"No, Louisiana Republicans did not demand an end to teaching about racism"
Writer and New Orleans native Quin Hillyer addresses a terrible rumor about Republicans
A New Orleans native has hit the bullseye with such precision that we’d like to share this piece with you in its entirety. We found it originally HERE, at The Advocate.
We had heard some rumblings from Leftists last week that Louisiana Republicans wanted to “ban teaching about racism.” We blew it off because it sounds like more trash from the reactionaries, what we’ve come to expect from the Transgressive Left.
Washington Examiner writer Quin Hillyer addresses the issue below:
By: Quin Hillyer
Despite earlier reporting, the Louisiana Republican Party did not pass a resolution last weekend to “forbid the study of racism at colleges and universities.” More broadly, national reporting on “diversity, equity, and inclusion” efforts and on critical race theory consistently misrepresents the true target of conservative opposition.
Nobody of note opposes the study of racism or slavery. The resolution passed by the Louisiana Republicans certainly doesn’t.
While the state GOP has done numerous objectionable things in recent years, the State Central Committee in this instance did nothing outlandish.
The word “racism” doesn’t even appear in the party’s resolution, or anywhere in the 47-page minutes of the entire meeting, of which this one resolution was a tiny part. Instead, the resolution calls for “the removal of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs” at state colleges, and repeatedly focuses its condemnations and explanations on the DEI bureaucracies and the “official campus polic[ies]” they promulgate.
Nowhere does the resolution talk about race within the curricula of the colleges, or even mention course contents or the word “curriculum.” Its ire is aimed at “administrative DEI offices” that it claims are “not covered by norms of academic freedom” while they “advance primarily political aims rather than educational aims.”
Nationwide, conservative attempts to rein in DEI bureaucracies and training or critical race theory and its derivatives have been falsely characterized as efforts to “not teach about racism.”
That’s what happened when Gov. Ron DeSantis led such an effort in Florida, for example. Despite the complaints, the law he sponsored, even by The Associated Press account, merely “bars instruction that says members of one race are inherently racist, and that they should feel guilt for past actions committed by others of the same race or that a person’s status as privileged or oppressed is necessarily determined by their race.”
Meanwhile, the same Florida law expands requirements for classroom coverage of “the ramifications of prejudice, racism and stereotyping on individual freedoms,” along with “the history of slavery, segregation and racial oppression, and of contributions by Blacks in U.S. history.”
The goal isn’t to hide racism. The goal of anti-CRT efforts is to stop teaching that one race is inherently oppressive. And the goal of anti-DEI efforts is to stop setting employment and disciplinary policies which make that assumption and stop installing bureaucracies that implement them.
It is not a mere assertion that DEI bureaucracies have added to bureaucratic bloat on campuses nationwide; it is fact. In the 25 years ending in 2012, college bureaucracies grew at twice the rate of college faculties, and the problem has gotten markedly worse since. Study after study shows that out-of-control administrative spending is making colleges ever-less affordable. At last report, Yale University literally had more administrators than students. And an outsized proportion of those are DEI staffers, at an average of 45 of them at each of 65 major universities surveyed.
At the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill), more than 13 times as many staffers are devoted to DEI as to serving people with disabilities.
Moreover, no matter how many times pundits say opposition to DEI or CRT derivatives involves just some anodyne teaching about racism, the facts are irrefutably otherwise. All across the country, the official materials promulgated for DEI and CRT feature highly tendentious and ideological, quite arguably radical, teachings with which large pluralities of Americans disagree. The reports and direct citations are voluminous.
In an Illinois school district, for example, CRT instructs teachers and students to fight against “the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and principles of constitutional law.” In a Missouri district, teachers are trained to fight against “whiteness” and “colorblindness” while saying it is a duty to be “advocating for changes in political, economic, and social life.” And even at the Smithsonian museums, “whiteness” is portrayed as highly objectionable, with its supposedly baleful characteristics listed as including “self reliance,” the “structure” of the “nuclear family,” the “scientific method” using “objective, rational linear thinking,” the “Protestant work ethic” emphasizing that “hard work is the key to success,” and admonitions to “respect authority” and “plan for the future.”
Some people have spent decades crusading against racism while spending those same decades opposing this ideological claptrap which teaches that hard work and respect for authority are disreputable elements of “whiteness.” Indeed, many of us think that by opposing this junk, we are not trying to hide racism, but rather to eradicate it.
New Orleans native Quin Hillyer is a senior commentary writer and editor for the Washington Examiner, working from the Gulf Coast. He can be reached at Qhillyer@WashingtonExaminer.com. His other columns appear at www.washingtonexaminer.com/author/quin-hillyer.