‘Antiracist’ hate is loud and proud in this Pennsylvania school district
Hudson Crozier
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It’s hard to imagine a nation’s schools teaching the next generation of children to hate their own country and the institutions to which they belong. But this is happening in a Pennsylvania school district, according to an investigation by the Washington Free Beacon.
Pittsburgh Public Schools trains K-12 teachers with resources such as a book arguing that “racist ideas have been stamped” into our “Constitution, laws, policies, [and] practices.” Other materials include the teachings of both district officials and outside sources.
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Various speakers in the district’s training videos talk about “decolonizing education” and claim America was “founded on the idea of enslaving one group of people and the genocide of another group of people.” How one could infer this from a founding document declaring that all are created equal, written by a man who hated slavery, is anyone’s guess.
Such deep, irrational hatred for these systems naturally induces hatred of the people considered responsible for them. The speakers obsess about “power and privilege” and lament that teachers in America are overwhelmingly white. One speaker from a middle school in New York brags that he got students to read the autobiography of Malcolm X, which advocates racial separatism.
Pittsburgh Public Schools also tells educators in a webinar that American “institutions” and even “social relations” are influenced by the uninvited presence of “whiteness.” It labels “middle to upper class white, heteronormative, Judeo-Christian, able-bodied, English-speaking” men as the embodiment of this oppression.
Children in the district who should be taught kindness and respect are left with teachers whose goal is to “disrupt whiteness and white supremacy within yourselves, your classrooms, and schools,” according to another resource. Given that other materials label “meritocracy” and high achievement as “rooted in whiteness,” there’s practically no limit to the normal, harmless, and even healthy behavior that staff may consider problematic.
Altogether, this toxicity is one of the clearest examples yet of schools embracing what is known as critical race theory, an offshoot of Marxist “critical theory” formed in higher education. A training video acknowledges those ideological roots by encouraging teachers to be “critically conscious.” Moreover, these standards seem to be welcome across Pennsylvania. Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) requires teachers to consider “biases at institutional and structural levels that can result in disadvantaging some groups … while privileging others.”
Though some have given up over time, there are still many in the media who attempt to gaslight on this issue. “Educators say ‘critical race theory’ is a dog whistle,” a March headline from the Arizona Capitol Times read. The paper’s one-sided article quoted sources claiming that “most people understand that critical race theory is not taught in K-12 schools” and that caring about it amounts to “dismantling public education.” What we’re seeing is different from “actual critical race theory, which originated in law school,” Time Magazine argued in April.
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These silly explanations rely on semantics. If schools were teaching all or even some of the tenets of Nazism, we wouldn’t particularly care whether they called it Nazism by name. Americans should be able to unite in eliminating from classrooms any poisonous, racist agenda that puts children into a caste system.
Hudson Crozier is a summer 2023 Washington Examiner fellow.