Critical Race To The Bottom
Anne Arundel County continues to promote Southern Poverty Law Center's CRT-based curriculum in Unity Days
Note: The original oped was submitted to the Maryland Gazette two months ago. It has yet to be printed.
Last year, Bob Mosier of AACPS assured me that schools were not using Southern Poverty Law Center’s Learning for Justice curriculum as part of Unity Day. He told me point-blank on the phone. Subsequently, an AACPS email dated February 7, 2022, stated, “Wednesday’s Unity Day lesson will focus on Learning for Justice Social Standards of Diversity.”
I wasn’t surprised that Mr. Mosier lied to me.
I cannot emphasize the following enough. Southern Poverty Law Center’s Learning for Justice champions Critical Race Theory. We’ve all heard it; Critical Race Theory is not taught in schools.
Bullshit.
SPLC and its Learning for Justice curriculum promote the core tenets of Critical Race Theory. They actively lobby to get those tenants taught in school. Don’t believe me? Lesson plans are on SPLC’s Learning for Justice website.
How did this come about? Look no further than AACPS’s Office of Equity.
The goal of AACPS’s Office of Equity is to teach this woke nonsense. While some of my fans will fire off the same tired letters to the editor calling me a racist, I ask those with an open mind to research the troubled history of the SPLC.
While the SPLC masquerades as an anti-racist organization, its real motivations are more dubious. Like any political organization, its machine feeds off fundraising. SPLC makes its money from propagating hate. Hate leads to division. Division leads to zealotry. There’s a reason why the SPLC has amassed a $500 million war chest. SPLC’s four biggest fundraising years were during President Trump’s tenure. Calling all Trump supporters white supremacists led to more rich liberals writing checks to the SPLC.
For the past decade, SPLC has been focusing on indoctrinated elementary school students. Look at those involved with SPLC’s curriculum. Hasan Jeffries, brother of Democrat Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, has claimed that police officers have killed more blacks than the KKK. Kate Shuster wants the since-debunked 1619 Project taught in our schools. Both want extremism and hate, not unity.
Read the Learning for Justice plans on SPLC’s website. They are clearly anti-Western Culture, even teaching half-truths. One K-2 plan states, “Students should understand that slavery and race are intimately connected, that slavery came to be associated with blackness.” This is not historically accurate. Any honest understanding of history teaches us that people have been enslaving each other since the dawn of civilization. Africans enslaved Europeans beginning in the 16th Century, Arabs established the sub-Saharan slave trade in the 7th Century, Romans enslaved Celts, the African Ashanti kingdom enslaved other Africans. Slavery still exists today across every race, so much so that it’s $150 billion a year industry. But SPLC doesn’t care because it doesn’t help its fundraising narrative.
Another K-2 lesson states, “Students will know that the United States was founded on protecting the economic interests of white, Christian men who owned property. In the process, it protected the institution of slavery.” This is laughable, considering it was white Christian men who ended the sub-Saharan slave trade. SPLC’s attacks on white Christian men are deliberate. It goes to the heart of SPLC’s fundraising tactics. If the problem doesn’t exist, the purpose of the organization is defeated. What better way to keep that problem (fundraising) alive than to indoctrinate our youngest? It’s no wonder why AACPS’s Office of Equity adopted SPLC’s lesson plans. It ‘justifies’ their bloated salaries.
If the SPLC really cared about minorities, why don’t they trumpet the financial success of Nigerian-Americans or immigrants from the West Indies? They can’t because that would involve teaching the benefits of a work ethic, strong family bonds, and personal responsibility. SPLC would rather focus on developing a perpetual victim class to support fundraising.
We, as parents, are sacrificing a generation of children to this woke nonsense because of our ignorance. It will inevitably lead to a more divided country and some children questioning their self-worth. Thomas Sowell sums it up. “Our children and grandchildren may yet curse the day we began hyping race and ethnicity. There are countries where that has led to slaughters in the streets but you cannot name a country where it has led to greater harmony.”
There are genuine issues with SPLC, including its founders abuse of women and its maintaining enormous reserves while forever fundraising. However, racism is fundamental to the founding of the USA. Where their narrative needs expansion is its seemingly total focus on one major aspect of the problem - oppression of people from African origins - while seeming to pretty much ignore another major aspect that predates the institutionalization of black slavery in this land - the oppression of the indigenous population. You may claim not to be a racist, but you are repeating racist shibboleths. You are an enabler of racism.