I’ll tell you from many years of experience, I have not read a detailed Conservative fact sheet or paper that was not essentially based on a huge internal lie. Not once. This particular E-book of QAnonsense by the Koch Brother-funded Heritage Foundation on the Critical Race Hoax is no exception.
It starts with the following pitch posted as a Facebook ad.
Critical race theory is spreading across our country like wildfire. Once isolated to colleges and universities, it has now invaded our K-12 schools, workplaces, state and federal governments, and even our military.
What makes critical race theorists so effective is how good they are at disguising their indoctrination. But this eBook will give you the tools to spot it and show you practical ways you can help stop it.
Learning about critical race theory and how to stop it is more important than ever—especially right now. The indoctrination needs to stop. And that’s why The Heritage Foundation is fighting back.
As the nation’s most influential conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation is working to expose, confront, and defeat critical race theory. Our more than 100 policy experts and researchers are invited to testify before Congress dozens of times throughout the year to provide principled solutions to our nation’s problems. And Heritage experts appear daily in America’s top news outlets and other media to educate and rally your fellow citizens.
But we can’t do this work alone. The threat posed by critical race theory is real—and there’s a lot at stake. That’s why we need your help.
Your tax-deductible gift today helps advance your principles—free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense—at a time when our nation needs these principles most.
So the grift here is obvious — but as it turns out the E-book their hawking is actually free. In fact, here is that Ebook, Right Here.
www9.heritage.org/…
Since a lie is best hidden between two truths, they start out accurately enough.
1 | CRITICAL RACE THEORY
Critical race theory (CRT) is a philosophy founded by law professors who used Marxist analysis to claim that America is “systemically racist.” Critical race theorists have been active in colleges and universities for years, but their impact on public policy was limited until recently.
They didn’t actually use “Marxist Analysis”, that’s just a scary word they threw in, but other than that this is largely correct. This is where they start to go off the rails.
The precepts of CRT have now burst outside the universities, affecting K-12 schools, workplaces, houses of worship, state and federal governments, and even
the military. Around the country, parents, educators, and employees have rejected CRT’s discrimination in favor of equality under the law and opportunity for all—regardless of skin color.
As a new tactic against this grassroots opposition, CRT’s defenders now deny that the K-12 curricula and workplace training programs in question include CRT’s prejudicial principles. However, there are bedrock features common to all critical theorists and practitioners.
CRT is not being taught in grade school, nor are it’s “bedrock features.” It is a fairly high concept that discrimination and a wide variance of outcomes continue to exist not simply because of individual acts of bigotry, but because large systems are structured to produce this variance by design.
When they’re talking about it becoming K-12 curricula, that is a misnomer. Since the murder of George Floyd some school districts have attempted to add elements of anti-Racism into their curriculum under the idea that if Racism can be taught, anti-Racism can also be taught. But most anti-Racism concepts are significantly different from the idea that large systems are designed to generate biased outcomes.
Heritage actually describes CRT accurately in the next section.
1 Systemic Racism
Critical race theory’s key assertion is that racism is not the result of individual, conscious racist actions or thoughts. Racism is “systemic” and “structural.” It
is embedded in America’s legal system, institutions, and free-enterprise system, and imposes “whiteness” as the societal norm.
The system, including capitalism, is “rigged” to reward white behavior and preserve white supremacy. Curricula and training sessions that teach that racism is systemic and structural, and demand that Americans work to dismantle laws, traditions, norms, institutions, and free-market enterprise—the entire American system itself—are part of CRT.
The lie that CRT is “taught in schools” is embedded in this statement — which is otherwise correct. How exactly can school children “dismantle laws, traditions, norms and institutions” from behind their desks? CRT is taught in graduate and law school to people who have a chance of going on to shape those laws and institutions. Why should school kids learn this, which is a concept that they could hardly be expected to fully grasp?
This is where they start to go off the rails.
THE FACTS
• Racial discrimination is illegal in America. In the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the government rejected racial discrimination and made it illegal in all public aspects of our lives. Likewise, the civil rights movement affirmed that prejudice has no place in American life. There are racists in America, as in all other countries, but the vast majority of Americans we work and worship with, live and learn alongside, embrace the equal rights and dignity of all. There is not evidence to suggest that our social order is oppressive and dangerous. CRT improperly focuses on completely overhauling our social order as a cure to any individual racism that still exists in America instead of the recognizing the individual factor — and individuals — involved.
No evidence? Well, the first and best example of how systems can be structured in a way that generates biased incomes is to just take a basic look at the Justice System. Starting with a basic truth, black people and white people use and sell drugs largely at similar rates but that’s now theyr’e treated by the Justice system.
African Americans are hit much harder than any other racial or ethnic group by the war on drugs, even when there's no evidence of significantly higher drug usage or sales. The most obvious disparity appears between white and black Americans: Both groups use and sell, according to some studies, illicit drugs at similar rates, but black people are roughly 2.6 times as likely to get arrested for drug crimes.
What's behind the disparities? Sometimes, racism and the subconscious racial biases of law enforcement are major factors. But often, it's a collision of socioeconomic trends and otherwise race-neutral policies. One example, from a Sentencing Project report released in February: "Socioeconomic inequality does lead people of color to disproportionately use and sell drugs outdoors, where they are more readily apprehended by police."
These types of disparities cascade down through the war on drugs and the rest of the criminal justice system, leading to the racially divided results shown in the chart above.
Not only are black people stopped by police and searched for drugs 2.6 times as often, they are also arrested, assaulted and killed by police 2.6 times as often even when the statistics indicate that they are actually less likely to be carrying drugs to sell.
Arrest data show a striking trend: arrests of blacks have fallen for violent and property crimes, but soared for drug related crimes. As of 2011, drug crimes comprised 14 percent of all arrests and a miscellaneous category that includes “drug paraphernalia” possession comprised an additional 31 percent of all arrests. Just 6 percent and 14 percent of arrests were for violent and property crimes, respectively.
Even more surprising is what gets left out of the chart: Blacks are far more likely to be arrested for selling or possessing drugs than whites, even though whites use drugs at the same rate. And whites are actually more likely to sell drugs:
Whites were about 45 percent more likely than blacks to sell drugs in 1980, according to an analysis of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth by economist Robert Fairlie. This was consistent with a 1989 survey of youth in Boston. My own analysis of data from the 2012 National Survey on Drug Use and Health shows that 6.6 percent of white adolescents and young adults (aged 12 to 25) sold drugs, compared to just 5.0 percent of blacks (a 32 percent difference).
So, black people are less likely to sell drugs — but black people get stopped, searched and arrested for drugs more often. This is a bias we can see with our own eyes when people like Kyle Rittenhouse are acquitted under a judge who insists that his victims should be called “Looters and Rioters”, and again we see it when prosecutors recommend 7 years for cop/convicted murderer Kim Potter and yet the judge decides because she cries so brilliantly that she should only serve 16 months for the killing of Daunte Wright.
Further, when they get to court this black/white disparity increases from 2.6:1 to 5:1 on the rate of who gets prosecuted for those drugs and who doesn’t, then when it comes to sentencing the disparity leaps yet again to 7:1.
This is why when we look at our prison system, the majority of inmates in jail and prison are black and brown people on drugs charges — which in turn is part of the rationale cops use to stop black and brown people in the first place — and yet, white people still sell the most drugs as we’ve clearly seen with the explosive growth of the opioid epidemic.
Now, no one argues that each and every cop, each and every judge, jury member, prosecutor and defense attorney is individually a bigot. That would be incredible. However, we see this consistent bias in the system in every state in the nation, in every courtroom, in every jail.
This is the type of systemic bias that CRT attempts to explain and combat. Another example would be the system of loan and housing bias that led to African-Americans being the group who mostly lost their homes due to the Housing Industry crash of 2008.
The State of Housing in Black America explores recent housing trends in the African American community, including high rates of foreclosures and falling rates of homeownership, the impacts of these trends for current and future generations, and concludes by advocating for improved policies to address the needs of housing in Black America. The report was commissioned by the National Association of Real Estate Brokers (NAREB).According to the report, African Americans have lost over half of their wealth since the beginning of the recession through falling homeownership rates and loss of jobs. Further, African American homeownership peaked in 2004, indicating that the housing crisis hit this community earlier than the nation as a whole. Since 2007, nearly 8% of African Americans and Latinos have lost their homes to foreclosure compared to 4.5% of non-Hispanic whites at similar income levels. The disparity ratio shows that African Americans are more than 70% more likely to have been foreclosed upon than non-Hispanic whites.
Again, is every Realtor and Lending firm in the nation full of individual bigots? CRT explains that there are biases are built into the structures of the system, and even if the Realtor or Lender themselves is black — that bias tends to persist.
So the argument that our social order is “not oppressive and dangerous” is flatly false. It is oppressive and it is potentially very dangerous. Simply the fact that open discrimination has been made “illegal” does not mean that it doesn’t still happen. Jay Walking is illegal. Robbery is illegal. Murder is illegal. We still have all three, so Racism being “illegal” doesn’t mean that Racism has “gone away” or that systemic bias has been conquered.
With this in mind, we can then see how Heritage travels farther down the rabbit hole rapidly.
2 Race Drives Beliefs and Behaviors
Critical race theory proponents say American culture is a conspiracy to perpetuate white supremacy by imposing white concepts on people of other races. Thus, members of minority groups must reject habits and ideas practiced by other cultures, even if the activities promote community cohesion and individual well-being. CRT champions curricula and diversity, equity, and
inclusion (DEI) programs that separate individuals by race, or teach that concepts such as being on time, hard work, and literacy are products of white values, and should be rejected by minorities.
CRT is not about refusing to show up to work on time and being illiterate in order to protest against “the Man” in a biased system. That’s nonsense that couldn’t possibly accomplish the goal of correcting the errors and mistakes in the system.
It’s also a racist concept.
6 | CRITICAL RACE THEORY
THE FACTS
• To accuse American culture of being a front for white culture, as CRT does, is an insult to Americans of all ethnicities and backgrounds who have flourished in America and contributed significantly. American culture is based on a timeless understanding of rights rooted in the inherent value and nature of the human race. People of all colors and national backgrounds come here and flourish because our culture embraces common humanity and dignity. In fact, throughout our history black Americans have worked, sacrificed, and built institutions that have had an enormous impact on American culture. These efforts represent the American way, just as the Civil Rights Act fulfilled America’s promises of freedom and opportunity to people of every race and ethnicity.
This is hogwash. There are many systems and institutions which show clear and obvious bias — but that bias is not an insurmountable obstacle that prevents ANY person of color from being able to succeed and thrive. It’s not a brick wall that completely blocks the ability to progress, rather it’s more like a steeplechase filled with traps and obstacles that act as “speed brakes” slowing down our progress, but not completely stopping it. [Except for when we lose our lives in the process.] We have to deal with issues that white people simply don’t — things that never occur to them or happen in their lives. An odd and dangerous encounter with a cop, being occasionally rejected for a loan, or perhaps having your house appraised for $500,000 less than it should
The Tate-Austin's
(CNN)Tenisha Tate-Austin and her husband became suspicious when the Northern California home they spent years renovating was valued by an appraiser far lower than they expected.
So when they asked for a second opinion last year, a White friend pretended to own their home and they removed all artwork and photos that could show that it actually belonged to a Black family.
The new appraisal for their home in Marin County was more than $1.4 million and nearly half a million dollars higher than the previous estimate, they said.
"What that appraisal did is what we were actually asking the appraisers to do, to not consider race, to not consider neighborhoods and or the lines that have been drawn and perpetuated by redlining," Tate-Austin told CNN.
This bias will not stop this family, if they hadn’t performed this second appraisal they would have still sold their house, they would have still lived their lives, only a little poorer than they should have been. They will survive and thrive.
It may have even been easier to deal with when discrimination was overt rather than covert. It was simpler when there were “Whites Only” signs at the door and we had “Sundown Towns” where black people were forbidden to tread. Back then you could see it coming, now you have to hunt down discrimination which can be like going on a snipe hunt. Many times you don’t find it, sometimes you do. This in turn may be why many people are so skeptical when they feel they’ve found some hidden discrimination because everybody always denies it. Donald Sterling denied it. Paula Deen denied it. David Duke denies it. The NY Giants and Miami Dolphins deny it. Donald Trump denies it. Paul Gosar denies it. Marjorie Taylor-Greene denies it. The Proud Boys deny it. The Oath Keepers deny it. Everybody.
3 White Privilege
Because critical race theorists see American culture as cementing white supremacy, they say that white people are born with unearned privilege that other Americans are denied. This produces a “whiteness premium” that prevents working-class whites from collaborating with working-class blacks to change the economic system. Reflecting its Marxist origins, CRT asserts that to achieve the unification of the working class, whites must recognize their white privilege and renounce it. Any curricula or diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) program that compels students or employees to accept their white privilege and/or work to abandon it are part of CRT
White privilege is clearly real, in that white people frequently get the benefit of all doubt and are usually free from negative suspicion. Cases in Point again: Rittenhouse and Potter. They get the treatment we all should get. It’s not so much an “unearned” benefit as it is an “unshared” benefit that everyone should enjoy. However, they don’t.
The existence of this benefit does not create some insurmountable rift between working-class blacks and whites, I don’t know that whites need to “renounce” their privilege, I would argue that they need to be aware of it and strive to make sure all people have that same privilege, that all people are naturally assumed to be their best potential selves until proven to be otherwise.
Innocent until proven guilty.
4 The System Won’t Allow Non-Whites to Succeed, So Meritocracy Is a Myth
Critical race theory teaches that whites have rigged the system, so the criteria used to measure merit and success in school or the workplace are not objective, but are designed to keep white individuals on top. Hiring metrics and workplace benchmarks, such as punctuality and logical thinking, need to be eliminated if
non-whites are to succeed. Any curriculum or training program that says color blindness is a myth and advocates for eliminating standard measurements of success, including standardized testing for university admissions for reasons of racial equity, are part of CRT.
Again, with the punctuality thing. Meritocracy is not a myth. As I previously stated, the bias in the system is not an insurmountable impediment. Non-Whites absolutely can succeed, they just have to work twice as hard to get half the credit. CRT simply argues that they should get credit for their work at the level that they have produced. Right now, quite often they don’t.
So basically these people present CRT as a “scam” designed to allow black and brown people to “slide” without working hard, meeting standard benchmarks or workplace metrics, which again is a highly racist meme. It goes on like this essentially blaming black people for their own station in life as being a result of their own cultural/social choices.
Convenient. No one else is responsible, no one else needs to lift a finger, no one else need to reconsider or question anything.
Heritage recommends in the end that to “Fight CRT” people engage (“harass”) their school, principals and school boards. That they become activists and “whistle-blowers” when they see these types of lessons being propagated to their children.
They need to become a threat.
Essentially Heritage ignores the systemic bias that is easy to identify but apparently very difficult to correct. These systems will remain in place, white privilege will continue while Black, Brown, Arab, Asian and LGBTQ+ people continue to be stifled, and teachers will be surveilled and threatened not to deviate from the narrow path that maintains the white power orthodoxy.
However, we will not be stopped. Will will survive and we will make this country into the nation that we were all promised in the Declaration of Independence where: All men (or mankind) are created equal.
We’re not there yet, but we’re still on our way despite the roadblocks and diversions erect by people such as Heritage.
