The Oklahoma State Board of Education voted on Thursday to lower the accreditation tiers for two school districts after deciding teacher training sessions in each contained thoughtcrimes violating HB 1775, the state’s anti-Critical Race Theory law signed into law by Gov Kevin Stitt in May 2021, Fox News reports. Tulsa and Mustang School Districts’ accreditations were both dropped to “accreditation with warning,” after Tulsa hosted a session with content deemed meant “to shame white people for past offenses in history,” in August 2021 – before the law even came into effect – and an anti-bullying lesson a teacher in Mustang gave to students in January 2022.
The 2021 “Critical Race Theory” panic, brainstormed by Claremont Institute chode Christopher Rufo – a colleague of insufferable twat MAGA lawyer John Eastman – was a panicked reaction within the right to the 2020 reckoning following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other unarmed Black Americans by police. Unable to control the changes happening within popular culture and on social media exposing youth nationwide to the reality of racial injustice and its consequences being wrought, Rufo, Steve Bannon, Fox News producers, and other scumbags took an obscure but ominous-sounding term found deep within the ivory tower as their weapon to try to fight back. Wielding “Critical Race Theory” both in propaganda to conservative voters and in actual “governance” as you see here, is insidious and evil shit meant to make teachers’ jobs harder when they’re already getting their asses kicked after two years of pandemic on top of all the other shit.
But it’s also pretty pathetic. This is really the best they’ve got in trying to stop white kids from thinking Black people are human? Does this bland procedural vote prevent suburban kids from streaming hip-hop on Spotify or watching Jordan Peele movies on Netflix or seeing “woke” influencers make a good point on TikTok? How many more of the teens in these two school districts are in the pews at Megachurch this Sunday as opposed to last Sunday? Can Rufo point to that or any other possible measure of success in recapturing a generation already mostly lost to them?