The highly partisan debate over whether
critical race theory
is being taught in public schools obscures a much more relevant question about whether schools should teach children what they tell the public they are teaching children. Unfortunately, some of what Montgomery County Public Schools and other school systems tell the public they are teaching children about race and racism is shockingly extreme.
Having recently undergone a systemwide
“anti-racist audit,”
MCPS is now training teachers and instructing students in a radical variant of anti-racist ideology called “white supremacy culture,” which makes even the most militant forms of critical race theory seem downright temperate. When MCPS undertook an anti-racist audit in February 2021, it
made clear
that one of its current “restorative justice professional development goals” is education on “white supremacy culture.” Apparently, the school system never looked back.
Developed by diversity guru Tema Okun, “white supremacy culture” holds that the dominant culture elevates norms favored by white people and is thus inherently racist. Traits such as promptness, individualism, and perfectionism are, according to the National Education Association’s
explanation
of the concept, “manifest in organizational culture, and are used as norms and standards without being proactively named or chosen by the full group.”
Under this framework, it’s not enough to oppose what we typically consider racism in society; we need to root out all societal norms loosely associated with being white.
It may strike many as strange that a concept as obscure and imperious as “white supremacy culture” is being taught as incontestable fact, but that’s what the evidence suggests is happening. While parents can read the MCPS anti-racist
audit
results, which recommends teaching children to “recognize and resist systems of oppression,” they aren’t privy to the teacher training and curricula emerging from these nebulous anti-racist concepts. Indeed, even before the anti-racist audit’s recommendations have been adopted, there’s
evidence
that “white supremacy culture” is already being taught in certain classrooms.
An MCPS teacher was stunned when she first saw the slide deck that school principals were encouraged to use to inculcate “white supremacy culture” in their faculty and students. She shared with me the slides.
One slide pictures the disturbing spectacle of the neo-Nazis in the Charlottsville “Unite the Right” rally in August 2017 marching with Tiki torches. The slide is captioned “Being honest with ourselves … Did we look at this image and think “That’s not me”? … Or not all White people are like those people? Do we want to view ourselves as ‘good white people’ and distance ourselves from ‘bad” white folks? How does this good/bad binary get in the way of accepting that we are all participants of a SYSTEM of white supremacy.”
In this pedagogy, students are enjoined, much like in a fiery religious exhortation, to accept that every white person is complicit in a pervasively racist system and told that they are no different than an avowed racist. The irony must have been lost on the slide’s authors that the white supremacists in the picture targeted a synagogue the Jewish congregants of which supposedly benefit from “white supremacy culture.” Taken to its logical conclusion, the caption morally equates the neo-Nazi perpetrators with the Jewish victims.
Another slide depicts a pyramid of white supremacy, which asserts that “denial of white privilege,” “denial of racism,” “white savior complex,” “color-blindness,” and “self-appointed allies” are all white supremacist concepts. In other words, anyone taking such stances are perpetuating white supremacy.
The young black writer Coleman Hughes
recently argued
that color-blindness “is neither racist nor backwards. Properly understood, it is the belief that we should strive to treat people without regard to race in our personal lives and in our public policy.” Under the “white supremacy culture” framework, Hughes’s perspective exemplifies white supremacy. Will MCPS also regard a student who shares Hughes’s view as promoting white supremacy?
Unfortunately, MCPS is not alone in prioritizing such teaching; New York City schools
have trained teachers
in the same extreme pedagogy, which raises the disturbing possibility that much of our educational establishment is in the grips of an ideological fad that is deeply inimical to critical thinking.
As an MCPS parent, I don’t mind my two teenage children being exposed to radical concepts; these ideas are, after all, part of the public discussion. I certainly want them to learn the history of this nation — the good, the bad, and the ugly. I strongly oppose states’ banning the teaching of “divisive concepts,” such as critical race theory and intersectionality. But if the schools are true to their mission to impart critical thinking skills, they must proactively teach opposing views to these concepts. Otherwise, the schools are imparting a single perspective on complex and controversial subjects. They are, in a very real sense, indoctrinating children.
Parents should strenuously but peacefully oppose “white supremacy culture” and other illiberal teachings before they become commonplace in the classroom.
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David Bernstein is the founder and CEO of the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values.
