Virginia's Loudoun County: "Ground Zero" In The Fight Against "Woke" Education
At Free Beacon, Alex Nester writes:

A black mother slammed critical race theory at a school board meeting in the nation's richest county Tuesday, comparing the radical education standards to tactics used by Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan to demean black people.

"Critical race theory is not an honest dialogue, it is a tactic that was used by Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan on slavery very many years ago to dumb down my ancestors so we could not think for ourselves," Shawntel Cooper said at the Loudoun County School Board meeting Tuesday night. "Critical race theory is racist, it is abusive, it discriminates against one's color. ... You can not tell me what is or is not racist."

A source close to Cooper told the Washington Free Beacon that the mother doesn't want to speak out nationally, citing fear of negative publicity. The Loudoun County School Board did not return a request for comment.

Parents of Loudoun County Public Schools students have rebelled against the district's efforts to adopt radical curriculum standards. One parent group launched a recall campaign against six of the Loudoun County School Board members in March. Other groups have tracked the school board's attempts to silence parents who oppose the district's recently adopted "culturally responsive" curriculum framework.

From the Daily Caller:

CRT holds that America is fundamentally racist, yet it teaches people to view every social interaction and person in terms of race. Its adherents pursue "antiracism" through the end of merit, objective truth and the adoption of race-based policies.

John McWhorter at Manhattan Institute (from a conversation -- hence the "John McWhorter":s I've left in):

The heart of critical race theory is an idea that all intellectual and moral endeavor must be filtered through a commitment to overturning power differentials.

...John H McWhorter:
All I mean is that what you've got as a religion where you're basing an entire worldview, partly but significantly, on requiring suspensions of disbelief. That is a major part of this new form of anti-racism. And so if you tell somebody that all race-based disparities are due to unequal opportunity, frankly, any nine year old could figure out that that is not completely true. And yet you're expected to pretend that that makes sense. If someone like you or me says, "Yes, there is the occasional rogue or under-trained white cop who kills a Black guy in a poor Black community. But the black guy is of much ... He's much more in danger of being killed by somebody he knows from three blocks away." And you could argue that that's the bigger problem. That makes perfect sense. That is two plus two equals four. And yet you and I both know that in certain circles, if you say that, you get hunted out of the corral like Yosemite Sam, has a gun and he's shooting Bugs Bunny. You're just not allowed to say it.

John H McWhorter:
You have to suspend your disbelief, and that's religious. And then there are all sorts of other aspects of it. And so to be racist is your original sin. White privilege is the original sin. You have to always atone for it, but it's never going to go away. There is the end of days when America "comes to terms with racism", which is a phrase that has no ... Talk about linguistics. Has no meaning whatsoever. But people talk about it because this is a religion that has that particular kind of structure.

John H McWhorter:
There's the evangelism that one sees. There is the sense of going against its tenants as making you a bad person. So for example, Andrew Sullivan isn't allowed to work at New York magazine because a lot of the woke workers feel dangerous around him. Now consider that that happened during the pandemic. These people aren't even in a building together, and yet the idea is that, abstractly, they feel like they're in danger because of his writings. They're treating him as a heretic. So when you go against these CRT views, it's not just that you have a different view, it's that you are somebody who needs to be put in the stocks and flogged. All of it is ominously parallel to a certain fantasy version of devout Christianity.

John H McWhorter:
But the main part is the suspension of disbelief. As you and I know, so much of what we're told as enlightenment on racism, doesn't make any sense, and yet you're supposed to enter into a pact where you pretend it does, and hence the whole idea that race discussions are complicated, that it's deep, the race thing with the idea that it's somehow as complicated as quantum physics. All of that means white people and Black people in a pact. And this gets into Shelby Steele. Where white people are asked to pretend that two plus two doesn't equal four. And if they do that, then Black people will absolve them as being not racist. But that little dance, as Shelby has put it for so long, it doesn't make any Black person less poor and it doesn't get us one millimeter past race in any significant way.