Gordon Mullin: Paso Robles schools were right to ban CRT. Other districts should too

You’ve heard about critical race theory (CRT) before. It migrated out from liberal law faculties over 20 years ago and is now well established on college campuses, especially in the arts.

It may be coming to our K-12 schools and parents should be aware of its divisive and destructive nature.

If you’re white, soon your fifth-grade child may come home and tell you that you are a racist, our society is corrupt and your unearned privilege, e.g. wealth, should be redistributed to people of color as reparations.

The Paso Robles School District has banned the teaching of critical race theory and good for them. Other local districts would be well advised to follow their lead.

CRT holds that American society should be viewed in groups based upon skin color and this group identity supersedes all others.

It claims whites are racist without knowing it and racism is “systemic” — meaning it is embedded in our history and our national institutions, laws and economic system and remains so today.

CRT claims we started as a white racist country with slavery at its heart and despite the Civil War with over 350,000 dead Union soldiers who gave their lives to end the institution and with numerous current national and state laws outlawing discrimination, we remain so today.

As proof, CRT points out there are still differences — quantified by wealth, income, health and other measures — in the outcome of groups. Further, these disparate outcomes are caused not by the actions or attitudes of each group, but the inherent racism built into our society and institutions.

All are false or distorted claims.

It’s important to note that CRT and its cousins, the Black Lives Matter movement, and now, sadly the NAACP, all buy into this notion that we should be viewed only by our skin color. CRT regretfully has forgotten Martin Luther King’s adage “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

Let’s consider CRT’s claims. First, America is a racist society. My questions is: compared to other countries, where does America rank? And why consider only racism? Is it acceptable to hate others because of their religion, sex or ethnic background, but unacceptable to hate by race? If so, why?

Of course there are people in the U.S. who are blatantly racist. We have 330 million people living here so it is easy to find these people, especially with 24/7 news and the internet. However, to compare, do we have, on a per capita basis, more or less racists than Mexico, Nigeria, China, Syria, France? Nowhere on any related CRT website does one find this question asked or answered.

Further, much of the world would agree the U.S. offers more freedom than many other countries. Witness the flow of immigrants on our southern border literally risking their lives to cross into America. They don’t view the U.S. as racist. What they see is freedom and opportunity.

CRT also claims the case for endemic racism in the U.S. rests on the disparate outcomes between races. The preeminent economist on this topic is Thomas Sowell and he reminds us that “at no time in history and nowhere on the planet have two people’s measurable outcomes been the same.”

In America, to use just one of many measurements, if we lump all households into just four groups, the U.S. Census Bureau tells us the following about median incomes (2019): Asian, $98,174; White, $76,057; Hispanic, $56,133 Black, $45,438. Is this evidence of discrimination by whites?

First, whites clearly have done a bad job of discriminating against Asians.

Recall how we threw most of the Japanese living on the West Coast of America into internment camps at the start of WWII, took away their property and made their lives a misery for decades? Yet according to the Pew Research Center, the median household income of Japanese born in the U.S. was $88,840 in 2019.

Indians born in the U.S. — who earned a median income of $104,000 in 2019 — also somehow escaped white prejudice. Same for the Chinese, despite legal restrictions of all sorts imposed on them until the mid-20th century; the median income of Chinese-Americans was $100,000 in 2019.

The base reasons for lower outcomes of American-born Blacks are three major factors: single parent families, education and crime.

Here’s one of my favorite adages. If you are born into a two-parent home, finish high school, don’t get a criminal record, get married and stay married you are practically guaranteed to join the middle class in America, which we should acknowledge is upper class in much of the world.

The claim that Blacks Americans suffer under the legacy of slavery and discrimination is one of pure speculation. If you imagine that you, as a white person, continue to discriminate against those of a different color, stop doing that. And don’t let anyone tell you you are unable to know whether you are doing so.

Perhaps the most destructive component of CRT is the notion that Blacks have no agency, no control over their own lives. It is a distorted belief system that feeds the concept of inability to progress with one’s life unless someone else acts differently.

Parents, imagine someone telling your child they are a failure and will remain so until someone else acts in some ill-defined different manner. Would you not intervene and tell your child they can do anything they want, become anyone they want in America?

Critical race theory is a set of beliefs; somewhat akin to a religion. It’s not based on facts but conjectures. Yet it is gaining acceptance within our society and our schools and parents must gird themselves for a fight.

To ensure it doesn’t come to your child’s school, act now.

Contributing columnist Gordon Mullin is a SLO High grad and has a degree in economics from the University of British Columbia. Among the 40 or so jobs he’s held in his life — including banker, carpenter, investment planner — he says taxi driver best fits his character.