The media is interpreting this as a partisan battle because that’s the simplest way of framing it.
Frederick M. Hess writes at the American Enterprise Institute:
Media’s misleading portrayal of the fight over critical race theoryCritical race theory (CRT) has dominated the past year’s education debates. In theory, CRT is a narrow scholarly approach to addressing legal, social, and economic arrangements. In practice, it’s come to serve as a shorthand label for an array of racially charged educational policies and practices. While the precise contours of CRT are far from clear, what’s indisputable is that CRT-aligned advocates, such as Ibram X. Kendi and Nikole Hannah-Jones, have risen to prominence as their assertions that the US is systemically racist have gained traction in colleges and schools.Such claims are ideologically charged, and it’s no surprise that they’ve provoked fierce conflict. Kendi, for instance, holds that every thought, action, and policy is either racist or anti-racist. “There is no such thing as a not-racist idea,” he writes in his wildly influential book How to Be an Antiracist. “There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy,” he argues. Robin DiAngelo, author of the bestseller White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism and a popular speaker for colleges, foundations, and schools, similarly teaches, “White identity is inherently racist.”1Bettina Love, winner of the 2020 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award and cofounder of the Abolitionist Teaching Network, explains that “active anti-racism” is “the most important step” teachers can take and “is not a teaching approach or method” but “a way of life.” Glenn Singleton, president of the racial-sensitivity training provider Courageous Conversation, tells the New York Times Magazine that “scientific, linear thinking” and “cause and effect” are among the “hallmark[s] of whiteness.”
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