All undergraduates will soon have to take an ideologically-slanted course on “Anti-Black Racism” at the University of Connecticut. Provost Anne D’Alleva announced last week that the course will become a requirement during the 2024-2025 academic year.
On May 1, the University of Connecticut’s Office for Diversity and Inclusion outlined the proposed ABR class requirement, saying the requirement will be “an important starting point for addressing barriers to success on our campus and in our society, especially given the spate of anti-Black racism that was made apparent by the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and that persists in current efforts to ban Critical Race Theory.”
“Making the anti-Black racism course a requirement for every Husky undergraduate is not the final step, but it is the necessary next step in improving the living and learning experiences at UConn, and in enhancing the value of a UConn education,” it said.
Provost D’Alleva said, “An education at our university must provide many opportunities to confront the history and current reality of injustice and human rights abuses, and we expect our students to be leaders in creating a more just and equitable world. ABR and the curricular changes that are in development are a powerful point of departure from the status quo.”
The course requirement was approved by the University Senate, in a 36-to-25 vote. According to UConn’s website, the fall 2022 version of the course was designed to train students about “Black resistance” and “intersectional solidarity,” and to train them to “question the consequences of anti-Black racism in areas such as Black health and wellness; Black agency and resilience; and/or anti-Blackness in higher education,” and to enable students to “locate valuable resources throughout the University of Connecticut that work to disrupt anti-Black racism for the collective good.”
Last month, professors at Bates College in Maine voted to mandate that students complete a new set of classes on “Race, Power, Privilege, and Colonialism.” Students who do not take the class will not allowed to graduate. Similarly, Northern Arizona University now requires students to take four diversity courses to graduate, all rooted in left-wing “critical theory.”
This is part of a larger trend, in which “schools are making it harder to focus on academic subjects such as economics, history, math, and science, by forcing students to waste time taking classes that indoctrinate them in left-wing ideology, such as ‘critical theory”’ or critical race theory,” according to a former Education Department lawyer.
Of the two “Race, Power, Privilege, and Colonialism,” courses at Bates College, one must be United States-focused, while the other will target international affairs and will be designated “RPPC I.” The RPPC 1 class will peddle the false notion that countries are underdeveloped due to colonialism. In reality, Third World countries that were not colonized are less economically advanced than those that were colonized, as the father of modern Liberia, William Tubman, noted. Tubman, who served as Liberia’s president from 1944 to 1971, observed that Liberia was economically poorer than its neighbors because it had not had “the benefits of colonization.” Colonization of Third World countries usually made them more agriculturally and economically productive, eventually curbed the practice of slavery, and led to the abolition of barbaric practices like suttee (the burning of widows on their husband’s funeral pyre). Most people in many pre-colonization African societies were slaves: For example, the slave population accounted for two-thirds to three-quarters of the total population of Songhay-Zarma people, who created the Songhai Empire. That empire was the successor of the similarly heavily-enslaved Mali Empire celebrated in progressive high-school textbooks, whose most famous leader, Mansa Musa, went on a pilgrimage to Mecca with an entourage of 12,000 slaves to cater to his every desire.
Critical theory and critical race theory are also proliferating in K-12 schools. The Minneapolis and St. Paul Public Schools in Minnesota have adopted Ethnic Studies requirements as a high-school graduation requirement. “Less than half of high school students in St. Paul Public Schools (SPPS) are proficient in math or reading but” soon all of them “will be required to take a Critical Ethnic Studies (CES) course before they can graduate,” reports the Center of the American Experiment. “Course concepts will include: identity, intersectionality, race, dominant/counter narratives, racism, white supremacy, racial equity, oppression, systemic oppression, resistance and resilience, social/youth-led movements, civic engagement, hope and healing, and transformation and change.”
These courses use critical race theory texts such as How to be an Antiracist, and other texts that “support CRT’s key concepts, including race essentialism, systemic racism, active racial discrimination and anti-capitalism.” Critical race theory is a radical ideology that is hostile to the free market economy, equating it with racism: “To love capitalism is to end up loving racism. To love racism is to end up loving capitalism….Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist,” says the best-selling book promoting critical race theory, “How to Be An Antiracist.” That book is a “comprehensive introduction to critical race theory,” gushes the leading progressive media organ Slate. It advocates discrimination against whites, saying, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination [against whites]. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”
The St. Paul schools also cite the protocol “Courageous Conversation” as part of Critical Ethnic Studies. That CRT-influenced protocol has “guided school districts to deem traits such as the ability to plan ahead and ’emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology’ as attributes of ‘whiteness.’” Schools have also disparaged individualism and planning ahead as signs of “cultural racism,” under its baneful influence.
These school systems are not alone. Detroit’s school superintendent, Nikolai Vitti, says critical race theory is deeply embedded in his school system: “Our curriculum is deeply using critical race theory, especially in social studies, but you’ll find it in English language arts and the other disciplines. We were very intentional about…embedding critical race theory within our curriculum.”
“Unequivocally, critical race theory is taught in K-12 public schools,” said the Heritage Foundation’s Jonathan Butcher, noting he wrote a research paper detailing numerous instances of school districts openly using the phrase “critical race theory” in curriculum plans.
