FLASHBACK: The left is playing dumb on the ubiquity of its radical ideology in our schools.

Two contradictory falsehoods about Critical Race Theory (CRT) pop up again and again: that it’s just teaching about racism, and that it’s not even in our schools. CRT defenders from MSNBC host Joy Reid to Congresswoman Ilhan Omar insist it’s just an esoteric theory discussed in law schools, and that conservatives are complaining about a phantom. If only we would read the real critical race theorists, they say, instead of listening to right-wing ideologues, then we’d understand what CRT really is, and the preposterousness of imagining that it’s become an essential part of public school curricula.

Harvard professor Jarvis Givens contends that CRT is  just “about teaching the history of racial inequality and the history of racism.” Similarly, Anne Applebaum at The Atlantic argues that the recent slate of CRT bans point to a “consensus in a segment of the Republican Party” that “schoolchildren should not be taught the history of racism in America.”

In reality, these contentions are demonstrably false. Critical Race Theory is radical in its outlook and fully present in American schools.

The mythical Republican who wants to ban teaching about slavery or Jim Crow doesn’t exist. No one objects to an accurate portrayal of American history and its many sins. In my own classroom—with its conservative teacher opposed to CRT—we read Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass, and the poets of the Harlem Renaissance with the intention of learning about the history of racial oppression in all its harsh reality.

How did that play out? Glenn Youngkin Defeated Terry McAuliffe Because Democrats Betrayed Parents.