Anti-Racist Education

The American in me chafes at compulsion, chafes at unequal treatment (especially unequal treatment before the law), chafes at injustice. However, even if you believe those sins are embedded on our schools, so-called anti-racist education doesn't correct them, it perpetuates them:

This summer, the tragic legacy of American racism came to the fore. This has created propitious, historic opportunities to confront real societal challenges. Yet “anti-racism,” for all its high-minded claims and surface appeal, proves to be, on close examination, a farrago of reductive dogmatism, coercion, and anti-intellectual zealotry that’s remarkably unconcerned with either improving schooling or ameliorating prejudice.

There’s a tragic bait-and-switch at work. Americans who care passionately about equality and justice have been dragooned into advancing an incoherent, illiberal agenda. Aspiring anti-racists are mounting a misguided assault on the very mores and habits of mind that undergird liberty, equality, and healthy communities.

Reasonable readers may regard such assertions with skepticism. How can “anti-racist” education be anything but healthy? After all, it’s self-evident that we want students to reject racism. The simple answer is that the doctrine of “anti-racism” doesn’t offer what’s promised on the tin.

The label “anti-racism” is wildly deceiving — a crude bit of rhetorical flim-flammery, akin to when Jim Crow Southerners rechristened the American Civil War as the “War of Northern Aggression.” No, a more fitting sobriquet for the movement that marches under the banner of “anti-racist education” is “anti-educational authoritarianism.” This is a strong statement, but one we believe we can support.

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