A segment on critical race theory aired by CNN’s Brianna Keilar (who styles herself a straight news anchor) shows just how biased the establishment media is, and how freaked out it is by the justifiable, societal backlash against CRT.
Keilar was so proud of her hit piece that she tweeted a snide insult: “Vocal opponents don’t fully understand what [CRT] means. Watch.”
Yes, please do click on the link above and watch the whole nine-minute segment. What is clear is that the ignorance is their own.
It is Keilar and reporter Elle Reeve who willfully refuse to understand why so many parents are mobilizing against the teaching of the noxious theory and its tenets in our schools.
“It’s an academic theory mostly taught at the grad student level,” said Reeve by way of introduction, as if the theory itself is what parents say is being taught in elementary and secondary schools. In actuality, it is the practical lessons and outlook promoted by the theory being taught in schools that are so detrimental.
Reeve belittles the idea CRT involves teaching that white people are inherently racist. Then, as if she thinks she is disproving the conservative complaints, she said she “wanted to meet the actual people working with actual kids in actual schools, so we talked to Keziah Ridgeway, who teaches high school African American history and discusses CRT in her anthropology class.”
Ridgeway starts by saying that “critical race theory is not being taught in schools,” which contradicts Reeve’s introduction stating Ridgeway uses it in schools. Ridgeway says, “It’s a good thing” that CRT “influences” teaching “because race and racism is literally the building blocks of this country.”
But, see, that’s the whole point. Indeed, it is exactly what parents are objecting to.
Parents, and most reasonable people, not only disbelieve but also fervently oppose the idea “racism is literally the building blocks of this country.” Reeve didn’t prove the point of proponents who say CRT isn’t being taught, but it’s also harmless — she just proved its tenets are being taught, and those tenets are exactly what the opponents say they are.
Then Reeve — again, acting as if she is a reporter — puts this extreme spin on it: “Relentless propaganda by some conservatives has created a panic that white people, and especially white children, are under attack.”
But that is exactly what is happening. It is a simple fact that, in thousands of schools across the country, teachers apply the tenets of CRT and require students to do things such as “locate themselves on an oppression matrix” to acknowledge their “covert white supremacy.”
Reeve’s misstatements of facts are outlandish. For example, she says this: “In the [19]90s, the crime bill gave much more severe sentencing to crack cocaine versus powder cocaine simply because black people were perceived as doing crack cocaine.”
This is malignant nonsense. Comparatively inexpensive crack cocaine was seen, with reason, as catalyzing an epidemic of violence.
Lawmakers originally imposed higher sentences on crack not because its users were black but to stem violent crime. When it became clear the different sentencing standards created a racial differential in incarceration, lawmakers worked to re-balance the sentencing standards specifically to reduce racial incarceration differentials. That senator, who for years led the fight to fix the disparities, was conservative Alabama Republican Jeff Sessions.
One of the biggest complaints against CRT is, by its founders’ own account, it “questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.” At the same time, some of its most influential progenies openly say capitalism must be abolished.
Naturally, these assaults on traditional American values make parents upset.
Yet, in her bid to allay the supposedly meritless fears of so many parents, Reeve returns to Ridgeway, the black history/anthropology teacher. Bad move.
“I teach these books for my anthropology class,” Ridgeway said while pointing to a pile of books, on top of which sits Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Zinn’s book is well-known as almost rabidly anti-American, one with scholarship so flawed a review in the New Republic denounced it as “polemical potboiler” full of “mutilations of American history.”
If Zinn is the standard text for teachers, such as Ridgeway who draws on CRT, parents are right to react against it.
In all, the July 7 Keilar-Reeve report on the CRT debate was the epitome of vapidity in both substance and style, mired in dishonesty. But it is typical of the relentless (and relentlessly ignorant) media rush to insist CRT is harmless and its opponents are ignorant, bigoted, or both.
Yet, by unintentionally confirming parental fears about CRT are entirely reasonable, CNN perhaps has done American children a favor.
