Politico’s Maggie Severns has a well-framed article on the burgeoning critical race theory issue, and you really should go and read the whole thing. The quotes she gets from Democrat-leaning parents about how real this issue is, and how fired up they are about it, are fantastic.
But leaving those quotes aside, and the polling showing how deeply unpopular Democratic efforts to push critical race theory on schools is, the article also does a great job showing how incoherent the Democrats are on the issue.
On the one hand, you have Clinton fundraiser and Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe who said in June: “That’s another right-wing conspiracy. This is totally made up by Donald Trump and Glenn Youngkin.”
In other words, “there is nothing to see here.”
But then you have Democrats such as Omari Hardy, who worked to pass a censure resolution against fellow Democratic school board members who had voted to remove the phrase “white advantage” from the Palm Beach County School District’s diversity statement after pressure from parents.
“Moderate Democrats have a history of compromising on what should be non-negotiable issues,” Hardy told Politico. “I don’t think that you can make these angry mobs that are going around the country talking about critical race theory go away by compromising with them.”
Hardy is joined by progressive activists such as Jin Hee Lee, the senior deputy litigation director for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “It’s no coincidence that this is happening on the heels of what is maybe the greatest civil rights moment in our history, when there was such a focus on systemic racism and anti-black racism,” Lee told Politico. “This is a backlash to the incredible movement that happened that spurred a national reckoning about what we are doing when it comes to systemic racism.
So the Democratic Party is divided between the McAuliffes of the world who want to pretend there is no backlash against public school children being taught that all white children are inherently racist and the Hardy/Lees of the world who see teaching critical race theory in public schools as one of the greatest accomplishments of the progressive movement.
The Democratic base is clearly with Hardy and Lee. Come next November, we’ll see who voters agree with.
