Recently, parents in a Virginia school district fought back against the local school board to have “racially divisive” material removed from the teaching curriculum. Woke theories, such as critical race theory, have begun to infiltrate schools nationwide in recent years.
According to recent reports, five families have sued the school board of Albemarle County Public Schools near Charlottesville, Virginia, over allegations of “discriminatory” policies they claim compel students to adopt the racially divisive content.
The Alliance Defending Freedom, a prominent legal organization dedicated to fighting for conservative causes such as free speech, stated, “the five families are challenging the school board’s in-class implementation of a discriminatory policy that indoctrinates students in, and compels them to say they agree with, a racially divisive ideology. The families appealed in June 2022 after a lower court dismissed their case.”
“Every student deserves to be treated equally under the law, regardless of race or religion. Public schools can’t impose demeaning stereotypes on students based on these characteristics,” said ADF Senior Counsel Vincent Wagner. “Parents have the fundamental right to know what their kids are being taught in public schools and to protect them from policies and curriculum that compel them to affirm harmful ideologies. We urge the court to take a hard look at the school board’s discriminatory policy.”
Reportedly, in 2019, the school board implemented a policy that requires schools to take into consideration critical race theory, a theory that generally views everything in society through the lens of race, when making decisions. The idea has garnered criticism from conservatives as being discriminatory in and of itself, particularly toward whites.
“The policy violates students’ civil rights by treating them differently and stereotyping them based on race, and by compelling them to affirm and support the board’s ideology, even if it is contrary to their deeply held moral and religious beliefs. Parents in the school district are not allowed to opt their children out of classes that teach this ideology, and the school labels any opinion not aligned with the curriculum as “racist” and threatens to punish dissent based on its redefinition of “racism,”” the ADF stated.
Kate Anderson, senior counsel for ADF, also weighed in on the dangers of forcing children to adopt woke ideologies such as critical race theory. Anderson explained that in some activities, students are asked to identify their “privileges,” essentially creating an “oppressor” and “oppressed” dynamic. “And so what went in that box were ‘White, Christian male,’ and then they were supposed to metaphorically break that box,” she said.
Continuing to discuss the dangers of critical race theory in the classroom, Anderson spoke about how students can be pressured into adopting the ideology. Apparently, it is taught that if you remain silent, you are condoning racism.
“And anti-racist is really code for adopting fully the CRT-based policy that views everyone through the lens of race,” Anderson said. “And students were instructed in class that if they were silent, that supported the most egregious forms of racism, so that they had to adopt this ideology and incorporate it into their lives and announce that to their classroom in order to be in alignment with the policy.”
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