Kentucky parents are organizing to fend off the intrusion of critical race theory into their schools.
The news that a new social-equity course was being planned at Highlands High School in Fort Thomas, Ky., first started bouncing around Facebook early this spring.
A proposed syllabus was leaked online. Students who signed up for the elective course would “develop awareness and engage in constructive discussion about social justice and diversity issues,” it read. They would learn about “the intersectionality of gender, race, class, and sexuality,” and begin to “create an action plan for future social change.”
Guest speakers were being lined up. The students would watch Dave Chappelle’s “8:46” YouTube special, where the comedian engages in a frank and explicit conversation about American racism in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police last summer.
There would be “required textbooks” – Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist and Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility – that for this class students would be asked to buy, with the hope that “these books will stay with you as a reminder of the work that we (society) need to do.”
The battle lines were drawn. There were dueling petitions for and against the class. And as has happened repeatedly in schools nationwide, parents and community members quickly retreated to their respective ideological camps.
To opponents of the course, it was apparent this was an attempt to inject critical race theory into the school, even if the syllabus doesn’t specifically mention it. “Anyone who believes this particular course is not critical race theory doesn’t understand what critical race theory is,” said Maggie McCluskey, a mom who helped lead the opposition to the class.
To supporters of the course, the opponents were flaunting their white privilege and trying to whitewash American history. “Many critics want to shroud themselves in the European fairytale that downplays the role of slavery and racism in our country’s foundation,” wrote Bonnie Jean Feldkamp, a newspaper columnist and Fort Thomas native who in May attended a packed community meeting about the proposed course.
The Kentucky case is emblematic of the cultural battles raging across the country in American schools, both public and private. While much of the attention has focused on schools on the liberal coasts or in big progressive cities, groups such as Parents Defending Education have noted that in many cases, like in Fort Thomas, the battles are raging in conservative communities in red states, including Utah, Oklahoma, Texas, and Florida.
In these fights, conservative parents see themselves as pushing back against left-wing racial activism – critical race theory, in their minds – that is intentionally shrouded in murky diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. In this view, activists used Floyd’s tragic death last summer to further worm their way into the nation’s classrooms. These concerned parents point at example after example of kids being forced to write essays about systemic racism and their so-called white privilege, and staff members being urged to rat on their colleagues for not being racially sensitive enough or for failing to fully buy into the new ideology.
The Left responds that most schools aren’t teaching critical race theory, which they describe as an obscure graduate-school analytical tool and a right-wing bogeyman. Rather, they say, they just want to address systemic racism by presenting students with a clear-eyed view of history and an understanding of how racial oppression and privilege are woven into America’s institutions. The whole dustup, they say, is just a desperate effort by Republicans to whitewash the nation’s often uncomfortable history and to fire up their base for political benefit.
In Kentucky, both sides of the debate accused the other of being uninformed. Neither side spent much time engaging with the other.
Opponents of the Highlands High social-equity course worry that injecting a divisive, racially charged ideology into the community will end up tearing it apart. They worry that the millstone that is the nation’s often racist past is being hung around the necks of white children.
Matthew Kleier, whose daughter attends Highlands, said the suggestion that the community even needs the course is insulting.
“This is not what our town is about,” Kleier said. “We are an inclusive town. We want diversity in our town.”
‘If you’re white, then you’re a racist’
Located on the south bank of the Ohio River, Fort Thomas is a small, middle-class to upper-middle-class suburb, about a ten-minute drive from downtown Cincinnati. Residents who spoke to National Review described it as a close-knit community where neighbors help neighbors, and good people donate generously to the local schools.
Fort Thomas is very white – about 93 percent of Highland High School’s roughly 1,000 students are white, according to state data – and also pretty conservative. Last year, 58 percent of the voters in Campbell County voted for Donald Trump for president. But the north end of the county, where Fort Thomas is located, has been turning purple, and new residents are bringing new ideas.
When the 11-page syllabus for the social-equity course was leaked online a couple of months back, McCluskey said she immediately had concerns. She didn’t appreciate the language, particularly in the Chappelle video, where he repeatedly uses curse words starting with F and N. In the video, he calls conservative commentator Candace Owens a “rotten bitch” and makes a derogatory comment about her. And he calls Fox News host Laura Ingraham “a regular-ass white bitch with a platform,” because of her criticism of his friend, NBA star Lebron James.
“That show in particular I felt was incredibly inappropriate for a high-school level,” said McCluskey, a mother of two children who aren’t school-age yet.
Then there are the books. In his How to be an Antiracist, Kendi argues in favor of race-based discrimination in order to achieve “equity,” writing that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”
In White Fragility, DiAngelo writes that “white people raised in Western society are conditioned into a white supremacist worldview because it is the bedrock of our society and its institutions.” And she suggests that white people should be viewed as a racist collective socialized to “fundamentally hate black people.”
To McCluskey, the message is clear: “It doesn’t matter who you are as a person. It doesn’t matter what your character is. If you’re white, then you’re racist.”
There were no required texts offering a perspective of race or diversity differing from Kendi’s and DiAngelo’s. To opponents of the course, it all looked very one-sided.
Concerned conservative parents began meeting and discussing the syllabus. They also started educating themselves about critical race theory, or CRT, a Marxist-inspired and self-avowedly activist academic movement that argues racism in the U.S. is collective, structural, institutional, and systemic. Adherents often call for radically altering the American and capitalist systems.
The parents started showing up to voice concerns at meetings of Highland High’s Site-Based Decision Making Council, an elected body of teachers and parents that approves or rejects curriculum changes. They also reached out to their state representative, Joseph Fischer, who filed Bill Request 60. Among its provisions, the proposed legislation would prohibit public schools in Kentucky from teaching that any race or sex is inherently superior, discriminating against students or making them feel discomfort based on their race or sex, or teaching that meritocracy and hard work are racist, sexist, or oppressive.
In an interview with National Review, Fischer said he lifted much of the language from similar anti-CRT bills currently making their way through Republican-led statehouses. The bill doesn’t mention critical race theory, but Fischer acknowledges that’s what he’s pushing back on. And, he said, knowing that there was likely to be a showdown at the Highlands High Site-Based Decision Making Council meeting in May, he filed the bill so parents opposing the social-equity course “would have some ammunition going into that hearing.”
‘A dumb white girl with white privilege’
The Highlands High social-equity course was devised by two school employees, Trinity Walsh, the school’s college and career counselor, and Elise Carter, a business teacher.
Attempts by National Review to reach both Walsh and Carter on their work phones, emails, and cellphones were unsuccessful. Attempts to reach the school’s outgoing principal, Matthew Bertasso, and members of the decision-making council also were unsuccessful.
However, Walsh has addressed the controversy over the course on her Facebook page. And in May 2020, just days after Floyd’s killing, she wrote a guest column for a magazine in her hometown of Loveland, Ohio, where she addressed her views on race and growing up with “white privilege that I didn’t even know I had.”
In the column, Walsh comes across as well-intentioned – though somewhat groveling – and honestly trying to grapple with race, and her role in improving the conversation.
She wrote about growing up and going to school in Loveland, which she described as “a pretty white town.” Her family didn’t talk much about race, she wrote, but she’s always considered herself “the least racist person around.” She also acknowledges that her social circle doesn’t include too many people of color. She describes her friendship with Carter, who is black, as “one of the great blessings in my life.” She wrote that she is grateful that Carter “continues to educate this white girl about the reality of the world.”
“If you’re a dumb white girl with white privilege like me, start asking questions,” she wrote.
In her Facebook post about the social-equity course, Walsh pushes back on accusations that the class was just thrown together. Rather, she wrote, she and Carter had been working on it for three years, investing “countless hours” and their own financial resources. The leaked syllabus was only about one-fifth of the actual course she and Carter had designed to help students learn “more about our society and really start to problem solve how to make it better.”
“Our hearts are pure,” she wrote, “and our intentions to help bridge a gap is true.”
Talking past each other
In the ongoing cultural fights over how schools should teach about diversity and the legacy of racism in this country, the two sides often appear to be intentionally talking past one another. In Kentucky, the two sides don’t appear to have talked much at all.
In her Facebook post, Walsh wrote that even though the proposed Highlands social-equity class has garnered a lot of attention, “only a handful of people have actually reached out to talk to us.” She noted that the leaked syllabus contained Carter’s and her contact information.
Kleier said he hasn’t reached out. “I don’t know if anybody has,” he said.
McCluskey also said she hasn’t spoken to either Walsh or Carter. “I wish that I had prior to the site-based meeting. I wish that I had reached out to one of the teachers.”
Fischer acknowledged that he didn’t read the leaked syllabus before filing his anti-CRT bill.
“I’m not personally familiar with what’s in all that, and I did not do the research to read all of what was in there,” he told National Review. Rather, he said, he studied the language of anti-CRT bills in other states, and “it just made common sense to me that these should not be taught to impressionable minds and a captive audience of kids. So that’s basically what I went with.”
To Jon Valant, an education expert at the center-left Brookings Institute, the whole debate is a kind of calculated political theater. In an email to National Review he said he believes the GOP has been manufacturing political issues in education – including concerns about critical race theory and transgender student athletes – “to scare voters and score political points.”
“I don’t think the reality in schools looks anything like what’s being portrayed in a lot of conservative media,” wrote Valant, adding that there are more serious issues “coming off the most disrupted, messy year in the modern history of American schooling.”
In many cases, school leaders insist that they aren’t teaching critical race theory at all, and that CRT is not part of their curriculum. In many cases that’s likely true. There are more than 3 million public-school teachers in the U.S., and the vast majority are not trained in critical race theory, said Robert Pondiscio, an education scholar at the center-right American Enterprise Institute. Instead, CRT-related concepts seem to be getting thrown in a blender with anti-racist advocacy, “culturally responsive pedagogy,” and other diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, and the results are showing up in classrooms, in corporate training sessions, and on bumper stickers.
“It just won’t do to complain about what is or is not critical race theory,” Pondiscio told National Review. “You have to look at how all of this stuff is being digested and implemented by 3.7 million mere mortals who are not critical race scholars in our classrooms.”
Pondiscio, a former teacher at Harlem charter schools and at a South Bronx public school, recently wrote a column asking: “Is a professed commitment to the tenets of antiracism now non-negotiable in our profession?” In the column, he quotes a veteran teacher leaving her high-performing charter school over its embrace of CRT and anti-racist ideology. Pondiscio also pushes back against the recent “shifts in ideology among education leaders,” including the view that the former American ideal of color-blindness is itself a passive form of bigotry because it ignores past and ongoing discrimination.
“The idea of color-blindness was not a fig leaf to cover racist attitudes. It was an earnest, moral commitment, and it still is on the part of a number of people,” Pondiscio said. “If you want to tell people who still believe in that ideal that they are not only wrong, but harboring racist ideas, then you’ve probably, at the very least, alienated a box car number of Americans who you need on your side.”
‘It’s the preaching it that they object to’
Typically, opponents of the new racialized ideology are accused of trying to gaslight history.
Republican-led legislative efforts such as Fischer’s, designed to push back on critical race theory and anti-racist ideology, are instead described in the mainstream media as efforts to limit teaching about race and the history of slavery and racism. A recent New York Times headline declared that Republicans, not activist educators, are trying to “Rattle American Schools.” Likewise, critical race theory typically is discussed in vague terms that ignore its radical roots.
The Fort Thomas parents who spoke to National Review said they have no issue with students learning the true history of the U.S., warts and all. And they said they have no issue with teachers discussing the legacy of slavery and racism that has greatly contributed to black Americans being behind other groups in many important ways, including socioeconomically. Instead, the parents draw the line at teaching groups of children that their skin color makes them inherently victims or oppressors, or that they are somehow collectively responsible for the sins of the past.
For most opponents of anti-racist ideology, “it’s not teaching it that they object to, it’s the preaching it that they object to,” Pondiscio said.
He rejects the idea that there’s a right-wing conspiracy to neglect teaching the uglier episodes in American history. The bigger problem is that American students too often aren’t learning history or civics at all, he said, pointing to National Assessment of Educational Progress reports that show less than a quarter of American twelfth-graders are proficient in civics, and only 12 percent are proficient in U.S. history.
When it comes to teaching about controversial current events and politics, Pondiscio is an advocate of teachers’ taking a strictly neutral role. When he was teaching civics, he said, he considered it a failure if at the end of the class his students knew anything about his politics.
“There needs to be some discipline in the profession to say, ‘Hey teacher, leave your activism at home. This is not about you. This is about the kids in front of you,’” Pondiscio said.
‘I think we have a lot of common ground’
In late May, a large crowd gathered in the Highlands High School Performing Arts Center for a meeting of the Site-Based Decision Making Council. The council’s meetings usually are sparsely attended, but McCluskey and Kleier both said upward of 200 people showed up.
More mundane local topics were discussed, but the social-equity course was the main draw, according to The Hilltopper student newspaper. Only 20 people were allowed to speak. Twelve supported the new course, including three students. Seven speakers were opposed, according to the paper.
Bertasso, the principal, said the course had created “unnecessary division” in the community. Ultimately, the course was tabled for next year. The student newspaper said it was due to scheduling restraints, but according to Feldkamp’s column, Bertasso said the social-equity course was tabled because “it did not pass the neutrality test.”
Kleier believes the course’s opponents temporarily fought back an effort to inject CRT into the school. “We recognized it, and we kiboshed it right away,” he said.
In her Facebook post, Walsh bemoaned a lack of trust that “has tainted what we saw (as) an opportunity for us to do some good for our students.” But, she said, the controversy “has pushed us to create something even better than we could have even imagined.”
McCluskey said she’s frustrated by the “biggest misconception” that “if you’re against the social-equity course as it stood with the draft syllabus, that you are against any diversity discussion or courses at the school. From everyone I’ve spoken to, that’s not the case at all.”
She said she’s started reaching out to proponents of the course, looking for areas of agreement.
“I have friends that signed the petition in favor of the class. I think we have a lot of common ground,” she said. “I think it’s just sitting down one-on-one as a community, like we’ve always been, and upholding the traditions of we come together and we work together and we help each other, and let’s figure out what everybody really believes we need in this class, and make it happen in a way that will make everybody happy – without teaching critical race theory.”