One outspoken critic of the growing critical race theory movement is offering to publicly debate a leftist professor who espouses the radical philosophy.
Christopher Rufo, director of the Center on Wealth and Poverty at the Discovery Institute, tweeted Friday he’d go head-to-head with “any prominent critical race theorist” on the floor of The New York Times, which published an article in which the writer suggested Rufo’s fearful of debating CRT.
In the piece, Michelle Goldberg described Rufo as someone who has “been leading the conservative charge against critical race theory.”
She continued:
As Rufo sees it, critical race theory is a revolutionary program that replaces the Marxist categories of the bourgeois and the proletariat with racial groups, justifying discrimination against those deemed racial oppressors. His goal, ultimately, is to get the Supreme Court to rule that school and workplace trainings based on the doctrines of critical race theory violate the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
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Rufo insists there are no free speech implications to what he’s trying to do. “You have the freedom of speech as an individual, of course, but you don’t have the kind of entitlement to perpetuate that speech through public agencies,” he said
“But the right, for all its chest-beating about the value of entertaining dangerous notions, is rarely interested in debating the tenets of critical race theory,” she claimed in the article. “It wants to eradicate them from public institutions.”
Now Rufo, a documentary filmmaker, is calling Goldberg’s bluff.
He is giving The Times and “the professors of critical race theory … five calendar days to accept this challenge.”
“If they do not,” Rufo continued, “we’ll know who is afraid to debate, and who uses it as an excuse to shelter their ideas from public criticism.”
In January, the same day President Joe Biden was inaugurated, Rufo announced the formation of a “coalition of legal foundations and private attorneys that will engage a relentless legal warfare against race theory in American institutions.”
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Rufo described CRT as “a grave threat to the American way of life,” arguing it “divides Americans by race and traffics in the pernicious concepts of race essentialism, race stereotyping, and race-based segregation — all under the false pursuit of ‘social justice.’”
“Critical race theory training programs have become commonplace in academia, government, and corporate life, where they have sought to advance the ideology through cult-like indoctrination, intimidation, and harassment,” he added.
Rufo’s debate invitation comes several days after Coca-Cola faced intense backlash over the company’s “anti-racism” training, which included materials instructing participants to “try to be less white.”
The training — which was developed by “White Fragility” author Robin DiAngelo and was available on LinkedIn — stated that, to “be less white,” one must be “less oppressive,” “less arrogant,” “less certain,” “less defensive,” “less ignorant,” “more humble,” “listen,” “believe,” “break with apathy,” and “break with white solidarity.”
A description of the course promised participants they would walk away with “the vocabulary and practices you need to start confronting racism and unconscious bias at the individual level and throughout your organization.”
Joshua Foxworth, a former Republican congressional candidate in Texas, said: “If your congressman does nothing when Coca-Cola tells its employees to ‘try to be less white’ but would rush to any available mic if this was said about any other race, can it truly be said that they represent every American in their district, or just the ones the media allows?”
In a statement released last week, Coca-Cola said the videos and images from the training “are not part of the company’s learning curriculum,” adding, “The video in question was accessible on the LinkedIn Learning platform, but was not part of the company’s curriculum.”
LinkedIn removed the training Friday.
In early February, Rufo appeared on “The Megyn Kelly Show,” where he told podcast host Megyn Kelly that CRT began in academic circles and seeks to “overthrow the constitutional order and end the unfettered protection of speech, end individual rights as individuals, end private property, which is another form of discrimination, and then end 14th Amendment protections that you’re all treated equally under the law.”
“For the critical race theorist, these aren’t actually signs of progress,” he said. “Even the Civil Rights Act, even desegregating schools — they were very skeptical of this because they saw it gives the appearance of progress but actually doesn’t change the fact that racism is as bad in 2021 as it was in 1814.”
Many of the ideas surrounding CRT have been “brewing for a half century” and finally bubbled to the surface in May 2020, following the police-involved death of George Floyd, according to Rufo.
“To their credit,” he told Kelly, “they patiently developed and built and perpetuated this in academia until the time was right where it just caught fire.”
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