The best practitioners of Critical Race Theory recently held a week-long “summer school” in Nashville to strategize, assess the movement, and debate how best to convert the next generation. It was an enlightening six days of revolutionary agitprop.

Two things immediately stood out. The first is that, despite protestations to the contrary, the architects of CRT know that they must focus intensely on those who participate in the teaching profession. If CRT is a tool for “revolutionizing a culture,” as its intellectual godfather, Derrick Bell, once put it, then it must be implemented by teachers from elementary through high school.

K-12 teachers, along with students at all levels, were given special ticket prices to the CRT conference at a significant discount, as my colleague and friend Jonathan Butcher pointed out. K-12 principals were also given a special package, but at a smaller discount.

The other undeniable conclusion is that CRT practitioners are shocked by the resistance they have encountered. The public, especially parents, saw the attempted takeover of their cultural institutions that gained momentum four years ago and fought against it, much to the chagrin of the CRT elite and their followers.

And the summer school was indeed organized by the elite most hurt by popular rejection. The school was led by Kimberle Crenshaw, a law professor at Columbia and UCLA. She is not only one of the movement’s key founders, but actually gave CRT her name at the discipline’s founding conference in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1989.

Crenshaw also coined the concept of “intersectionality,” by which the founders of CRT mean that people can be discriminated against based on various characteristics – their race, gender, ability status, etc.

Also present to lecture on CRT were Cheryl Harris, another CRT founder and also a law professor at UCLA; Gloria Ladson-Billings, who has done perhaps more than any other to spread the ideas of CRT to the educational system; and Michael Eric Dyson, whose accomplishments are not equal to those of the other three, but who is much better known to the public from his repeated media appearances. In all, 40 academics, some of them well-known, were announced to appear.

These CRT summer schools began in the long, hot summer of 2020, when the entire country was in turmoil due to the Black Lives Matter riots. It seemed to the CRT people at the time that the world was their oyster, as many leaders of cultural institutions were willing to surrender and adopt many CRT principles.

But the oyster has gone bad and the room has begun to stink. In 2020, the organizers of the summer school saw the moment as a “great opportunity.” Those who led this year’s summer school, however, view the current moment with a growing sense of dread.

In their triumphant 2020 announcement, the summer school organizers proclaimed that “the persistent racial disparities laid bare by the casual killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery … have loosened the grip of colorblindness as an officially sanctioned anecdote about persistent racial injustice.” The 2020 summer school was held “to capture the significance of this opportunity.”

We must quickly explain that while most people think color blindness is a good thing and an aspirational goal, it is anathema to CRT.

CRT is a work that portrays racism not as an individual act or attitude, but as a “systemic” problem. Racism, it preaches, is embedded in the normal course of society, keeping the oppressor group (whites, men, Christians, heterosexuals, but also Jews, Asian Americans, or anyone else who is generally successful) in power and wealth, while members of victim groups remain subjugated. To reverse this dynamic—a goal derived entirely from Marxist concepts—CRT practitioners believe that government and industry must take color-conscious action.

Contrast the optimism of the summer of 2020 with this year’s ominous summer school. The description of this year’s opening plenary on July 28 read: “Our CRT Summer School Kickoff Plenary focuses on Tennessee as a ‘spearhead’ for the nationwide pushback against racial justice and democracy.” Every session revolved around this idea.

As Crenshaw told radio host Kaye Wise Whitehead in a video advertising the event, “We started this in the middle of the summer of reckoning, recognizing that critical concepts like structural racism and implicit bias and intersectionality were all part of the mobilization that we saw in 50 states across the country demanding accountability. Well, now we’re at a point where the blowback against 2020, the blowback against racial justice, has taken the form of suppressing our right to learn, our right to know, our books.”

Of course, this is all hyperbole. Many people have developed antibodies against the attempted takeover of their countries by Marxist academics, and their political leaders have responded by passing laws that make it difficult to indoctrinate students and teachers with CRT and that eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates from schools and universities.

These ideas are mainly spread in secondary schools, where unsuspecting and well-meaning prospective teachers obtain their degrees.

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I spoke with Beanie Geoghegan, co-founder of the group Freedom in Education, who has done a lot of work in this area. When I asked her if education students knew what they were eating, she said, “Absolutely not.” The professors who push this kind of thing “really play on people who care about kids,” she added.

It’s a good thing they’re feeling so uncomfortable right now.

Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T. Arredondo Senior Fellow on E Pluribus Unum at the Heritage Foundation.