Epoch Times Spotlights CriticalRace.org Databases: “serves as a call to action” on CRT and DEI in Education

Epoch Times Spotlights CriticalRace.org Databases: “serves as a call to action” on CRT and DEI in Education

The Epoch Times spoke recently with our very own Bill Jacobson about Legal Insurrection Foundation’s CriticalRace.org project, Cornell Professor Tracks CRT in Higher Education, Elite K-12, and Medical Schools.

CriticalRace.org, a project of Legal Insurrection Foundation, launched in February 2021 to track and document CRT and its variants, including DEI, in American education. It’s grown from a list of 200 colleges and universities to over 700 higher education institutions, medical schools, military schools, elite K-12 private schools, and veterinary schools across the country. 

The article details how the website came to be as a reaction to “anti-racism” activism at Cornell in the summer of 2020:

The inspiration for Criticalrace.org came from what Jacobson describes as “the explosion of mandatory programs called ‘anti-racism training’ and ‘anti-racism education’ at colleges and universities” in the wake of the death of George Floyd in May of 2020.

In the aftermath of Floyd’s death, Cornell President Martha E.  Pollack posted a message to her fellow “Cornellians” on June 3, 2020, saying, “As a campus community, we have a collective responsibility to engage in difficult but critical conversations—to listen genuinely to, and learn from, one another.”

“To help bring focus to these conversations,” Pollack urged her colleagues “to participate in a Community Book Read of ‘How to Be an Antiracist’ by National Book Award winner Ibram X. Kendi.” Kendi is a racial activist who promotes the idea that racist policies and ideas are deeply ingrained in American society.

“I hope you will choose to read the book and to join in the conversation,” Pollack said.

“That was the first time I actually read his book, and it was pretty shocking,” Jacobson said. “It advocated the use of discrimination to cure past discrimination.” .…

On July 16, 2020, Pollack issued another message to her colleagues, announcing that more needed to be done to “create a more just and equitable Cornell.”

“It is clear that we must think and act holistically to change structures and systems that inherently privilege some more than others,” Pollack wrote.

In a Sept. 8, 2020, open letter to Pollack and other university officials, several hundred Cornell faculty and students outlined “Immediate” and “Longer-Term Demands” for what her anti-racism initiative should look like in all departments and curricula from undergraduate to postdoc.

“It was a document that called for outright discrimination and racial preferences in hiring or promotion, and it was signed by some prominent professors, including nine law professors,” Jacobson said, noting that “the philosophy in that letter is actually contrary to Cornell anti-discrimination policies and contrary to state and federal law.” ….

It was reading these”demands” that inspired Jacobson to research and document precisely where CRT was being promoted in America’s institutions of higher learning. Criticalrace.org was born.

Since CriticalRace.org‘s launch two years go, the project has garnered significant attention for the work accomplished as the databases have grown in reach and breadth. The Epoch Times spoke with one CriticalRace.org fan who extolled the site:

Jonathan Butcher, Senior Research Fellow in Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation says he’s been on Jacobson’s website often.

“It’s good that it’s so narrowly focused on one area of the woke landscape,” Butcher told The Epoch Times. “I really think he’s put together a great tool.”

Regarding Jacobson’s revelation that CRT is now even part of the curriculum at veterinarian schools, Butcher recalled a piece he wrote on Sept. 29, 2021, about a newly hired music teacher at Arizona State University, brought on board to train K-12 music teachers “from a critical race theory perspective.”

…

“This is what makes Jacobson’s resource so valuable,” Butcher said, suggesting it “serves as a call to action” by demonstrating how ubiquitous the ideology is.

“This gives you a measure of the amount of unrest and disruption that colleges are teaching students to be a part of,” Butcher said.

The Epoch Times goes on to cover some of the latest updates and future plans for the database:

The database has now expanded to include CRT reports on the top 100 medical schools ranked by U.S. News and World Report.

“The goal this year is to cover the schools we haven’t covered yet,” Jacobson explained. “We have also covered the top 50 elite K-12 private schools, the fancy boarding and day schools. We’re hoping to expand that to the top 100 this year. We’ve also covered U.S. military academies and within the last month we started covering veterinarian schools.”

Jacobson noted that it wasn’t until recently that he realized CRT was even invading veterinarian schools.

“A lot of this starts with a tip,” Jacobson explained, adding that the vet school database “started when a vet student contacted us and said, ‘You’re not going to believe what’s going on in veterinarian school.’”

And as we begin to process Tucker Carlson’s absence from Fox News in the rearview mirror, it’s worth remembering how instrumental Carlson was in helping put CriticalRace.org on the map — so to speak — when the database had just gone public:

“We launched on February 2, 2021, and announced the project on Tucker Carlson’s show,” Jacobson recalled, adding that he only had around 200 colleges and universities in the database at the time.

“I didn’t realize how big it would become,” he admitted. “But by midnight after being on Carlson’s program we had over 400,000 visits. At one point, we had over 70,000 people on our website. It’s a miracle it didn’t crash. By the next day, we had over a million visits. It was then we thought, ‘Yes, this could be an interesting website.’”

And for those who might have missed it, here’s a flashback to Jacobson’s appearance on Tucker Carlson Today just this past April introducing our updated medical school database. We’re happy to see the promotion for his appearance is still pinned at the top of the show’s  Twitter feed with over 1 million views, and hoping it stays there in perpetuity!

If you can, take a moment and head over to CriticalRace.org and join our growing community of concerned parents and citizens. The more of us who make it a priority to follow CRT and DEI in education, the better — especially as we anxiously await the Supreme Court’s higher education affirmative action decision in the coming weeks. Change is afoot.

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