The current anti-Critical Race Theory debate is fully about turning a blind eye and negating disparities between whites and people of color while enhancing the power and privileges of white people.
Racism's greatest power is both to reinscribe not only the idea of a "white" identity to begin with, but also to socialize whites into being prejudicial and discriminatory while erasing the histories of people of color, the vast majority of whom are native to this continent. Note: There is no country or continent named "White" such that whites come from somewhere else. Trite but true.
And this isn't only a "white people problem," but also a people of color problem to the degree they buy into these fictions.
This work by an anti-CRT Cornell Law School professor named William Jacobson also reminds us that attacks against native peoples are ongoing racial projects themselves.
He brings to mind a person named Felix S. Cohen, solicitor of the U.S. Department of the Interior who in 1940 set up a task force of case law pertaining to Indian rights so that he could create a plaintiff-friendly "handbook" designed as an "authoritative" source for ostensibly limiting—and according to scholar Vine Deloria, Jr.—actually ending Native Americans' "political existence and the merging of Indian rights into domestic American law." (p. 95) He describes this text as getting elevated "to the status of a treatise—an elevation it never deserved." (p. 95)
Hence, Felix S. Cohen's "handbook" was the tool of conquest in its day—not unlike Professor Jacobson's website today.
-Angela Valenzuela
*Deloria Jr, V. (2006). Conquest masquerading as law. Unlearning the language of conquest: Scholars expose anti-Indianism in America, 94-107.
New website tracks where critical race theory is taught at US schools
A Cornell Law School professor has launched a new website about critical race theory curriculum in the US — in hopes of educating “concerned” parents about how the controversial movement impacts education.
Criticalrace.org, created by William Jacobson, features a state-by-state list of more than 200 colleges and universities promoting critical race theory — which he describes as “a radical ideology that focuses on race as the key to understanding society, and objectifies people based on race.”
“The website is a resource for parents and students who no longer can assume they will be left alone,” Jacobson told Fox News. “The entire ideology of CRT and ‘anti-racist’ training is that ‘silence is violence.'”
He added, “As we head into college application and selection season, we need to get parents, in particular, to focus on CRT that will be forced on their kids.”
Launched last weekend, the website was a six-month project by Legal Insurrection, the conservative blog run by Jacobson. It contains information about various schools — including Cornell in Ithaca, where Jacobson teaches — as well as links to critical race training activity there.
Jacobson told Fox News that people need to know that higher education “is the source of the problem.”
“It provides the ideological mothers’ milk for activists and trains the people who then go onto jobs in government and primary/secondary education and the ‘journalists’ who push this coverage,” he said.
“This summer, Cornell University announced a series of actions to respond to advocates of critical race theory,” the website reads. “A for-credit, university-wide graduation requirement covering ‘systemic racism, colonialism, bias and inequity’ is under development. Additionally, the university announced the creation of an ‘anti-racism’ research center, as well as possible reform of its police department.”
Critics, including Discovery Institute researcher Chris Rufo, believe critical race theory perpetuates racism by encouraging segregation, Fox News reported.
Proponents say the intellectual movement helps people better understand race and its relevance to all social interactions.
“Racism is not extraordinary,” Angela Onwuachi-Willig, an expert on the theory at Boston University School of Law, told the Boston Globe. “Race and racism are basically baked into everything we do in our society. It’s embedded in our institutions. It’s embedded in our minds and hearts.”
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