Yiatin Chu, an Asian mother of two and co-chair of the New York chapter of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR), said that critical race theory is “racist” and is having a harmful impact on schoolchildren.
In an interview with NTD’s “Focus Talk,” Chu acknowledged the presence of racism in the United States, but disputed the notion of systemic racism, a concept pushed by critical race theory advocates.
“As a whole, going through the New York City public school system, as an immigrant, as someone who didn’t even speak English when I first started, I would say it’s actually a very good system, a very caring and open system,” she said. “I don’t think that there is systemic racism built into our New York City public schools.”
Chu described critical race theory as the idea that disparate outcomes, such as academic competency, can be reduced to a single variable—race. Advocates of the theory, which she said is increasingly being taught at pre-college levels, push the socialist notion of equality of outcome, and blame differences in outcomes on entrenched privilege while dividing people into “oppressors” and their victims, the “oppressed.”
She said that the growing prevalence of critical race theory in the classroom means “everyone’s being judged, everything is being looked at.
“Every picture you look at, every classroom you look at, people are looking at it by race—and it’s just an awful thing to have to think this way,” she said.
She said that she stepped into education advocacy in response to mounting pressure on selective, exam-based admissions schools, which she said “were being targeted for being racist.”
Advocacy groups didn’t like the fact that the outcomes of the admissions process led to a high proportion of Asian students admitted relative to their representation in the general population, she said.
BY TOM OZIMEK
