Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis said Friday that he opposes teaching critical race theory in the state’s public schools, calling the ideas pushed by its advocates as “based on false history” and “teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other.”
DeSantis made the remarks at a Friday press conference in Pensacola, where he announced the signing of a bill temporarily establishing several statewide tax-free periods on items like storm supplies and back-to-school products.
“It’s offensive to the taxpayer that they would be asked to fund critical race theory, that they would be asked to fund teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other,” DeSantis said.
In a recent interview on NTD’s “Focus Talk,” Yiatin Chu, an Asian mother of two and co-chair of the New York chapter of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR), described critical race theory as pushing the idea that disparate outcomes, such as academic competency scores, 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.”
Republicans across the nation are trying to prevent the teaching of critical race theory in classrooms.
Recently, South Dakota’s Republican Gov. Kristi Noem took aim at both the “1619 Project” and critical race theory and, like DeSantis, voiced opposition to their incorporation in school curriculums.
“The 1619 Project relies upon the concept of Critical Race Theory to further divide students based on the color of their skin,” Noem wrote in a series of tweets Friday. “This is inappropriate and un-American. It has no place in South Dakota, and it certainly has no place in South Dakota classrooms.”
BY TOM OZIMEK
