President Trump merits great credit for standing up to cultural bullies.
Trump has ordered that federal agencies immediately cease spending on training employees on the tenets of the pernicious doctrine of “critical race theory” or “any other training or propaganda effort that teaches or suggests either (1) that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or (2) that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil.”
This edict will stop a terrible, highly racialist trend across many parts of the federal government, one in which left-wing ideology and virulent anti-Americanism is forced upon employees under the false color of combating racism. As noted by Heritage Foundation senior fellow Mike Gonzalez, examples of these practices are numerous, such as in the Treasury Department session instructing workers that “virtually all White people contribute to racism,” and in similar affronts at the Securities and Exchange Commission, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security.
“Meanwhile,” he wrote, “employees at Sandia National Laboratories, a federal agency that conducts nuclear research, held a three-day re-education camp for white males, at which they were forced to write letters of apology to women and people of color.”
In recent months, the outlandishness of critical race theory came into sharper and more controversial focus when the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum for African American History and Culture was found to be pushing an “anti-racist” chart teaching that numerous “aspects and assumptions of whiteness” are evil, including the “nuclear family,” “objective, rational linear thinking,” the notion that “hard work is the key to success,” and the belief that people should “plan for the future.”
Of course, by all traditional and reasonable definitions, it is racist in itself to assume that nonwhite people do not value those attributes. Moreover, most people surely believe that the rejection of those values is a rejection of civilization itself. Trump is right that taxpayer dollars should not finance such reprehensible rubbish.
Now, to be perfectly clear, the elimination of federal funding for training in critical race theory does not mean a denial that racism is real or that it should be combated. It just means that this particular sort of training, which is highly ideological and aimed at political power and cultural revolution, is not an acceptable or even legitimate means of combating racism. It’s just anti-Americanism and cultural Marxism cloaked in an anti-racist guise.
This does not mean that all efforts to educate people about racism, and to guard against it, are problematic. There is such a thing as “implicit bias training” that can be done, with appeals to reason and goodwill, without either bullying people, engaging in power politics, or pushing an ideological agenda.
Several key studies in neuroscience, using modern brain-imaging technology, show two key findings — subtle, but important — about how race-based (or other group-based) biases appear to work in the brain. The first is that the amygdala, the part of the human brain largely involved in emotional response, is “activated” (with emotions of fear or contempt, for example) “when people are shown pictures of faces of out-group members.” Thus, unless someone makes a conscious effort to counteract the effect on the amygdala, that person subconsciously reacts to the “out-group member” with that fear or contempt.
Crucially, this phenomenon is common among all groups tested. Black as well as white, Asians as well as Hispanics, all show a proclivity toward these subconscious biases rooted in the emotional centers of our brains.
The second key finding, though, is that conscious awareness of this tendency can be used to negate it. Without belaboring the science, suffice it to say that, as summarized in Psychology Today, the studies “strongly suggest that a lot of people’s biased tendencies are actually learned rather than innate.” Apparently, those tendencies can also be unlearned. The studies indicate that “it is possible to reverse biased ideas through ‘counterbias’ training.”
In sum, conscious efforts can counteract subconscious reactions developed over the course of time from cultural cues. People of goodwill need not be bullied or browbeaten, nor do they need to have notions of power politics or communal guilt or “economic justice” shoved down their throats, in order to fight any tendencies they may have to mistreat people of another ethnicity.
We all know it is true that logic can be trained to overcome fear. We learn it, for example, when as children, we are deathly afraid of the water, only to overcome that fear once we are taught how to swim.
In sum, we can fight against racism without resort to pestiferous agendas such as those embedded in critical race theory. No matter how much the “anti-racist” activists and their media enablers scream, Trump is right to make sure taxpayers aren’t forced to finance dangerous, radical indoctrination of the federal workforce.
