Indiana School Administrator Nails CRT’s Racism

BUCK: An Indiana school administrator named Tony Kinnett wanted to explain what he sees. When people talk about CRT, what does it actually look like? How does it manifest in schools? And here it is.

KINNETT: I’m the science coach and admin in the largest public school district in Indiana. I’m in dozens of classrooms a week. So I see exactly what we’re teaching our students. When we tell you that schools aren’t teaching critical race theory, that it’s nowhere in our standards, that’s misdirection. We don’t have the quotes and theories as state standards per se. We do have critical race theory in how we teach.

We tell our teachers to treat students differently based on color; we tell our students that every problem is a result of “white men” and that “everything Western Civilization built is racist,” “Capitalism is a tool of white supremacy.” Those are straight out of Kimberle Crenshaw’s main points verbatim in Critical Race Theory: The Writings that Formed the Movement.

This is in math, history, science, English, the arts, and it’s not slowing down. If students of color have lower reading scores, it’s because of inequity, he said. Therefore, we take from the “white students” and give to the “colored students.” That’s Richard Delgado, straight out of CRT: An Introduction.

“All teaching is political, with reality and facts taking the back seat.” That’s Gloria Ladson-Billings, who outlined how she saw Critical Race Theory fleshed out in public schools in 1995. When schools tell you that we aren’t teaching Critical Race Theory, it means one thing: Go away and look into our affairs no further.

CLAY: Well, that’s pretty well said.

BUCK: Yeah.

CLAY: And I think it’s important. There’s an attempt to say, “Oh, critical race theory, they want to take out teaching of history.” That’s not accurate, right? Nobody’s pretending that slavery didn’t exist. The difference is what it means going forward. What critical race theory is trying to instill in our children is that their identity defines whether or not they can be successful.

Which is an identity that they don’t choose themselves — i.e., your race if you’re black, white, Asian, Hispanic — and it’s fundamentally not true if you just look at the data, Buck. And I wish we talked more about data like this. I’m gonna hit our audience with it. Asian men are the highest-earning people in America today. The highest earning.

BUCK: Per capita, yes.

CLAY: Per capita. If America were a fundamentally white supremacist country, that would be a big failure, wouldn’t it, that we would have allowed Asian men to be the highest earning? The reason why Asian men are the highest earning is because America’s a meritocracy. Also, immigrant populations. Recent immigrant populations vastly out-earn native born populations within a generation or so.

Such that Nigerian immigrants, for instance, overwhelmingly dominate people who are born black in America. Why would it be that people who come to America and are from Nigeria — and are theoretically coming with the same burden and that the color of their skin is supposed to define them — arrive here and absolutely dominate when they are here?

It’s not just Nigeria. It’s immigrants of all stripes and colors and persuasions. Legal immigrants, when they come to this country, dominate. And those are data that are important because I think it sends to our kids the message, which is true that you determine your success failure, not an identity that you cannot choose. And that is lost in all of this critical race theory madness.

BUCK: And I think it’s also important to note that CRT teaching harms the individual insofar as you’re either the oppressor or the victim when actually done nothing, really destroys our basic notions of autonomy, culpability, you know, what is moral agency? If you can be held guilty for, you know, the sins of your great-grandparents, what exactly are you supposed to do about that?

But beyond that it also prevents better policy from being made because instead of actually looking at how you could address the differences in test scores let’s say between certain communities and areas, what’s really going on, it’s always, “Oh, the system is racist; therefore, there needs to be a rebalancing of resources or even of outcome within the system.”

That’s what they end up doing. They say, “Well, some groups should get certain test scores and get into a school and other groups can have other test scores and not get into the school or get into school.” This is where Ibram X. Kendi’s tweet that got so much attention when he was pointing out how all these white individuals were pretending to be Native American and getting into school. Right. So how, exactly, is that white privilege? That’s actually the opposite of white privilege!

CLAY: And also, Buck, to that larger point, that’s why so many Asian parents in your home city of New York —

BUCK: They’re upset with the Democrats.

CLAY: — are so fired up about the idea that because their kids are winning the meritocracy race, they are posting the highest scores, they are being discriminated against because they’re Asian and there’s so many people who are Asian of high level jobs.

BUCK: It is racist. De Blasio basically says, “There are too many Asians doing well in school so we’re gonna balance them out and deny them opportunities.” That’s racism, actually.