A Texas foundation is reportedly poised to take the lead in legal challenges to a federal rule aiming to fund grants for teaching critical race theory (CRT) and anti-racist ideas in schools across the country.
Texas Public Policy Foundation head Kevin Roberts told Epoch Times’ "Crossroads" program the proposed rule released April 19 hides a dangerous agenda.
"The Biden administration uses that kind of vocabulary to shroud the real content of this proposed rule," he told the news outlet. "The real content of this rule is not antiracism, but pro-racism" by trying to fight racism with more racism.
In the proposed rule, the Education Department outlined new priority criteria for a $5.3 million American History and Civics Education grant, as well as materials for K-12 educators to use, citing as examples the New York Times' "1619 Project" and critical race theory advocate Ibram X. Kendi’s "antiracist ideas."
"The proposed rule … has some details in it that are truly radical things that I would imagine 95 percent of Americans would reject," he added.
"Kendi argues that the only way to fight discrimination, the history of discrimination in the United States, is to implement discrimination in the present," Roberts argued, saying "that’s decidedly the opposite of what we need to be doing."
"Rather than classifying American students and Americans generally, for that matter, according to the color of our skin, we need to be aiming for what the Declaration of Independence inspired us to do, its aspirational vision of all men and women being equal," he told the news outlet.
"This rule would actually do the opposite. And it fuels an agenda, unfortunately, that’s much more radical than that vocabulary of antiracism would suggest," he told "Crossroads," likening it to advocating "hatred for one another" and introducing conflict and race-based division in classrooms.
To try to "define all people, including young people, according to the color of their skin is the very thing that the great patriot Martin Luther King was arguing against his entire career," Roberts said.
Roberts said once the comments on the rule are published, he expects the Texas Public Policy Foundation to take the lead in related litigation efforts aiming to block adoption of the rule, Epoch Times reported.
"We anticipate being the lead plaintiff against this ridiculous proposed rule," Roberts told "Crossroads."
Former President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning CRT training in federal agencies in September 2020, with the White House describing it as "anti-American propaganda."
After taking office, Biden reversed Trump’s September 2020 executive order.
Whether or not to include history lessons on systemic racism has become a hot-button issue in the U.S. after a year of reckoning with violence against Black men following the killing of George Floyd and others. Conservatives have largely come out against the idea, with GOP Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee signing a bill that bans the teaching of the subject in public schools.
Fran Beyer ✉
Fran Beyer is a writer with Newsmax and covers national politics.
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