After O.C. school district bans critical race theory, it faces Cal State Fullerton backlash
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El Centro, Calif. • After O.C. school district bans critical race theory, it faces Cal State Fullerton backlash
El Centro, Calif. • After O.C. school district bans critical race theory, it faces Cal State Fullerton backlash.
After the school board banned a controversial theory of social justice that calls for a multi-cultural society, a group of white faculty and students took to the district’s Twitter feed on Friday morning to denounce the ban.
The debate began when a white male student, who had just received a grade of A on a paper, tweeted to the president of Students Allied for Freedom and Equality, an organization that promotes the theory, the theory’s proponents say.
“If they can’t be critical, how can they be learning?” the student asked. “The people they’re taught to listen to, they will tell them what they think by what they think.”
Students at El Centro High School, a middle school with just 3,600 students, had voted Friday morning to ban the theory and require a social justice essay.
Two weeks ago, the high school’s student body had voted to keep the theory but to use it as a springboard for their discussions of issues of importance to the community to include a social justice essay.
“We got a response from several students and teachers,” said the student who replied to the president’s tweet. “We didn’t get a response from any parents because this is an issue that affects us all.”
The theory, which has only one teacher, was taught to the student who shared the tweet.
It says that groups of people, like the Japanese and the Africans, and peoples like those in China and Russia, have similar histories.
The theory was first taught in 1974 by Richard McEachin, a University of California professor who has said that he is not racist but that the theory is “a vehicle for critical social transformation.”
The theory states that it is wrong to stereotype people different from you because, it is said, you are judging things by what you see, when you would be better able to judge people by what they