Bari Weiss Manhattan Institute Special (1): Alex Pareene on Christopher Rufo and the New Confederate McCarthyism

[David Shasha]

The Fox News Guest Behind the Republican Frenzy Over Critical Race Theory

By: Alex Pareene

Last September, an obscure, 36-year-old documentarian named Christopher Rufo landed a slot on Tucker Carlson Tonight. Knowing the president would be watching, he sounded the alarm about an ideology almost as obscure as he was: “critical race theory.” Rufo, who describes the theory as the notion that the United States was “founded on white supremacy and oppression,” begged Donald Trump to take action. Critical race theory, he warned, had become “the default ideology of the federal bureaucracy.” The next morning, Rufo got a call from Mark Meadows, the president’s chief of staff; just a few days later, the White House issued a bizarre memo instructing public agencies to root out the theory from government trainings.

In the months since Rufo’s TV appearance, roughly a dozen states from Idaho to Tennessee have passed or considered legislation banning critical race theory from schools and government institutions. Almost overnight, Rufo has become the standard-bearer for a hysterical movement to solve a problem that may not even exist—and in the process, charted a course for the right in the Biden era. With a likable moderate in the White House, the task for operatives like Rufo is to gin up evidence of an overwhelming conspiracy everywhere else, convincing voters that the left has taken over the school and the workplace.

Rufo has had an unusual career: He came up not through the traditional conservative blogosphere but as a man-about-town documentarian, who made a film about roughing it in Mongolia that The New York Times called “self-involved” and a PBS documentary about inner-city poverty. Last year, after the Floyd protests, he learned that the city of Seattle was hosting racial sensitivity trainings where white employees were urged to practice “self-talk that affirms [their] complicity in racism.” Supported by Patreon and, more recently, by a Manhattan Institute fellowship, Rufo started collecting tips from other “whistleblowers” about funky language in diversity trainings from Cupertino, California, where third-graders were asked to rank themselves according to privilege, to New York City, where a principal urged parents to be “white traitors” and advocate for “white abolition.” (Rufo did not answer questions about whether he has other affiliations or funding sources.)

The past year has produced a remarkable amount of hand-wringing and self-flagellation among middle-class white people, not all of it productive. But Rufo has framed these isolated instances of identitarian malapropism as evidence of an overarching Marxist plot to replace the “categories of bourgeoisie and proletariat with the identity categories of white and black.”

He says he has provided feedback on at least 10 of the critical race theory bills moving through state legislatures. He is adamant that they do not seek to govern what can be taught in the classroom, and from a textual standpoint, he may be right: The Idaho bill prevents schools from teaching “that any sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin is inherently superior or inferior”; the Texas bill, meanwhile, stops schools from saying any individual is “inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive.” The rhetorical gambit is for the text to mimic the facially neutral language of civil rights even as the rhetoric around the bill conjures up a Marxist menace.

Of course, it remains unclear who would enforce these laws. But Rufo and his fellow crusaders don’t seem particularly interested in that. The single greatest threat to the Republican Party is its newfound electoral weakness in the suburbs; in order to regain strength in those areas, especially during a midterm that will draw out a more educated segment of the electorate, the conservative movement must convince suburban voters that the other side represents an unthinkable Marxist menace. With a slew of state bills and an obsessive focus on a few isolated statements by misguided public employees, Rufo is attempting to convince swingable voters that liberals and leftists have engineered a totalizing takeover of public institutions. As in the days of Joseph McCarthy, the question is not whether the menace exists but who can be made to believe it exists. Rufo has made it his business to find it everywhere he looks.

From The New Republic, June 7, 2021

 

Subversive Education: Critical Race Theory in Wake County, NC Schools

By: Christopher F. Rufo

Last year, the Wake County Public School System, which serves the greater Raleigh, North Carolina area, held an equity-themed teachers’ conference with sessions on “whiteness,” “microaggressions,” “racial mapping,” and “disrupting texts,” encouraging educators to form “equity teams” in schools and push the new party line: “antiracism.”

The February 2020 conference, attended by more than 200 North Carolina public school teachers, began with a “land acknowledgement,” a ritual recognition suggesting that white North Carolinians are colonizers on stolen Native American land. Next, the superintendent of Wake County Public Schools, Cathy Moore, introduced the day’s program and shuffled teachers to breakout sessions across eight rooms. Freelance reporter A.P. Dillon obtained the documents from the sessions through a public records request and provided them to City Journal.

At the first session, “Whiteness in Ed Spaces,” school administrators provided two handouts on the “norms of whiteness.” These documents claimed that “(white) cultural values” include “denial,” “fear,” “blame,” “control,” “punishment,” “scarcity,” and “one-dimensional thinking.” According to notes from the session, the teachers argued that “whiteness perpetuates the system” of injustice and that the district’s “whitewashed curriculum” was “doing real harm to our students and educators.” The group encouraged white teachers to “challenge the dominant ideology” of whiteness and “disrupt” white culture in the classroom through a series of “transformational interventions.”

Parents, according to the teachers, should be considered an impediment to social justice. When one teacher asked, “How do you deal with parent pushback?” the answer was clear: ignore parental concerns and push the ideology of antiracism directly to students. “You can’t let parents deter you from the work,” the teachers said. “White parents’ children are benefiting from the system” of whiteness and are “not learning at home about diversity (LGBTQ, race, etc.).” Therefore, teachers have an obligation to subvert parental wishes and beliefs. Any “pushback,” the teachers explained, is merely because white parents fear “that they are going to lose something” and find it “hard to let go of power [and] privilege.”

This isn’t an aberration. In fact, the district’s official Equity in Action plan encourages teachers to override parents in the pursuit of antiracism. “Equity leaders [should] have the confidence to take risks and make difficult decisions that are rooted in their values,” the document reads. “Even in the face of opposition, equity leaders can draw on a heartfelt conviction for what is best for students and families.” In other words, the school should displace the family as the ultimate arbiter of political morality.

The equity plan outlines this new ideology in chart format, announcing the district’s commitment to a series of fashionable pedagogies, including “color consciousness,” “white identity development,” “critical race theory,” “intersections of power and privilege,” and “anti-racist identity and action.”

The equity program in the Wake County Public School System is a massive enterprise. Founded in 2013, the district’s Office of Equity Affairs has now amassed a $1 million annual budget and hosts an ongoing sequence of school trainings, curriculum-development sessions, and teacher events. In 2019, for example, the office hosted a series of “courageous conversations” about race and a five-night discussion program about the podcast Seeing White, which asks listeners to consider how “whiteness” contributes to “police shootings of unarmed African Americans,” “acts of domestic terrorism,” and “unending racial inequity in schools, housing, criminal justice, and hiring.”

According to Wake County Public Schools, the purpose of these programs is to achieve “equity,” which it defines as “eliminating the predictability of success and failure that correlates with any social or cultural factor.” This is naïve, at best. Cultural traits such as family environment, transmitted values, and study habits have an enormous influence on academic outcomes. The radical-left educators believe that this is an injustice. They see their job as leveling cultural differences, grouping students into the categories of inborn identity, and equalizing outcomes.

The administrators have the logic backwards. Rather than seek to level cultural factors, they should seek to uncover and then cultivate the cultural traits that lead to academic success across all racial groups. Despite all the recent focus on racial issues in education, the greater disparity in student outcomes today is, in fact, related to social class. As Stanford’s Sean Reardon has shown, the class gap in academic achievement is now twice as large as the race gap—precisely the opposite of what it was 50 years ago.

This news should suggest an opportunity to school administrators. They could pursue pedagogical strategies that help struggling students of all racial backgrounds. Sadly, rather than seizing this opportunity, teachers in Wake County are busy planning conference presentations on “toxic masculinity,” “microaggressions,” “trauma-informed yoga,” “peace circles,” and “applied critical race theory.” North Carolina might be a red state, but in its largest county, the school system has fully bought in to the latest progressive dogmas.

Parents across the U.S. should not assume that their local district is immune to these trends. The new political education is spreading everywhere.

Christopher F. Rufo is a contributing editor of City Journal and director of the Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth & Poverty. Sign up for his weekly newsletter and watch his new documentary, America Lost, which tells the story of three “forgotten American cities.” This article is part of an ongoing series on critical race theory in American schools.

From The Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, March 17, 2021