UCLA Law launches project to track 'attacks' on critical race theory

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Texas mom gets fired up at public education meeting over critical race theory

The Texas mom spoke out at a Texas House of Representatives meeting and said, "Our kids are not your emotional support animals." (Credit: Gabrielle Clark)

The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law has launched a "CRT Forward Tracking Project," a database that will allow users to "track attacks on critical race theory" at the "local, state and federal levels."

"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 school's press release read.

"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 school also argued that many efforts to influence K-12 curriculum have used the term "incorrectly" and "have affected plans to include ethnic studies more broadly for students before they get to college."

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Royce Hall on the campus of UCLA. (iStock)

Critical race theory (CRT) is based on the idea that systemic racism is embedded in U.S. institutions. Proponents have argued it's necessary to introduce to students, while critics have called the curriculum divisive. It was one of the issues that drove parents to protest at school board meetings and question its presence in academia amid COVID-19-related school closures the past two years.

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The CRT Forward researchers said they scanned 24,000 media articles from August 2021 and rounded up 479 instances of anti-CRT activity, finding that most anti-CRT proposals have been in Florida, Virginia, Missouri and the U.S. Congress. Several states have introduced laws against the teaching of CRT in K-12 classrooms.

"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."

A student holds up a sign against banning CRT as members of the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School Board meet in Placentia, California. (Leonard Ortiz/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images)

The project received support from some groups like the National Education Association, the largest labor union in the U.S.

"A new project from UCLA has found efforts across the country to censor teachers and stamp out honest education under the banner of banning ‘critical race theory,’" the NEA tweeted. "This push to whitewash education must stop."

Residents of Loudoun County, Virginia, have helped make critical race theory a national conversation in 2021. (Reuters/Evelyn Hockstein)

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Parents and academics who opposed CRT, however, have continued to speak out against the controversial theory and have disputed a progressive media narrative that CRT is not taught in K-12 schools. Former Vanderbilt University professor and author Carol Swain, for instance, argued there are numerous examples of the concept that came from law school theorists such as Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado, and Kimberlé Crenshaw that have been distilled into children’s books.

"And so it’s definitely in the classroom, and they can even take a historical moment that was something that we’re proud of, like the civil rights movement, and twist it in such a way by cherry-picking the concept and that historical moment that it does the opposite of what it should do. It should make us proud as Americans," Swain told Fox News Digital in January. "What they do is shame and bully people. So it is definitely in the K-12 education ram."

"Progressives have insisted that Critical Race Theory isn’t in schools, and they have done everything manageable to protect it," Ryan Girdusky, founder of the 1776 Project PAC, said in a statement amid news of the UCLA Law project. "The truth is that aspects of CRT have been practiced in school for decades, and now that parents understand what’s going on, they’re up in arms about it. The resistance to CRT is only going to grow as politicians tell parents that they don’t have a place in their children’s education."

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Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, is among the conservatives who have argued the "upside" to pandemic-related school closings was that millions of parents got to see what was being taught to their kids.

"I think this is a powerful moment for school choice nationwide," Cruz told Fox News Digital last week.