“Critical Race Theory” Crackpot Communism

As activists trade equality for “equity,” they jettison the principles of the civil rights movement.

A new generation of “antiracist” intellectuals and activists is rewriting rules, canceling nonconformists, and making a grand attempt to rid America of what they consider its systemic racism. With the support of academia, media, and many major corporations, they seem well positioned to achieve their goals. They even have support in in the White House, as President Joe Biden stated in a press conference last month that he will make “racial equity” a priority for the “whole of government.” Yet these efforts may encounter a surprising obstacle: the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Last year, the Wake County Public School System, which serves the greater Raleigh, North Carolina area, held an equity-themed teachers’ conference with sessions on “whiteness,” “microaggressions,” “racial mapping,” and “disrupting texts,” encouraging educators to form “equity teams” in schools and push the new party line: “antiracism.”

In late January, months of feuding at New York City’s Dalton School spilled into public view. In an anonymous letter, a group of alumni and parents wrote that the school they had long loved was abandoning real education in favor of “an obsessive focus on race and identity” in every class.

The dissidents use pseudonyms and turn off their videos when they meet for clandestine Zoom calls. They are usually coordinating soccer practices and carpools, but now they come together to strategize. They say that they could face profound repercussions if anyone knew they were talking.

But the situation of late has become too egregious for emails or complaining on conference calls. So one recent weekend, on a leafy street in West Los Angeles, they gathered in person and invited me to join.

The Left has denounced the “war on woke,” but it is afraid to defend the principles of critical race theory in public debate.

The critical race theorists are feeling the heat. Over the past decade, they have had remarkable success in perpetuating the concepts of systemic racism, unconscious bias, white privilege, and white fragility in American institutions, beginning with universities and moving on to schools, government agencies, and multinational corporations. Their campaign began mostly without opposition, as most conservatives were either ignorant of what was happening o r dismissed it as a campus fad.

That changed last year.