CRT Presentation by Zoe Warren - Lexington Richland 5 School Board Meeting

In my presentation I endeavor to resolve generally three questions:

What is Critical Race Theory?

How is it being applied in K-12 schools despite legislation forbidding it?

How should we respond?

Excerpt:

"What is Critical Race Theory?

Dr. Peter McLaren who is known as one of the leading architects of critical pedagogy defines Critical Race Theory as “much more than a program of study, a classroom text, or a course syllabus. Rather, it represents the introduction to a particular form of life...”

CRT is more than an idea: it is a form of educational warfare- sometimes in stealth, under what seems to be a helpful means of teaching the history of race relations in America, but it is meant to wash our children in race hatred using clever narratives under the guise of social and emotional education. It is put forward like a Trojan horse packed with presuppositions designed to flip the cultural hegemony through supplanting the American values of our children and replacing them with revolutionary ideals.

Dr. Nicholas Hartlep, Associate Professor of Education Studies at Berea published an important study on CRT in 2009. He is a CRT proponent and he titled his presentation “Critical Race Theory: An Examination of its Past, Present, and Future Implications”

In it he evaluated the current body of research conducted on CRT- data that I will be drawing from in this section.

CRT is broken down most succinctly in five major components, or 5 tenets:

(1) the notion that racism is ordinary and not aberrational; (2) interest convergence; (3) the social construction of race; (4) counter-storytelling; and (5) the notion that whites have actually been the beneficiaries of civil rights legislation."