If you want to understand the dilemma of today’s Democratic Party, have a look at this comic book called Racial Capitalism and Prison Abolition.
Thanks to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, this comic book, or its close equivalent, will soon be forced on Minnesota’s students. Because Walz has just added an “ethnic studies” strand to his state’s social studies standards, all Minnesota schoolchildren must shortly be exposed to a “discipline” that is essentially a cousin of CRT. As part of their mandatory ethnic-studies training, Minnesota’s students are going to have to “develop an analysis of racial capitalism,” an abstruse concept created by theorists of “black Marxism.”
The idea of “racial capitalism” is breathtakingly radical. It delegitimates America’s free enterprise system, America’s legal system, and even the very belief that there can be such a thing as “crime,” under current circumstances. Implicit in the racial capitalism concept — and sometimes explicit — is the belief that America’s unjust system may need to be swept away by a violent rebellion or revolution. It’s all in the comic book. This is what civics has become under the governance of Tim Walz.
Last September, at the height of the 2024 presidential campaign, I reported that Brian Lozenski, a Macalester College professor appointed by the Walz administration to help design the “implementation framework” for the new ethnic studies standards, had called for the “overthrow” of the United States. I said at the time that Lozenski — Minnesota’s leading theorist of ethnic studies and the main advocate behind the new ethnic studies requirement — was no outlier. Nor was his call for revolution a fluke. Read the comic book and you’ll see why. The belief that America’s political and economic system must be overthrown is a clear implication of the racial capitalism concept.
About a week ago, Governor Walz made news when he said that the Democratic Party ought to double down on DEI. When it comes to woke policies, said Walz: “We got ourselves in this mess because we weren’t bold enough to stand up and say, ‘You’re damn right we’re proud of these policies. We’re going to put them in, and we are going to execute them.’”
I don’t doubt that Governor Walz aims to push his radical ethnic studies standards on Minnesota’s families. Yet Walz is simultaneously trying to suppress the truth of what is actually in his new standards. He has actively hidden the “implementation framework” that Lozenski and his fellow radicals created for the new ethnic studies standards — standards devised under the supervision of Walz’s own administration.
The contradiction between Walz’s curricular secrecy and his bold public endorsement of DEI is striking. This is the dilemma faced by today’s Democratic Party. The party’s activist base is way too far left for the country to stomach. Walz thus has little choice but to play to the Left while simultaneously pretending that their actual positions don’t exist. The open emergence of a socialist wing of the Democratic Party hasn’t helped. Explicit leftist radicalism is now so deeply rooted in the party that efforts to disguise it are at once unavoidable and impossible.
It’s been noted that the Democrats are dangerously in thrall to “the groups.” Leftist nonprofits used to be a force multiplier for the party. Nowadays, however, their maximalist ideological demands tend to pull the party away from the electorate. Minnesota’s new ethnic studies standards and their “implementation framework” exemplify the perils of “the groups.” Walz turned the task of designing Minnesota’s ethnic studies program over to politically radical activists, rather than to conventional academic subject-matter experts. That placated the Democratic base, yet it’s led to a series of ideological fiascoes ever since.
As written and ratified, Walz’s ethnic studies standards are filled with far-left concepts like “racial capitalism” and “fugitivity.” That radicalism is at least partially disguised by the unfamiliar nature of this jargon — and by the brevity of the standards. As the “implementation framework” for the standards, and its associated materials, are released, however, the truth is bound to come out.
This, I argued last September, is why the Walz administration broke its promise to release a draft of the implementation framework for public comment by early August of 2024. Walz was holding onto the framework to suppress any controversy before the election. Once I made Lozenski’s call for the overthrow of the United States public (Lozenski was one of the chief authors of the ethnic studies “implementation framework”), the Walz administration had even more reason to hold back the framework’s text.
Even after the election, Walz’s administration refused to release the implementation framework. It was obtained only when Minnesota’s conservative Center of the American Experiment filed a lawsuit against the state. At that point, the Minnesota Department of Education sent the framework to the American Experiment, yet simultaneously disavowed it by saying that it would not be adopted “in its current form.” The supposed reason was that the implementation framework does not properly align with the ethnic studies standards it is supposed to explain and amplify. Actually, the standards and their implementation framework align all too well. After all, the same groups that designed the standards designed the implementation framework. Walz’s disavowal of the framework was simply an effort to avoid responsibility for the radicalism of his own ethnic studies program — and an effort to distance himself from Lozenski’s call for revolution.
There is a kernel of truth to the Minnesota Education Department’s excuse, however. Rather than giving detailed instructions on how to teach every jot and tittle of the ethnic studies standards, the implementation framework repeatedly instructs teachers to partner with — and subordinate their pedagogy to — the very same radical groups that designed the standards in the first place. This is at once a technique of self-dealing (these radical groups will receive a perpetual bonanza in consulting contracts), a guarantee of ideological purity, and a way of keeping the details of the recommended curriculum under wraps until leftist nonprofits are actually brought into partnership with Minnesota’s schools.
Katherine Kersten, a senior policy fellow at the Center of the American Experiment, has published an excellent analysis of the ethnic studies implementation framework forced into the open by her think tank’s lawsuit. As she points out, the framework fundamentally “shifts the mission of public education from academic instruction to political activism.” Students are to become “change agents” transforming their communities through “activism and resistance.” Teachers must subordinate their voices to the political activism of their students, their community, and above all to the radical nonprofits they’re to bring into partnership with their schools.
The ethnic studies implementation framework has plenty of troubling passages — more than Kersten can fully itemize in her report. She describes, for example, the intrusive thought-reform exercises that teachers will have to endure to break down their existing identities and turn themselves into radical activists. We can add, however, that students must also change their identities. Students are to be given exercises, for example, in which they ask themselves the following questions: “How does ethnic studies instruction and support help me understand white supremacy as a structural condition? How do I recognize the ways white supremacy shows up in my everyday life (e.g. at home, school, community)? How does ethnic studies instruction and support allow me to form an emerging identity as an anti-racist individual and advocate?” Students, in short, must locate and purge their supposed inner white supremacist.
Despite these disturbing indicators, even the ethnic studies implementation framework tends to bury the specifics of classroom instruction under abstractions. The real curriculum is left to be dictated by the radical groups meant to partner with the schools. Kersten and her colleague Catrin Wigfall recognize this. That’s why each has written about a group currently designing ethnic studies lesson plans to be peddled to districts across the state.
That group is RIDGS, the Center for Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota. Kersten describes RIDGS as an amalgam of “oppression studies” departments — more political than academic, and pervaded by a revolutionary ideology that calls on students to “organize” for “resistance” to America’s irredeemably racist system. Kersten highlights the Racial Capitalism and Prison Abolition “zine” (“magazine” in the form of a fancy comic book), and other similar materials that RIDGS promotes as “racial justice resources” for college students. Some of these resources, she says, are very likely to be included in the K–12 ethnic studies lesson plans now being developed and compiled by RIDGS. And again, RIDGS is endorsed as an ethnic studies provider by Minnesota’s implementation framework. In fact, according to Kersten, a couple of representatives of RIDGS helped develop Minnesota’s ethnic studies standards and implementation framework to begin with.
Now we’ve hit pay dirt. The whole elaborate structure of Governor Walz’s ethnic studies program, from the condensed and sometimes difficult-to-interpret “standards” to the clearly political but still relatively abstract “implementation framework,” is designed to simultaneously mandate and disguise what students will actually study. The fancy comic zine on racial capitalism promoted by RIDGS is what students will actually see. It takes a lot of digging to figure that out.
Even now, we can’t say for certain that this particular zine will be included in RIDGS’s still unreleased ethnic studies lesson plans. It seems very likely that it will, however — unless this report turns the comic book taboo. But even if this particular comic isn’t included in RIDGS’s ethnic studies lesson plans, some effective equivalent will have to be. The standards say that students have to understand and analyze the concept of “racial capitalism.” There are very few materials suitable for teaching that concept to high school students. This zine does quite a good job of it. Whether this particular publication or some de facto clone of it is actually used in RIDGS’s ethnic studies lesson plans, these are the ideas that must be conveyed to the students of Minnesota.
So what does our Marxist comic book actually say? Well, it’s not long, and there are nice illustrations, so you can read it for yourself. For those with a low tolerance for Marxist comic books, however, here is the gist.
The American system produces inequality through capitalist private ownership, which concentrates the vast majority of wealth into the hands of a tiny few, enabling them to effectively steal the labor of everyone else. Capitalist exploitation is backed up by the state, which holds a monopoly on violence. The state gets to define what kinds of violence are permitted and which are not (“illegal” immigration, for example). The police and the military back up the state yet are unaccountable to the communities they patrol. Today’s police, in fact, directly descend from the runaway-slave patrols of old. The entire American system is thus inherently unjust.
Furthermore, the comic book continues, the capitalist system uses the idea of racial superiority to solidify its exploitation of the working class. The idea of racial differences foments conflict, thereby preventing the working class from uniting to throw off its exploitative capitalist masters. The state also criminalizes poverty by classifying basic survival techniques like shoplifting or fare evasion as illegal. In effect, capitalism both creates poverty and criminalizes the condition of being poor. In the service of capitalism, the state also warehouses the masses of poor unemployed persons in prisons. Large-scale incarceration thereby reduces the risk of a mass uprising of the unemployed against the system.
All of these processes have been identified and explained, says the zine, by black Marxists like Cedric Robinson, Robin D. G. Kelly, the Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Angela Davis. (The portraits of these figures feature the best and most appealing art in the “zine.”)
That, as I say, is the gist of this Marxist magazine. It is, of course, ideological and extreme. But it really does help to explain support for Democrat-backed policies that are often nowadays dismissed by conservatives as simply crazy. Why do so many Democratic prosecutors refuse to prosecute crimes? Why no cash bail? Why California’s refusal, until only very recently, to punish shoplifting? Democrats seem to have distanced themselves from slogans like “defund the police,” but the zine provides a rationale for precisely that policy. Remember, this is Minnesota, where the George Floyd incident occurred and where calls to abolish the police first broke out. The radicals behind that movement are the radicals behind Governor Walz’s ethnic studies standards. This is what they believe.
Walz, and even the activists he invited to create his new ethnic studies standards, have turned somersaults to avoid having the true curriculum exposed. Nor was Brian Lozenski’s video call for the overthrow of the United States meant to reach more than a select audience of true believers. And yet last week, Walz was calling for Democrats to double down on woke and to stand by DEI. Walz wants to brag on his progressive credentials without having to admit precisely what that implies. Walz is walking a precarious tightrope, like the Democratic Party as a whole.
It certainly looks as though Walz is preparing for a presidential run. Whether that eventuates or not, however, many students will pay the price of his doubling down on woke — in shameful attacks on their supposedly internalized white supremacy, in the poisoning of their civic understanding, and in the continued deterioration of civil peace sure to result from Minnesota’s mad curriculum. All that is collateral damage from the Democrats’ new dilemma. You can read about it for yourself in a Marxist comic book.
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