Will Opposition to CRT Turn Virginia Red?

Could parents’ opposition to “critical race theory” (CRT) in government schools flip Virginia back to red? Joe Biden won Loudoun County, where opposition to CRT is loudest right now. Parents were blindsided, and they’re fed up, but will their discontent make them change the way they vote? Is the CRT fiasco a harbinger of things to come in the 2022 midterm elections?

If you go by this article in Politico, it could be: “‘People are scared’: Democrats lose ground on school equity plans.”

One of the parents featured is a woman named Elina Kaplan, an immigrant from the former Soviet Union who votes for Democrats but strongly opposes the teaching of CRT in government schools. A California resident, Kaplan is alarmed by the state’s “new model ethnic studies curriculum,” and has set up an email list and meetings with state lawmakers, and recruited people to meet with school boards to discuss it. An excerpt (emphasis added):

On the national level, Democrats have insisted that the brush fires over critical race theory — which has become a political punching bag even for unrelated equity initiatives — are largely the work of right-wing activists who willfully misrepresent what it means, and they blame Fox News for fanning parents’ anger.
…
But those Democrats appear to be underestimating parents’ anger in places where critical race theory is top of mind. Objections to new equity plans are not the sole province of conservatives but extend to many moderate and independent voters, according to POLITICO interviews with school board members, political operatives and activists in Democratic and left-leaning communities including the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C.; Palm Beach County, Fla.; New York’s Westchester County; Maricopa County covering Phoenix, Ariz.; and suburban Detroit.

Democrats believe opposition to CRT is “largely the work of right-wing activists who willfully misrepresent what it means, and they blame Fox News for fanning parents’ anger.” But parents across the country who gave school boards a piece of their minds know exactly what CRT means, in all its various forms, and they are fighting against it.

Regardless of what leftists claim, CRT is a racially divisive idea that America and its founding institutions are racist, groups of people are inferior or superior to others based on race, ethnicity, sex, or religion, and individuals are inherently responsible for the actions their ancestors committed in the past. Neither white nor black parents who oppose CRT want schools telling their children that they are superior or inferior based on the color of their skin.

“I don’t know about you,” Quisha King, a black mother in Florida said to a school board, “but telling my child or any child that they are in a permanent oppressed status in America because they are black is racist, and saying that white people are automatically above me, my children, or any child is racist as well.”

Ty King, a black father in Illinois, told a school board that CRT “pretty much” teaches kids to hate and dislike each other. Another black father said the same. His wife is white, and he said government schools “would teach my daughter that her mother is evil.”

Politico cited a poll conducted by the Public Opinion Strategies, which found that 48 percent of independent voters and 59 percent of parents with kids in government schools in Loudoun and Fairfax Counties view CRT negatively. President Biden won Loudoun Country by 62 percent and Fairfax County by 70 percent. Leftist politicians blame Donald Trump and Glenn Youngkin, Republican candidate for governor in Virginia, for parents’ reaction to CRT.

It seems that Democrats believe parents in Virginia, many of them Democratic voters, don’t know their own minds or what’s best for their own children.

Photo credit: justgrimes (Creative Commons) – Some rights reserved