Leftists have been using strained racial relations to force “Critical Race Theory” in all of America’s classrooms, but Cornell law professor William Jacobson is helping parents and students track the rise of the anti-American ideology in college classrooms through his newly unveiled website CriticalRace.org.
The website is “an ongoing project of the Legal Insurrection Foundation,” a tax-exempt corporation that educates and informs the public on critical issues such as academic freedom and free speech. CriticalRace.org allows users to search their schools and review the steps being taken to mandate Critical Race Theory in every facet of the college experience.
“Critical race theory is not the traditional civil rights movement, which sought to provide equal opportunity and dignity without regards to race,” the website observes. “Rather, Critical Race Theory, and the training to implement it, is a radical ideology that focuses on race as the key to understanding society, and objectifies people based on race.”
Born out of the European Marxist school of critical theory, Critical Race Theory is an academic movement that advocates for toppling current social, political, and economic structures to end “systemic racism” and achieve equality.
While critical race theory is not new, the death of George Floyd and the rise and acceptance of the Black Lives Matters movement has prompted schools and leftist groups to demand “anti-racist” actions be taken, including the implementation of Critical Race Theory in America’s classrooms. For now, Jacobson said his website specifically focuses on college classrooms, as opposed to secondary schools or libraries, because the foundations of the ideology are most prominent there.
“[Higher education] is the source of the problem, it’s where the ideological foundations were developed, and the training of activists takes place,” Jacobson said.
Colleges and universities have applied Critical Race Theory in the following ways, according to the website: changing admissions policies; implementing anti-racism, bias, and diversity training; changing curriculum requirements; instituting disciplinary measures; politically supporting anti-racism activism; funding critical race theory programs and research; “Re-imagining” policing; providing anti-racist resources; and taking “symbolic” action.
Examples of these applications are easy to find as the universities proudly tout their policies. The Daily Wire notes the University of Chicago’s English department recently announced it will only consider graduate school applicants who pursue “Black studies,” and Johns Hopkins University has delayed the development of a campus police force to allow time to re-evaluate policing.
The website currently tracks 200 schools, and Jacobson hopes to expand its monitoring to 500 schools in the coming months. The site also invites parents and teachers to submit their own school information to enable better tracking.
The need for such a website could not be greater. The Daily Wire reports Ibram X. Kendi at Boston University has founded the Center for Antiracist Research and a “Racial Data Lab,” both intent on pushing critical race theory in every facet of higher education.
He also hopes to expand monitoring to include primary and secondary schools in the future, as Critical Race Theory’s pervasive agenda has also been pushed at school boards across the country.
“What started on college campuses has moved to primary and secondary education, and into the broader culture,” reports the conservative blog Legal Insurrection — also run by Jacobson. “Government agencies and private corporations now are some of the worst offenders of the obsessive focus on race.
At Central York School District in York, Pennsylvania, for example — one of my own local school districts — two brave school board members, Vickie Guth and Veronica Gemma, have been labeled “racists” for daring to challenge the school board’s implementation of Critical Race Theory in the classroom. This has included the quiet rollout of radical books such as Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness, intended for children ages eight through 12. And while Guth and Gemma have been largely successful at stopping the district-wide implementation of the radical ideology, for now, it is unclear whether teachers have been given free rein to implement it in their classrooms. Parents are also frustrated by the school district’s lack of transparency as they were wholly unaware of this agenda until Guth and Gemma went public with their battle.
Noting the dangers of the anti-white, anti-American ideologies at the heart of Critical Race Theory, Gemma said, “Reverse racism is still racism.”
Predictably, a Moveon.org petition has circulated demanding the resignation of both women.
Jacobson has also been targeted by the “Cancel Culture” movement. According to the Daily Wire, the Black Law Student Association, Cornel alumni, and law school faculty have all demanded the university “take immediate action” to fire Jacobson after he dared to challenge Black Lives Matter’s ideology in June of 2020.
