ in the form of land at the end of their term of service. Some obtained land after becoming free by importing servants under the ‘head-right’ system, by which they obtained 50 acres for each servant imported...."
... slavery was an institution that blacks, Native Americans, and whites participated in as slaveholders....
Critical race theory is an analytical framework to analyze institutions and culture. Its purpose is to divide the world into white oppressors and non-white victims. Instead of traditional forms of knowledge, it uses personal narratives of marginalized minority “victim” groups (blacks, Hispanics, Asians) as irrefutable “evidence” of the dishonesty of their mostly white heterosexual oppressors. The ultimate goal of this theory’s proponents is to remake society so that the victim class eventually displaces the oppressors and becomes the new ruling class....
Universities and colleges have created a cottage industry of people who profit from indoctrinating America’s future leaders with a dangerous and destructive ideology....
The 1619 Project is a misguided effort to keep open historical wounds while telling only half of the story. It is flawed because it is connected to critical race theory and the diversity-inclusion grievance industry that focuses on identity politics and division. ...
Related
Critical Race Theory is a Victimization Cult, by Art Keller, New Discourses, June 29, 2020.
Marxism, BLM, and American gullibility, by Fred Elbel, CAIRCO, June 20, 2020.