The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law announced the launch of a project that will be dedicated to tracking so-called “attacks” on the far-left concept of Critical Race Theory, allowing users to view a database of any time the concept is criticized at the “local, state and federal levels.”
As reported by Fox News, the university issued a press release celebrating the new initiative, declaring that the “UCLA School of Law’s Critical Race Studies Program has created an innovative project to track and analyze legislative, regulatory, and administrative efforts to block or undermine the teaching of a more complete history of the United States in schools across the country.”
“The project was created to help people understand the breadth of the attacks on the ability to speak truthfully about race and racism through the campaigns against CRT,” said Taifha Natalee Alexander, project director of CRT Forward. The college further justified its efforts by claiming that critics of CRT have used the phrase “incorrectly,” and subsequently tied CRT to the broader teaching of ethnic studies in schools around the country.
CRT Forward said that its researchers compiled the database by scanning over 24,000 media articles dating as far back as August of 2021, and rounding up 479 particular examples of anti-CRT activity and rhetoric. The project concluded that the majority of anti-CRT activity has taken place in three states: Florida, Virginia, and Missouri.
“CRT Forward brings to bear the research capacity and expertise of UCLA’s unique Critical Race Studies Program,” said Noah Zatz, faculty director of UCLA Law’s Critical Race Studies Program. “We need critical race theory to understand this assault on racial justice, where even naming structural racism gets portrayed as unfair to white people. And we need CRT to develop legal theories of education and free speech that not only blunt these attacks but place anti-racism at the center of a democratic society.”
Critical Race Theory is the far-left claim that all White people are automatically racist, and that the United States is an inherently racist nation from its very founding. As such, the theory has attempted to rewrite history by tearing down the accomplishments of the Founding Fathers and other White historical figures, while artificially boosting the role played by African-Americans in the birth of America. Schools that promote the theory have actively encouraged anti-American sentiment, and have also gone out of their way to make White children feel ashamed of their heritage, as well as guilty over past racial injustices for which they were not responsible.
The rise of CRT has subsequently led to massive social, cultural, and political backlash. Republicans have seized on the issue as a major talking point in recent campaigns, which culminated in a massive upset in Virginia’s elections last year, when Republicans swept all three major statewide offices and retook the state legislature, after Governor Glenn Youngkin ran a campaign primarily focused on removing such politicized topics from education.