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"After 24 years of teaching in multicultural classrooms in Philadelphia, Christopher Paslay knows a lot about diversity, tolerance and understanding.
It's why he is wary of the new thrust in education, bolstered by President Biden's executive orders, emphasizing "anti-racism" and what has come to be known as "critical race theory."
"It's definitely not sensitivity and it's definitely not diversity. There used to be sensitivity and diversity years ago, and this is not that," he said in an interview with the Daily Caller.
Paslay is the author of "Exploring White Fragility': Longtime School Teacher Explains How Critical Race Theory Is Hurting Multicultural Classrooms."
A major problem, he said, is that people still don't know what "anti-racism" is.
"They think it's just social justice, but they don't know the other components to it," said Paslay.
The objective of "critical race theory," he said is to "disrupt and dismantle," which obscures underlying problems that need to be addressed to achieve academic success regardless of race, such as single-parent households.
In general terms, critical race theory is a post-modern theoretical framework rooted in Marxist principles that views individuals through the lens of oppressed or oppressor based largely on their skin color.
... "The values that make people successful like a two parent family transcend race and culture," he told the Daily Caller.
"I think that others, for political reasons, have made it about race."
He writes in his book that "the reality that decades of diversity and anti-bias training is at best inconsequential, and at worst, creating more problems — matters little to those invested in identity politics."
Paslay said parents and teachers should speak up and tell administrators they agree with the objective of racial justice and inclusion but not the means.
Last week, President Biden unveiled a plan to "embed racial equity" in all government agencies and "redress systemic racism where it exists" across the nation.
Among his moves was the elimination of the 1776 Commission, which countered the claim of the New York Times Magazine's 1619 Project that America is an inherently racist nation built on a foundation of slavery.
... The 1776 Commission released a report just before Inauguration Day with the aim of restoring education on America and its founding.
In its introduction, it argues that while the country "has its imperfections, just like any other country, in the annals of history the United States has achieved the greatest degree of personal freedom, security, and prosperity for the greatest proportion of its own people and for others around the world."
( the ) 1619 Project ... seeks to place the enslavement of Africans at the center of America's story."
(author) Hannah-Jones asserts that 1619, "when some 20 Africans arrived at Jamestown," should be recognized as the year of the nation's founding, not 1776.
The scholars point out that the 1619 Project has been discredited by so many historians that the Times "has felt the need to go back and change a crucial passage in it, softening but not eliminating its unsupported assertion about slavery and the Revolution."
"Prominent historians" keep finding "serious factual errors, specious generalizations, and forced interpretations," they emphasize.
... The New York Times' own fact-checker, Leslie M. Harris, the scholars point out, has "warned the newspaper that an assertion that 'the patriots fought the American Revolution in large part to preserve slavery in North America' was plainly false."
