Click here to view original web page at amgreatness.com

Here is a question for parents who are upset when they learn about the critical race theory sessions their children have to undergo at school this year: Did you know that you’ve been paying for all this proselytizing, and have been doing so for decades?

I’m sure that most Americans are unaware of that sorry fact, but it’s been happening for a long, long time. This Woke Revolution, of which CRT is an essential part, has erupted into American public life with astonishing speed and fervor, but the genesis of it goes back much further than the death of George Floyd, the election of Donald Trump, and the founding of Black Lives Matter a few years before.

Instead, like so many leftist ideas in their current form, it stems from the 1960s, when the civil rights movement shifted from the liberal integrationist vision of Martin Luther King, Jr., to the aggressive identity politics of Black Power and the Panthers. That story has been told many times (see, for instance, this biography of Stokely Carmichael)—though many people today forget that hard leftists denounced MLK as weak and over-compromising in the last year of his life.

It’s an easy memory to lose because the militant racial protests dissipated over the course of the 1970s, by the end of which you heard few national voices speaking in CRT-like tones. Even Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition campaign for the presidency in 1984 favored a positive message of multicultural unity over the bilious talk of white supremacy.

Click here to view original web page at amgreatness.com

“But He’s Not Doing Race!”

Here’s the thing, though: Militant identity politics didn’t go away. It took refuge in academia, where programs in Black Studies, Women’s Studies, etc. proceeded to carry out the militant vision in an academic mode.

Angela Davis ended up a distinguished professor at UC Santa Cruz, Bill Ayers at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Their ideas of systemic racism, white hegemony, “the Other,” intersectionality, and cultural imperialism were developed, refined, disseminated, and advocated in classrooms, conferences, scholarly presses, and journals. Affirmative action in the hiring of faculty and admission of students expanded into a frankly quota-like process until the Supreme Court in Bakke forced schools into the “diversity” rationale, which kept social engineering moving forward. Deans and provosts threw money at identity projects and events.

Everyone nodded approval, assuming that such energies were the natural extension of the civil rights movement, the moral standing of which was now higher than that of the founding itself.

The success of these “studies” fields spread the word widely across campus to humanities departments, schools of education, and the “softer” social sciences. When I was a graduate student in English at UCLA in the 1980s, the big shift in the field from Dead White Males to women and minorities was in full swing, both in existing personnel policies and in the materials to be studied. The trio “race-class-gender” was on everybody’s lips (though class got little serious consideration—too many leading scholars were Ivy League).

If you wanted to get ahead, you had to talk the talk. That’s what got you hired, published, and promoted. I remember one hiring committee meeting in the mid-’90s, our job being to find a 19th-century American literature specialist. But that wasn’t enough for a few people on the committee, one of them blurting at one point as we considered a candidate, “But he’s not doing race!”

Click here to view original web page at amgreatness.com