Across the country over the past several years, racial antagonism has metastasized. In cities such as Portland and Seattle, normal life for everyday Americans has become a thing of the past, replaced by lawlessness, violence, and destruction of private property and small businesses.

How can we prevent Texas cities from becoming Portland and Seattle?

HB 3979, “The Partisanship Out of Civics” bill, is not only a plea but also a roadmap for racial harmony. Its effort is twofold: (1) It restores genuine civic education in Texas K-12 public schools. In so doing, students will learn that both our Declaration of Independence and our Judeo-Christian ethos stress that what unites us as human beings is far more important than the accidents of birth (race and sex) that separate us. This teaching of our common humanity provides the way, the only way, for all members of our society to recognize their kinship with others and live with them in harmony.

In the course of teaching the basis for racial harmony, HB 3979 also seeks (2) to safeguard Texas students from falling prey to ideologies that deny our common humanity and, in so doing, flout both our Judeo-Christian ethos and the moral teaching of equality and individual liberty found in our Declaration of Independence. What ideologies are these that threaten our children?

Perhaps no better answer to this question is provided by the Chinese-American Citizens Alliance of Greater New York (CACAGNY), which published a stunning critique recently of Critical Race Theory (CRT).

Stated simply, CRT is the new racism. Consider these excerpts of the summary of CRT provided by CACAGNY:

“Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a hateful, divisive, manipulative fraud. CRT appears in our workplaces under the cover of implicit bias/sensitivity training. It infiltrates our schools pretending to be culturally/ethnically responsive pedagogy, with curricula such as the New York Times’ 1619 Project and Seattle’s ethnomathematics. Hate groups, with allies in politics, the press and education, pass CRT off as anti-racism and diversity, equity and inclusion, but CRT is exactly the opposite. From its very roots, CRT is racist, repressive, discriminatory, and divisive.”

CRT finds its roots in the thought of Karl Marx, “but with race struggle replacing class struggle, CRT’s main ideological dogmas are:

  • You are not a person. You are only your race, and by your race alone you will be judged.
  • Justice is about equal rights, but Social Justice, or equity, is about equal outcomes. Only Social Justice matters; Justice does not. To achieve equal outcomes, forget equal rights.
  • All unequal outcomes by race — inequity for short — are the result of racial oppression.
  • All Blacks are oppressed and all Whites are oppressors. This is systemic: never ask whether oppression occurred, only how it occurred. Everyone and everything White is complicit.
  • If you are White and won’t admit you are racist, you are racist by implicit bias. To reduce implicit bias, you must self-criticize, confess to privilege, apologize to the oppressed race.
  • Whiteness is belief in, among others: achievement, delayed gratification, progress, schedules and deadlines, meritocracy, race-blindness, the written word, facts and objectivity (they deny lived experience), logic and reason (they deny empathy), mathematics and science (until they are de-colonized and humanized).”

From the above we see that CRT offers a shockingly condescending view of our African-American brothers and sisters. The Ku Klux Klan would gleefully agree with CRT’s racist assertions that somehow only “whites”  believe in and are capable of “delayed gratification,” individual merit, “facts and objectivity,” “logic and reason,” and “mathematics and science.” The racist, blackface “minstrel shows” of the 1800’s “lampooned Black people as dim-witted” and “lazy.”

CRT’s grossly demeaning caricature of African-Americans, along with its racist assertion that “all whites are oppressors,” does a gross injustice to Americans of all races and ethnicities. CRT must plead guilty to what George W. Bush called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” CRT promises only to bring more hostility, more racial misunderstanding, and more violence to our cities and our nation.

HB 3979 aims to stop this nightmare from coming to Texas. It would ban any teaching of students and any training of their teachers in doctrines that advance racial or sexual scapegoating or stereotyping—in conformity with our country’s core Founding principle of human equality.

The great state of Texas stands at a crossroads: We can allow into our classrooms the new racism that is Critical Race Theory, or we can recommit ourselves to our Founding creed of race-blind equality.

We can have the Judeo-Christian ethos and its counterpart in the Declaration of Independence, or we can have Critical Race Theory. But we cannot have both. Ever.

For the sake of our children of all races and for the sake of our State and country, HB 3979 asks that we choose love over hate, unity over separatism, and truth over lies.