BY GQ PAN February 25, 2021 Updated: February 25, 2021.
The New York chapter of the oldest Chinese American civil rights group has denounced critical race theory (CRT) as “a hateful, divisive, manipulative fraud,” urging parents to identify and call out the ideology in their children’s education.
In a Feb. 23 letter (pdf), the Chinese American Citizens Alliance of Greater New York condemned CRT, a European Marxist outgrowth that views society through the singular lens of race-based power struggle and labels the very foundations of American social and political life—such as rationalism, constitutional law, and legal reasoning—as tools of racial oppression.
“From its very roots, CRT is racist, repressive, discriminatory, and divisive,” the organization wrote, noting that the CRT framework is heavily influenced by prominent communist thinkers like Marx, Lenin, and Gramsci, but with class struggle replaced by racial struggle.
Chinese Americans, according to the Alliance, have come into CRT’s crosshairs because the racial minority group has continued to “overcome discrimination and achieve upward mobility,” becoming “white by adjacency.”
Pointing out that CRT promotes broad generalizations solely based on skin color, the Alliance argues it will inevitably collide with immigrants who are “grateful to be here, work hard and educate their children hard, and believe in the American dream under the Constitutional guarantee of equal rights.”
“When CRT eventually clashes with immigrants, we will find CRT’s racism and hate against us ratcheted up another notch,” the letter reads.
In a call to action, the Alliance said parents should not only organize to resist CRT being taught in schools, but also speak with their children to ”un-doctrinate” them at home. “This needs to start early, because CRT indoctrination also starts early,” it warned. “Don’t trust schools and teachers blindly.”
The group also urged voters to elect state legislators who “represent our views on CRT,” noting that it is unlikely to purge CRT at the federal level with President Joe Biden in the White House. In one of his first executive actions as president, Biden rescinded Trump’s September 2020 executive order, which declared that “un-American” and “divisive concepts” should no longer be promoted in any diversity and inclusion training for federal employees.
The Alliance’s letter was applauded by Christopher Rufo, a conservative journalist, filmmaker, and active critic of CRT. He drew parallels between CRT and Mao’s Cultural Revolution, noting that many Chinese-Americans fled the deadly political movement and don’t want to see it reappear in the United States.
“Welcome to the fight, friends,” Rufo wrote on Twitter.
The Alliance was originally founded in 1895 in San Francisco, California, to empower Chinese immigrants during the exclusion era, when the Exclusion Act of 1882 suspended Chinese immigration for 10 years and declared immigrants of Chinese origin ineligible for naturalization. Its Greater New York chapter was re-established in 2016.