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Dec. 28, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show
21:26
Rampant Racism, CRT, and The Fall Of Education | Dr. Carol Swain

Dr. Carol Swain joins The Michael Knowles Show. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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There's a black professor at Emerson College has just been promoted to become an interim dean She says that whites and blacks can't really have meaningful relationships, should not have meaningful relationships.
And I thought, to help me work through this, I would like to invite on a black woman, happens to be a professor herself, with whom I do have a wonderful relationship, to see if we can disprove this theory.
I'm talking, of course, about Carol Swain, former tenured professor at Princeton, and Vanderbilt has lots of fancy degrees, has lots of fancy awards from academic institutions.
The author of, among other books, Black Eye for America, How Critical Race Theory is Burning Down the House.
Carol, thank you for coming on.
It's my pleasure.
Are we allowed to have a relationship anymore?
No, that's over because the interim dean said so.
Isn't that so sad?
All I can say in the truest southern sense, bless her heart.
I would say I can't believe she said this, but I can believe it, and I'm not even surprised when I read these things anymore.
They seem to occur day by day and week by week, some other divisive, outrageous, false I mean, we've just seen justice for that racial attack on Jussie Smollett.
His attacker was brought to justice, happens to be himself.
Complete racial hoax.
So I guess my first question for you is, Carol, how is critical race theory burning down the house?
Well, first of all, the House is America.
And if you look at what was happening last summer after George Floyd's death, I think we had 50 straight days of some city, you know, in turmoil, vandalism, fires, deaths.
It has turned apart the country because it is pitting whites against blacks.
And that professor at Emerson College, she was married to a white man.
She divorced him because of his race.
And I would say that CRT It's so divisive that it's reached the point, you know, that it's breaking up marriages.
And this racial, visceral hatred that she has espoused, had she been a white person, she would have lost her job by now.
Right.
Because it would have risen to the level that even a tenured professor would not be able to get away with that if they were white.
And so what I feel about America, when I look at all of these...
Racial incidents that are occurring, and I look at how they handle it if the perpetrator is black versus a white perpetrator, and the whole idea that people make the argument that black people cannot be guilty of racism, that white people cannot be victims of hate crimes.
It is ludicrous, and we cannot have true equality in America until we hold Everyone to the same standards of conduct and behavior and moral decency.
Well, it seems like this professor's actions undermine her claim, and you see this in a lot of the left's racial theory.
She is espousing this idea that black people, and especially black women, are exceptionally oppressed, and white people, and especially white men, are the oppressors.
And so she says this view.
She says white people and black people can't have relationships.
She leaves her husband because of his race.
And she She gets away with it, whereas, as you say, if a white person had done that, obviously their life would be ruined.
So, doesn't the reaction to what she has said and done suggest that perhaps she is of the privileged sex or race and that maybe the situation is kind of the opposite of what she's saying that it is?
Of course it's the opposite.
There's no truth to it, but the whole idea that we would give her a free pass, that she would be able to make those outrageous, dangerous, damaging statements, be in a position to be a role model, you know, for hundreds if not thousands of students, And it would just, you know, we treat Black people as if that kind of behavior and attitude is somehow normal behavior.
It is not normal behavior.
It's obscene.
It should be condemned.
And it grows out of this critical race theory because it's all about dividing people.
People on the color of race, because of the color of their skin, with whites as the oppressors and racial and ethnic minorities as the victims.
But it is rooted to critical theory, which takes many forms.
There are other critical theories, and so they divide.
Homosexuals from heterosexuals, males from females, rich from poor, blacks versus whites.
These are all critical theories.
They're rooted in Marxism and postmodernism and all kinds of other things.
And it is dangerous and destructive for our society.
In my book, Black Eye for America, Which happened to be co-authored with a young white guy who started off as a research assistant and because this young white guy was such a good scholar, I promoted him to co-author.
We look at what CRT is, where it came from, how it manifests itself in our society, why it's un-American, why it runs counter to our constitution, And civil rights laws.
And then we have two chapters on how to fight back against it.
And so we see CRT as a danger.
In fact, I have argued that it is the civil rights issue of our day.
You know, we're told that, and it seems that a lot of people know, that CRT began in Harvard Law School with theorists such as Kimberley Crenshaw, and after that, things get a little confusing, because what the left says is, CRT remained in Harvard Law School and didn't really go anywhere else, and it's not being taught in lower schools, and it's not in our corporations, and And then, of course, out of the other side of their mouths, they're saying, and actually CRT is in all of these places, and that's a good thing.
But it's a little hard to pin down.
I remember, I think it was Martin Jay, the sympathetic historian of the Frankfurt School and critical theorists generally, said that critical theory is less its own discipline than it is a gadfly on other disciplines.
That it's sort of an analytical framework that begins to infect all of the other disciplines.
It does.
So how do you go from Harvard Law School to CRT, ostensibly everywhere else?
You mentioned Kimberly Crenshaw, and so I'm going to give credit to Derek Bale.
I don't know if you read in school, Faces at the Bottom of the Well and his fictional account, Space Traders.
I think Kimberly was a student of his, and she brought us intersectionality.
But the CRT is clearly rooted in the critical theories, you know, related to, you know, the cultural Marxists.
And it just morphed.
and it has infected every institution and discipline within the academy.
And I guess it would have been OK if it had stayed at the universities, but it got into departments of education.
And when the Obama administration came to power, it was not long.
By 2012, that was when you saw it really impacting K through 12 education and the criminal justice system with arguments about restorative justice.
And so people are becoming more aware of it because of George Floyd's death and the money that's been poured into it from corporations trying to buy peace and virtue signaling.
Money has given it more strength than it should have.
But it is something that we should all fight against.
It's very harmful to racial and ethnic minorities as well as to, you know, Caucasians.
It's harmful to our American society and we should not give people that divide us in the way CRT theorists do a free pass and we should not give them access to our children.
So now, how do you stop it?
Because there are governors such as Ron DeSantis who are going in using the power of the state and saying, look, the state has obviously a role in education.
A lot of these are public schools.
And so we're going to say, no, you're not going to teach this stuff to our kids.
Then you have some people, maybe the more libertarian minded, who say, no, we don't want to kick any books out of school.
We just want to teach all sort of points of view and we'll open the curriculum up to everyone.
And we don't really want to use state power.
So in terms of the nuts and bolts of how you get this poison out of our lower school, you know, middle school, high school, even elementary school.
Right.
How do you do that?
Well, I can tell you that it is in K through 12 and you may have seen some of the research.
I know that you have a, your little boy, how old is he now, like eight or nine months now?
Yeah, he's a little over 10 months now.
Okay, well, according to some of these race theorists, by six months, a baby can be racist.
And so little white babies and little Jewish babies or whatever, they can be racist.
And so Sesame Street and Nickelodeon and all of those children's programs are trying to indoctrinate these children.
And they're trying to make them see color because naturally kids just, you know, they see their friends.
They see people around them.
They see who they like.
But we're trying to consciously teach them to see color and to guilt out white people to make them feel ashamed, especially if they come from a normal family, a two parent family.
If they've been successful, then that's undeserved wealth.
You know, that's white privilege.
And I have been around long enough to know that, you know, white privilege, a lot of it, there's black privilege, there's Hispanic privilege.
In most cases, it means that your parents made good decisions and you have benefited from it.
And it is...
In the K-12, there are books that they may not be quoting Derrick Bell and Kimberly Crenshaw or Richard Delgado, but they're taking their ideas and they're distilling it down to children.
And it creates, I would say, a hostile learning environment, shaming, bullying of children and teachers.
And it's just unacceptable and it's un-American to allow that.
We should all fight back against it.
You know, I have no evidence that my son is racist, but I'm open to the possibility because I know that my son is sexist because he loves mommy and he has absolutely no interest in daddy.
So I don't know, maybe he's racist.
Who knows?
These kids, according to the left, they're so evil these days.
Guess how the research is?
It's my understanding that part of the research to determine that these babies are racist is that they prefer some faces better than Others.
And I'm thinking that if I'm a baby, I'm going to prefer the faces that are changing my diapers and beating me and hugging me.
Those are going to be the people that I prefer.
And so if that makes me racist as a baby, then, you know, so be it.
That means that in every ethnicity, there's a whole bunch of racist babies if they're being raised by their biological parents that took care of them and show them love.
That's right.
I know my baby.
I suppose he is anti-Italian because my wife is not Italian.
I am.
He doesn't have any interest in me.
So as they say in The Sopranos, it's anti-Italian discrimination.
And really, I mean, we're kind of joking about it, but you are seeing the left go more and more into not just putting this stuff in the minds of grad students or college students or high school or middle, but it's going down to elementary.
It's going down to preschool.
It is.
At the same time, you're seeing this coupled with a move from the left to get more and more kids into preschool earlier on and to keep them in college later on.
I mean, you see the growth of education, too.
Well, Michael, we're focused on CRT, and, you know, that's what we're talking about today, but...
Just as dangerous is critical queer theory, critical gender theory, because they are sexualizing kids that are in kindergarten.
And, you know, they're confusing them, telling little boys that they may not be little girls.
I've heard stories of children, after they get this sex education, being terrified that they're going to turn into the opposite sex.
And so we're focused on one thing, but there are other critical theories that are just as dangerous.
They don't belong.
In K-12 education.
And we have to root it all out.
It's a very good point, because while we focus on critical race theory, frankly, the critical sex and the gender theory is probably more dangerous.
I think so.
The sexual distinction in human beings is much more fundamental than any kind of racial differences.
So what is the solution to this, though?
Because in the old days, you would say...
Look, we know that there are boys, we know that there are girls, we know that boys and girls naturally want to do certain things together, and people might have aberrant desires and understandings, but look, there's true, there's false, there's natural law, there's certain things we're supposed to do, and so get in line with the telos.
With the natural order and the theology of the body, if you wanted to use a technical term.
Today, we're not allowed to say any of that.
We're not allowed to say that there's any better sexual behavior than any other sexual behavior.
We're not allowed to say there's any substantial difference between men and women.
We're barely allowed to say that there's such a thing as objective truth.
So, how do you go back?
Well, I tell you that, again...
The Obama administration, I don't want to say it was the root of all evil because evil preceded the Obama administration, but the activism of the LGBT community where it pertains to our children,
where you have transgenders and lesbians and homosexuals talking about their sexual behavior to the children, And just really pushing the activism that some people warned about.
They said it would happen.
And of course, they said, oh no, it wouldn't happen.
And I don't know if you followed the fact that the Biden administration is trying to change the policy at the Department of Education so that they no longer track sexual activity between adults and children.
These teachers that assault their students, engage in pedophilia, they don't want to track those numbers.
And I don't see that getting a lot of attention.
It's not getting the immediate attention that it should.
We should be up in arms about it because It does lay the groundwork for normalizing pedophilia.
We know a lot of it takes place in the classroom with teachers because we see all these teachers, you know, that are having sex with their students.
The whole idea that an administration would argue that we don't need to collect that data and make it public.
It's absurd.
You know, I actually had not heard about that story, but I'm not surprised.
Some years ago, conservatives said, as we always do, we said, this is a slippery slope, and if you permit certain sexual ideologies, the next thing you know, the left is going to try to normalize pedophilia.
And they told us that was completely insane, and it was never going to happen.
And you just had a professor who came under fire recently for using the term, minor attracted person.
He said he wanted to, he or she, I don't really know because his gender was sort of confused, So I'll use him as the single gender-neutral pronoun.
But he said that we need to destigmatize pedophilia because they're born that way.
Because they have these desires, and the desires are static their whole lives.
And his view was that they can't change them in any way.
And so, if you're going to begin with those premises, then what's the flaw in that logic?
Well, let me tell you, his research is not very original because...
Back, I would say, 20 years ago, they were using the concept, some people, intergenerational intimacy.
And that was a euphemism, you know, for sex between adults and children.
And so in academia, you know, you get paid for coming up with ideas, and usually the more bizarre, the greater the reward.
Yeah.
And so he just gave it a new spin.
I think it was a professor at Old Dominion University, and I believe he lost his job.
But he was clearly confused sexually by just looking at him and, you know, I don't know.
But he was certainly laying the groundwork for relationships between adults and children.
And they have openly made the argument at times that it benefits the children.
We have a sick society around us, and I think that...
If we are going to restore anything that resembles, you know, our Judeo-Christian roots as Americans, we're going to have to confront some of this stuff.
And they may call us names.
They will call us names because they do always call us names.
But it is worth it.
If you speak up, then someone else will speak up.
And before you know it, you have Moms for Liberty and Moms for America.
And you have all of these groups of people that were not activists, but they are there fighting hard for their children.
But if we're going to transform the culture in this way and transform the whole conversation and get rid of some of these crazy ideas, then it seems to me we have to be able to say that some things are better than other things, some desires are better than other desires, that we actually can kind of shape, to at least some degree, shape our desires.
You know, you practice the virtues, then it gets a little easier.
You start practicing vices, it gets a little harder to stop.
It's kind of like a drug addiction, right?
The more drugs you do, the harder it is to stop doing it.
But then what you're going to be told is, hey, you can't legislate morality.
Stop forcing your religious views on me.
Who's to determine what's right and wrong?
And you get this breakdown.
We're told that in a totally secular society, total separation of church and state, you're not allowed to have those kinds of opinions in the public square.
But wait a minute.
You know, they make that argument, but they actively proselytize it.
They actively indoctrinate our children.
They actively recruit.
And so we need to have enough courage to call it out for what it is.
And it doesn't matter what they say.
Look at what they do.
That's a good point.
You say, I'm going to proselytize at least as much as you are, guys, which means basically you could bring back the Spanish Inquisition, and it would probably be not even close to what they were doing.
Carol, I've got to let you go, but where can people find the book?
I think you had two books out last year?
I do.
Let me tell you this, Michael.
Black Eye for America, How Critical Race Theory is Burning Down the House is my first bestseller.
It was self-published.
It sold over 20,000 copies, you know, with me promoting it.
And then I had a book released in September.
Now, this book is not as popular, so I need you to help me popularize it.
It's a counter-cultural living.
What Jesus has to say about life, marriage, race and ethnicity...
Gender identities and materialism.
And I use my life and my mistakes.
And I've had a messy life.
I'm in my 60s, Michael.
When you reach my age, you've been through a lot of stuff.
And I can talk about how not to do life.
But Jesus has a better way.
And it's a short book.
I mean, it's shorter than Black Eye for America.
And both of those books are well under 200 pages.
Because I know people are busy.
They don't have time to sit down with a long book.
And so I'm writing for the American people, and I'm writing to be read, and I'm writing to help transform lives.
And I believe that we will win this victory.
And I tell people to be encouraged.
What you see with your eyes is not the true reality.
There's more of us than there are of them.
I love it.
I'm very pro-short book, Carol.
You know, some of my favorite books ever written that I think are the most profound are really short because they say most books should be essays, most essays should never be written.
And people go on and on and on, but you just distill it, give them exactly what they need.
So the two books, I can't believe you would write.
I've written two books ever, and one of them didn't even have words.
You write two books in a year.
Black Eye for America, How Critical Race Theory is Burning Down the House, and Countercultural Living, What Jesus Has to Say About Life, Marriage, Race, Gender, and Materialism from one of the greats.
Carol Swain.
Carol, thank you for being here.
Thank you.
My pleasure.
And Merry Christmas.
Merry?
You're not allowed to say that, Carol.
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