Describing CRT's Totalizing and Religious Language

Introduction

Folktales are peculiarly local and often seek to teach moral and religious values. This work is a specific local telling of a new understanding of the history of racism — a distinctly American macro folktale — and how such ideas made their way into New York City’s Public (NYC) Schools and the elite media. From a Jungian (2013) perspective, folktales often devolve from the archetypal into religious education; what starts as an insight into the human experience mutates into a societal form of moralism. This book explains how Critical Race Theory (CRT), an essential legal understanding Derrick Bell (1995) articulated that generally coalesced with a broader Post-Civil Rights Movement, may have passed on into a radicalized form of moral, and as argued here, religious education. More specifically, the work underscores how NYC Public Schools and the elite media form an informal partnership around the implementation and the reporting of CRT ideas.

This book examines how Richard Carranza, a short-lived NYC School Chancellor, enacted CRT as a comprehensive ideological agenda in Gotham. This CRT program radically departed from the more nuanced Post-Civil Rights Movement (PCRM) and bifurcated history into an ardent fundamentalist version of racial understandings. The contrast between instituting religious education and ideological thought is often only the difference of establishment. This study examines the policies of an enacted CRT and the reporting of these initiatives. Additionally, the study argues that CRT was fully unleashed in NYC Schools and deployed as an ideology and a type of religion. It likely still seeks to undermine Civil Rights-Era understandings of race and equality that have long informed the NYC Department of Education’s (DOE) day-to-day policies and practices.

CRT is a legal framework or, in education, a way of understanding the complexities of how racism is a recurring theme in American history. More precisely, and of pressing concern in our case, CRT provides a structural analysis of how race and racism became embedded in American institutions. Using such a definition, CRT examines systemic racism, and the reading of American history is replete with examples of such failings. Unfortunately, however, this definition seems too benign and doesn’t explain why CRT has become such a divisive issue in the United States.

CRT rejects both Civil Rights and PCRM frameworks of equality in favor of radicalized understandings of race. CRT understands racial prejudice as a monocausal reason to reject American society, classic philosophical and historical reasoning, notions of career progress, and political achievement, among other ideas. In doing so, CRT goes far beyond simply being a body of legal scholarship that has influenced the American university system. Instead, CRT abides as a Post-Civil Rights version of totalizing evangelism that seeks to upend the historical, legal, meaning-making, philosophical, and scholarly foundations on which the United States so precariously rests. CRT remains tribal and religious at its core, reverting to meaning-making ideas that predate social contract notions. CRT dwells as a full-fledged movement rooted in tribalism, religious constructions, and the rejection of the broader Liberal Philosophical Tradition. Beyond this, CRT also tends to reject Enlightenment principles and seeks to redefine knowledge about America and, therefore, to redefine, in a revisionist fashion, what America was, is, and is to become.