Echoes of Mao: Weaponizing Schools With ‘Critical Race Theory’

A silhouette of Mao Zedong under a clouded moon in Wuhan, China, on July 22, 2009. AFP/AFP/Getty Images

Commentary

This is part 19 in a series examining education in the United States.

Long before California’s infamous “ethnic studies” curriculum made national headlines last month for literally suggesting children chant to the Aztec gods of cannibalism and human sacrifice, the insidious weaponization of “race” and “racism” had already overtaken the nation’s government school system.

The racist effort to divide and conquer Americans by “race,” all under the guise of examining everything through the “lens of racism” and fighting “structural” or “systemic” racism, has come to be known as critical race theory, or CRT.

Just think of it as half-baked pseudo-intellectual gobbledygook aimed at stirring up as much racial hatred, resentment, division, and conflict as possible.

Like cult leaders, the growing overpaid legions of tax-funded “experts” in CRT want the public to believe that this is some complicated and mysterious “epidemic” that only overpaid “experts” can understand. But the reality behind CRT is actually pretty simple.

The premise is basically this: All “white people” are racist oppressors with power and privilege, and all non-white people are oppressed victims.

From that flows the silly premise that America—among the least racist nations on earth, studies show—is a “systemically racist” abomination that must be “decolonized” and dismantled.

In fact, any institutions created by peoples or nations of mostly European heritage are evil and must be pulverized. And any people who lack sufficient melanin must repent for their collective guilt.

If all that sounds evil and unhinged, good—it is.

Unfortunately, it’s also now a staple in the diet of impressionable young victims of government schools across America.

The goal isn’t really fighting racism, as its proponents claim.

In fact, a number of studies show that “diversity training,” an offshoot of CRT aiming to put the cult’s views into practice, “can activate bias or spark a backlash,” the Harvard Business Review warned.

“Many participants actually report more animosity toward other groups afterward,” it said.

Duh!

The same is true for children: When they’re bombarded with racial division and hyper-racial extremism, they not only begin thinking in terms of race, they also begin resenting those supposedly in other “groups” alleged to be in conflict with them.

And that’s precisely the point. In the Soviet Union, like Marx decades earlier, totalitarians divided people by “class,” driving a wedge between the “bourgeoisie” and the “proletariat.”

Similar divisions were created and exploited by Chairman Mao in communist China.

In America, where the poor live materially better than the rich in many nations, the “class conflict” narrative was not as effective.

And so, as in National Socialist (Nazi) Germany, socialist and communist agents from abroad and homegrown subversives turned to “race” as the key fault line to exploit.

It has been bubbling beneath the surface in America for years—even decades. But in recent months, it has exploded into the national consciousness as increasingly extreme examples of tax-funded CRT indoctrination spark outrage from parents and normal people.

There’s a long history behind this ideology of hate in America.

Part 6 of this series explored the enormous influence of the Marxist Frankfurt School and its “critical theory” schemes on American culture—and particularly in its government-controlled education system. CRT is an outgrowth of this deadly weapon, adapted to the American scene.

A big part of the lie depends on fraudulent history taught to children such as the almost universally discredited “1619 Project” and the debunked diatribes of communist Howard Zinn, as documented in part 17 of this series.

The end result is disaster.

Tax-Funded CRT at School

Naturally, adults of all “races” with even basic critical-thinking skills, common sense, and a rudimentary understanding of history could see right through the CRT propaganda.

But young children in government schools for five days a week? They make for easy victims. After all, mommy and daddy said to listen to the teacher.

That’s why the forces behind CRT are focusing so heavily on targeting children.

What do CRT and the race-mongering look like in practice?

In California, for example, the newly adopted “Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum,” approved by the state Board of Education on March 18, suggests children seek help from pagan Aztec gods for “a revolutionary spirit” in a chant.

“The chants have a clear implication: the displacement of the Christian god, which is said to be an extension of white supremacist oppression,” writes Christopher F. Rufo.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, the largest district in the nation, has already indicated that it will be requiring “ethnic studies” for graduation starting in 2023. The whole state may eventually follow. And the cancers that begin in California often spread nationwide.

In one of the wealthiest districts in the nation, Silicon Valley’s Cupertino Union School District, third-grade students were reportedly ordered to “deconstruct” their racial, gender, religious, family structure, and sexual identities.

After that, they were told to create an “identity map” and rank themselves based on the “power and privilege” received from the “intersection” of their various “identities.”

“A white, cisgender man, who is able-bodied, heterosexual, considered handsome and speaks English has more privilege than a Black transgender woman,” offered the school materials in an example of how to understand the results.

In short, under this twisted worldview, your melanin content makes you either an oppressor to be destroyed, like the bourgeoisie, or a victim who must destroy others, like the proletariat.

This sort of madness is taking place all across “red” states, too.

North Carolina’s largest school district, Wake County, for instance, launched a campaign to eradicate “whiteness in educational spaces.” As part of that, teachers were ordered to “disrupt whiteness” and “override families,” according to Rufo.

It’s not new, either. In 2017, outraged parents fumed at a Rockingham County, North Carolina, Board of Education meeting after learning that a teacher forced children of European heritage to stand in front of the class and apologize for their “white privilege.”

In Ames, Iowa, and other cities and towns across America in recent years, the “Black Lives Matter Week of Action” has been peddling “diversity and globalism,” “the disruption of the Western nuclear family,” “transgender, queer affirming, and collective value,” and more.

To understand just how aggressive the peddlers of this Marxist narrative in schools have become, consider news reports from mid-March about government-school teachers who plotted to “infiltrate” parents’ groups opposed to the indoctrination, use “hackers” to mess with their communications, and even “expose these people publicly” for speaking out.

Similar Tactics in Communist China

Victims of these tactics who have lived through the horrors that stem from them recognize the same schemes clearly.

Prominent Chinese exile Lily Tang-Williams, who grew up under Mao but eventually fled to the United States, remembers those exact tactics being used in Mao’s government-indoctrination centers for children, masquerading as “public schools.”

“It creates hatred, guilt, and division in our country,” she said about CRT being peddled on children in school. “It is a tool used by the radical left to divide and conquer.”

Having grown up during Mao’s reign and experienced the entire 10-year Cultural Revolution, Williams sounded the alarm about what’s happening in America today.

“Let me tell you, this racist theory is nothing more than a tactic to separate citizens into ‘oppressed’ and ‘oppressor’ classes, and it is something I have heard before,” said Williams, who recently testified before the New Hampshire legislature on this issue.

Mao’s regime sought to destroy the “four olds,” she told The Epoch Times, referring to the mass-murdering communist Chinese tyrant’s campaign to eradicate China’s old ideas, culture, habits, and customs.

“He and his regime used identity politics to divide people into 10 classes: five red and five black,” she explained. “The red classes included poor and lower-middle peasants, workers, revolutionary soldiers, revolutionary cadres, and revolutionary martyrs. The black classes were landlords, rich farmers, counter-revolutionaries, bad-influencers, and rightists.”

Every member of the “black classes” was considered guilty by association, simply for having been born into a family, and was said to have been “born black.”

“Mao urged Red Guards to publicly shame the black classes by raising their fists, making them do self-criticism, confess and denounce themselves, or they would get beat up, locked up in a room to write about their ‘blackness,’ apologize for their families or themselves, and be sent to re-education camps to do hard labor,” Williams continued, adding that some young members of the families would do anything to escape the shame and association, including reporting their own relatives to the Chinese Communist Party.

Tens of millions of Chinese died amid the Cultural Revolution “due to those murderous policies,” said Williams, who serves on the advisory board of U.S. Parents Involved in Education along with this writer and others in the field.

“What is happening in America today with CRT, in our schools, in our workplaces and governmental agencies, really reminds me of what happened during the Cultural Revolution,” she added.

Bad for Children

Aside from being destructive to society, the CRT madness is going to harm children of all types, too, experts say.

“It is horrendous and utterly harmful psychology to tell people, especially young children and teens, who do not believe that they are racists, and may actively despise racism, that there is nothing they can do to stop themselves from being racists,” explained Doctor of Clinical Psychology Gary Thompson with the Early Life Child Psychology and Education Center.

“Woke Supremacy is just as psychologically destructive on people as White Supremacy,” added Thompson, who happens to be a black American.

Thompson told The Epoch Times that many public schools are now teaching children as young as second and third grade that “whiteness is synonymous with evil, that the police systematically hunt down and murder black men deliberately, and all these other highly charged political convictions that they’re teaching as if they’re uncontested fact.”

How to Fight Back

Parents across the nation are scrambling for ways to fight back and protect their children.

Thompson, who also serves on the advisory board of U.S. Parents Involved in Education, said his personal opinion is that attempts by average parents to eliminate CRT from their children’s public school would be “futile.”

“If CRT does not fit your family values, the option of leaving public schools may be a viable option for parents,” he said, echoing a growing sentiment in America as enrollment in public schools continues to plummet.

Partly in response to CRT propaganda, millions of parents have fled government schools over the last year for homeschooling and private schools.

Unfortunately, the CRT madness is no longer confined just to government schools. Even many “woke” elite and self-styled “Christian” schools have been jumping on the bandwagon, so parents must do their due diligence.

Ignoring the voices of some of America’s most prominent black Christian leaders—Voddie Baucham and Bishop E.W. Jackson, for instance—many liberal churches and seminaries have taken the plunge, too.

Some critics have argued that indoctrinating children with CRT at taxpayer expense is already against the law.

Wu Wenyuan, executive director of the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation, has been fighting the battle in California and beyond for years. She argues that CRT in the classroom is “illegal and unconstitutional.”

“Teaching CRT that’s predicated on racial divisions and a social dichotomy of victim versus oppressor fundamentally violates the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—which guarantees equal protection of the laws—Title VI/VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, California’s constitutional principle of equal treatment, and a plethora of anti-discrimination laws,” she warned.

In Florida, top officials are taking action. In fact, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis just promised the ideology would not be included in his state’s public schools.

“Let me be clear there is no room in our classrooms for things like critical race theory, teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other is not worth one red cent of taxpayer money,” DeSantis said.

“They’re trying to make people view each other based on race, I want to do the opposite. I want to treat people as individuals,” he added. “I want to treat people based on character.”

But of course, dividing people is the goal—not an unintended side effect—and the constant appeals to “white supremacy” are simply a red herring designed to force critics to remain silent.

The stakes couldn’t be higher.

CRT’s leaders and cult-like adherents have labeled virtually everything the far-left and Marxists hate as “white supremacy”: the U.S. Constitution, Christianity, math, the rule of law, punctuality, individualism, Western civilization, the nuclear family, objective truth, and more.

Nothing and nobody is safe.

Adults largely recognize the evil and idiocy of this. However, America’s children—like children in other nations who have been indoctrinated to hate their parents and their compatriots before committing ghastly atrocities—do not know better.

It will be up to parents to protect their own children, and thereby the nation and its freedoms.

Alex Newman is an award-winning international journalist, educator, author, and consultant who co-wrote the book “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children.” He is the executive director of Public School Exit, serves as CEO of Liberty Sentinel Media, and writes for diverse publications in the United States and abroad.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.