JUST A FEW RUFFOED FEATHERS:

When anti-CRT activists are confronted with the irrelevance of CRT proper to any likely public-school curriculum, they retreat to charges of a popularized CRT being inculcated. A commonly cited example is the very accessible, pointed writing of Professor Ibram X. Kendi, recently ensconced at American University in Washington, D.C.

Even so, their depictions of Kendi's work are wildly off-base. For instance, it is claimed that Kendi and CRT posit a hierarchy of races, with whites at the bottom of the totem pole. There is no such thing in Kendi or CRT. Another slur is that to Kendi, all white people are racist. In fact, he asserts more than once that racism is common to all peoples, including himself. Kendi's actual politics are wholesomely, tolerantly liberal, with a radical thought here and there. CRT and Kendi speak of systems and institutions, not malevolent white people.

Another source for anti-CRT agitators is the plethora of materials used in public schools toward the promotion of supportive learning environments for minority and LGBTQ students and for teaching about racism. The wealth of texts and fugitive literature on U.S. race relations provides ample fuel for those who are not reluctant to employ cherry-picking and out-of-context references. The county superintendent told The Washington Post that anti-CRT protesters had photoshopped the school board logo onto CRT materials.

This is the fruit of a new cottage industry of anti-anti-racist entrepreneurs. The most prominent is one Christopher Rufo, a frequent guest on Fox TV from Seattle who can be credited with fomenting a national, online race riot. We also have local characters in Virginia trying to get in on the grift. Rufo has affirmed publicly that his strategy is to stigmatize any remotely anti-racist initiatives under the rubric of CRT. New reporting in The Nation points to a buildup of Koch network funding for such protests.

The leaders of this agitation have well-established, long-standing links to right-wing politics and the Trump Administration. In the wake of the massive discrediting following the Capitol riots of January 6, my suspicion is that targeting local school boards on white-racial and culture war grievances is a new Trumpist strategy for grassroots organizing.

Blue Virginia is a logical target. If its upscale suburbs can be turned around with race panic, the state's hefty 13 Electoral College votes come into play. Replicate this nationally, and the Democrats' prospects for 2024 and after looking dim.

There will be a gubernatorial election this year. The former term-limited Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe is back in the fray, facing Republican Glenn Youngkin, who is focusing his campaign on the CRT flap. Dr. Ben Carson, Trump's befuddled Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, has been recruited for backup.

Shortly after April 2020, the Loudoun school board was hit with the drop of a second shoe--a dispute over protocols for treatment of transgender students, including requirements for teachers to use students' preferred pronouns, and no requirements for parents to consent. Dick could demand, unbeknownst to her parents, that her teachers address her as Jane.

At first blush, this seemed to me a genius move by the bad guys. But it has not turned out to be so. In opposition to the entire mishigas of Trump-oriented activism, an upsurge of anti-racist, LGBTQ-friendly parents has announced itself. These are mostly women, with what might be called a vanguard of transgender students' moms, and they are fierce. They are the sort of people--the "Resistance"--often credited with forming the nucleus of the Democrats' suburban strength since 2016. One of their leaders is the bicycle rider who gave Trump the famous middle finger in 2019. She was later elected to the county Board of Supervisors. (Aside from flipping the bird, she actually brought a strong resume to the position.)

The right's error here is overlooking the fact that while the CRT animus and transgender bias sometimes play well, they don't resonate much outside of Trump's hard core. Well-off Loudoun is not going to be stirred up by gun rights or the old transgender bathroom stuff, which played out years ago. Loudoun students are prone to support their peers and lack the twentieth century prejudices about gender. Immigrants and minorities will not be mobilized by those who have revealed themselves as hostile to their identities. A majority of Loudoun's students are now black, Hispanic, or Asian.

Anti-CRT may have gone national, but it's also running aground. Resolutions banning the teaching of CRT enacted in state legislatures lack force because CRT is not in fact being taught, and because state lawmakers are not well-situated to micro-manage how racism is discussed in a multitude of school systems, schools, and classrooms.

Public education's decentralization defies that sort of dragooning. As a critic of liberal school boards and CRT noted in The Wall Street Journal, "Even where allowed to stand by courts, these laws, like other efforts to rein in education bureaucrats, will be swallowed up in the spreadsheets and matrices into which state departments of public instruction lure and quietly strangle every curricular reform." It's what we economists call the principal-agent problem.

In Loudoun, the main Trumpists' tactic was to ventilate their grievances at school board meetings. In one especially rowdy episode on June 22, the board meeting had to be adjourned. Clearing the room led to a melee between Trumpist protesters and the county sheriff's deputies. At the next meeting, the school board arranged tight security. There was no repeat of the disruption that broke up the previous meeting. It turns out that decorum is the antidote to Trumpist agitation. 

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