On this episode of The Federalist, RealClearInvestigations reporter John Murawski joins Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky to outline progressive activists’ battle to create a mandatory ethnic studies curriculum that forces teachings about “systemic racism, predatory capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and other structures of oppression” on 1.7 million high schoolers in California. President Joe Biden’s new education secretary may try to implement it federally as well.
“Their hope is that he will take up the ethnic studies cause and will use the power of the federal government, the federal muscle by the federal government to advance ethnic studies in some way to make it a national, to raise the profile of ethnic studies,” Murawski said.
He compared the scenario to the transgender bathroom issue that said the government, “can withdraw federal funding for schools if they don’t cooperate with certain federal policies.”
Some of the people involved in the curriculum’s creation and evaluation, Murawski said, are openly sympathetic to Marxism and treat the ideology behind the literature as a “utopian exuberance.”
“Ethnic studies is very similar to critical race theory. In some ways, I can’t tell the difference between ethnic studies and critical race theory,” Murawski said. “They are very similar, very much focused on the ubiquity of racism, the prominence of racism, white supremacy, systemic racism, and oppression as being inherent to the American experiment.”
Read more of Murawski’s reporting here.
Listen here: