It was a bit cognitively dissonant last month when some of the best-known merchants of critical race theory began whining that their campaign to transform society had hit a rough patch.
Surely, they couldn’t be serious? Woke orthodoxy is firmly in place in all the cultural centers and even at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Then along came a report from one of the cathedrals of the woke canon, the University of California-Los Angeles, which cataloged just how extensive the groundswell of resistance to critical race theory has been over the past two years. It seems that state legislators and local policymakers have responded to grassroots opposition to CRT with a raft of measures and are getting better at passing them.
That put in context Ibram X. Kendi’s complaint to a CNN interviewer in late March that momentum had been halted in his work—which Kendi calls “antiracism,” but which is, in fact, a series of race-based proposals that demand the government and the private sector illegally take account of race when making decisions.
Kendi told CNN that after the Black Lives Matter-led riots in 2020, he had hoped there would be momentum for massive change. And it is true that immediately after, and even in the years since, there has been a panicked rush by many in charge of America’s elite cultural institutions to accept that “systemic racism” actually exists and that, ergo, the system itself needed to be overhauled.
But the would-be revolutionaries pushed too hard, too fast. And Americans pushed back. . . .
. . . . Americans have rejected the “cultural change” sought by critical race theory. Polls, including this recent one in January by McLaughlin and Associates, show that the public rejects CRT and other woke ideologies, such as transgenderism, by large margins.
One comprehensive poll of 1,500 people, including 1,322 registered voters by The Economist/YouGov, conducted April 8-11, revealed that large majorities oppose males playing in women’s sports, and overwhelmingly support requiring schools to inform parents if their children request opposite-sex pronouns. The poll didn’t canvass views on either critical race theory or diversity, equity, and inclusion.
This is why state legislators and local officials, reflecting the view of their constituents, are passing bills or taking other government measures, such as bans on transgender participation in women’s sports and compelled acceptance of critical race theory, that push back on wokeism. . . . (read more on the Daily Signal)
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