Readers of this blog are accustomed to the rule “follow the money.” Thus, you should not be surprised that the national campaign to discredit teaching about racism (aka critical race theory) is an obscure rightwing foundation.
Judd Legum and Tesmin Zekeria wrote on a site called “Popular Information” about the activity of the Thomas W. Smith Foundation. In 2020, the authors correctly write, few people outside of law schools had ever heard about CRT. In 2021, CRT has suddenly become “an existential threat” to our nation, a subject of constant discussion at FOX News and other media outlets.
The Thomas W. Smith Foundation has no website and its namesake founder keeps a low public profile. Thomas W. Smith is based in Boca Raton, Florida, and founded a hedge fund called Prescott Investors in 1973. In 2008, the New York Times reported that The Thomas W. Smith Foundation was “dedicated to supporting free markets.”
More information about the foundation can be gleaned from its public tax filings, which are called 990-PFs. The Thomas W. Smith Foundation has more than $24 million in assets. The person who spends the most time working for the group is not Smith but James Piereson, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. According to the foundation’s 2019 990-PF, Piereson was paid $283,333 to work for The Thomas W. Smith Foundation for 25 hours per week.
The article continues:
Piereson has made clear that he opposes efforts to increase racial or economic equality, even if these efforts are financed by private charities…
In a 2017 column, Piereson criticized liberal philanthropists for focusing on “climate change, income inequality, [and] immigrant rights,” describing these as “radical causes.” He stressed the need for “a counterbalance provided by right-leaning philanthropies.”
Piereson also opposes classes dedicated to the study of women, Black people, or the LGBTQ community in universities, saying these topics lack “academic rigor.”
In the 1960s, universities caved to the demands of radicals on campus by expanding academic departments to include women’s studies, black studies, and, more recently, “queer studies.” These programs are college mainstays, making up in ideological vigor what they lack in academic rigor.
How did CRT, a complex theory that explains how structural racism is embedded in the law, get redefined to represent corporate diversity trainings and high school classes on the history of slavery? The foundation funding much of the anti-CRT effort is run by a person who opposes all efforts to increase diversity at powerful institutions and laments the introduction of curriculum about the historical treatment of Black people.
It’s hard to generate excitement around tired arguments opposing diversity and racial equality. It’s easier to advocate against CRT, a term that sounds scary but no one really understands.
The article goes on to describe the 21 organizations that have been funded by the Thomas W. Smith Foundation to attack CRT. They include the Manhattan Institute, ALEC, the Heritage Foundation, Judicial Watch, and the American Enterprise Institute.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Are we surprised? Why don’t they just call themselves The “White Men Rule” Institute? It lets the younger generation think they are almost cool while the older crowd can just take the sobriquet literally.
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The “Old White Men Rule institute”
Most of these people were born in the heyday of the KKK.
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I thought about adding that, but then I thought about all the younger white men I know who aren’t quite as rigid but who still are beneficiaries of white male supremacy. Women don’t get off the hook, but, as a general rule, they are not on equal footing to their male counterparts.
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The Thomas W. Smith Foundation has no website and its namesake founder keeps a low public profile”
This is actually a very good strategy.
Not having a website ensures that you can fly like a cruise missile under the radar.
People don’t even know you exist before you strike them out of the blue.
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Indeed it is easier to make people afraid of the things they do not understand. Man has always created structural aspects of society around things that were difficult to understand. CRT will soon be gone from the public eye as the manipulation of public reaction continues, fueled as it is by big wallets.
The interesting thing is that different cultures have generally chosen different things to fear. Some have accepted homosexuality without much reaction, many have accepted or promoted various Magic’s and beliefs. Our culture, Europe, has been responsible for both witch burning and science. I guess it still is that way, a mass of contradictions.
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Scientist burning too (Giordano Bruno).
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Organized religion always seems to play a role in the burnings — and much of the fear mongering, for that matter.
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The Giordano Bruno Story
–COSMOS: A Spacetime Odyssey
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I disagree with Tyson on one point.
He says Bruno was no scientist, that his theory was just a lucky guess for which he had no evidence.
But many scientific theories start out that way. And all scientific inquiry begins with a hypothesis which can be tested.
Bruno’s hypothesis falls squarely in that category.
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“Galilei was an Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer, sometimes described as a polymath, from Pisa.”
“Giordano Bruno was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician, poet, cosmological theorist, and Hermetic occultist.”
Perhaps it’s safe to say Bruno “was no scientist” is the sense of a Galileo in Galileo’s time.
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Back in Bruno’s time, people were not really called scientists anyway.
They were called Natural philosophers.
Scientist or not, Bruno was a genius. It is rather amazing how much ahead of his time Bruno was in his thinking. He had quite an imagination to come up with a theory of the cosmos that gets so many things correct.
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And his ideas were not entirely without evidence any more than Copernicus’s ideas were without evidence, since his own ideas merely extended those of Copernicus.
He was taking the observation of the stars (dots of light)in the sky as a basis for his extension, assuming they were like the sun. That’s a perfectly reasonable scientific hypothesis.
Bruno also anticipated what is normally called the Galilean principle of relativity, even using the example of a ship that Galileo later used (perhaps not coincidentally)
”
It from the point D to the point E someone who is inside the ship would throw a stone straight up, it would return to the bottom along the same line however far the ship moved, provided it was not subject to any pitch and roll.”[48]
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Have you read Lucretius’ “The Nature of Things” that apparently set Bruno’s thinking on fire? I haven’t but I’m thinking it would be a fascinating read.
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Ah yes, the historian sees complexity
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quite the US conundrum: I grew up in a home which pushed non-questioned Christianity at me from the day I was born while putting National Geographic magazine on our living room coffee table month after month.
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The right wing nuts are giving it a “name” (CRT) to stoke the fires of the culture wars, but many parents (of ALL political parties!) are realizing that something is not right in their public schools. They rightly have cause for alarm and are happy to have a “name” or “description” to attach to what they are feeling. Mercedes Schneider posted about this several days ago on her blog. In the name of equity/diversity and anti-bullying teaching, some curriculum/teachers/admin are pushing tweens/teens towards the fringes of ideology with the” way” they are teaching the subject matter. This is NOT good for kids and parents are seeing the negative affects of this on their children. Call me a tin-foil hat wearing nut, but I am experiencing the negative affects of this type of curriculum/teaching in my own home. THIS is what parents perceive as CRT (even though it’s not).
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First of all, Mercedes is reporting on a charter operation, not a public school no matter what they call themselves. The fact that the term CRT developed for discussion of the inequites in law and legal procedure in law schools is being co-opted by forces (that really have no interest in freedom of speech that isn’t theirs) to describe K-12 curriculum is lost in the repetition of fallacy. CRT is an easy label to excuse people from really having to understand what they are talking about.
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Yes, Democracy Prep is a Charter operation, but some public schools are doing this as well. I don’t know where they are getting this type of curriculum (Safe Schools?), but it is most definitely happening like this in some public school systems. I will tell you that some of this is happening in my district at the HS level (in some schools). I don’t know if these are “activist” teachers going over the top with curriculum or if this curriculum is something that the district has purchased? This is NOT CRT….but this is what parents are experiencing with their children and the right wing is having a field day with it. Whatever it is, it needs to be stopped.
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I agree wholeheartedly, and it is a very big problem, but you will not find a much of an audience for that view here.
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Lisa Buchman,
I wonder if you could give a specific example to back up your statement “I will tell you that some of this is happening in my district at the HS level”.
What I have seen is that people post links to anti-CRT folks with video of supposedly “dangerous” teachers or educators that the anti-CRT folks mischaracterize in an attempt to totally destroy those teachers.
I’m probably one of the few people that actually watch the entirety of the videos and it almost always turns out that there are perfectly nice teachers who are saying something that is not at all frightening. I can’t imagine anyone being offended, so my suspicion is that a few snowflake white parents hear tell exaggerated rumors and don’t bother to check it out for themselves but still wrongly believe that their white children will be gravely harmed by hearing this. Most times their kids are far less freaked out about it than their parents or don’t even notice.
In fact, a conservative student at a private school, Harvard Westlake, wrote a public letter to one of the purveyors of this fraud, to correct her massively incorrect characterization about his school. A conservative student who just believed in telling the truth, not vague rumors or exaggerated examples like pretending a random comment in a yearbook is a sign of an “anti-CRT curriculum”.
So I wonder if you could be very specific. So what are some specific examples of what you are seeing in your public high schools that alarm you so much?
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“…exaggerated rumors and don’t bother to check…”
Yes. It’s like a bad telephone game which is still a great way to show students how things get exaggerated.
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^^^That is to say, I have no doubt that a classroom teacher could be doing offensive things in the name of CRT, but without understanding exactly what is going on, it’s hard to make a wholehearted condemnation.
The Democracy Prep teacher did sound ignorant, but the lawsuit seems to blame CRT and not the inexperienced teachers at a charter school.
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Lisa Bushman, thank you.
Sometimes, maybe often times, we wrongly think a kind of behavior that shows up within one context cannot transfer to and become active within a different context.
I read Mercedes as warning us to beware of such thinking. In concluding, she offers:
“There is much more to this suit, which I encourage K12 teachers and administrators to read in full and then be certain NOT to emulate.
“Before this suit, I had never heard of such foolishness happening in the name of teaching sociological awareness. By the way, the New York lawyer connected to this case is shifting his attention from personal injury to ‘personal injury and civil rights.’ He is counting on the likes of this DPPS stupidity occurring repeatedly in schools nationwide and cashing in on it in the process. Don’t set yourselves up to become defendants in any of his potential, future litigation.”
It can be seen here in Atlanta that leadership of public schools are already beginning to emulate the “foolishness” and “stupidity” by encouraging students and adults to read Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi’s “Stamped (For Kids): Racism, Antiracism, and You.”
Positioning children labeled Black to develop the belief that any people are “haters,” inherently, is just plain foolish and stupid and should be chilling. And, yes, the foolishness and stupidity are, without question, contrary to Martin Luther King’s wisdom.
I continue to hold that Kendi is an activation of CRT, and that CRT is just one of any number of instantiations of Critical Theory (CxT), and that CxT requires radically “disrupting ” what-is so as to bring into existence an ideological, wisdom-free should-be.
CxT/CRT remind me of Michael Hammer’s “radical change” ideology, and maybe there’s a connection. I don’t know, yet.
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…CRT is just one of any number of possible instantiations of Critical Theory (CxT)…
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Are you positive your characterization of Kendi’s book is accurate? It certainly does NOT appear that way from the many educators and parents who reviewed that book on goodreads.
“Positioning children labeled Black to develop the belief that any people are “haters,” inherently, is just plain foolish and stupid and should be chilling.”
This sounds like a mischaracterization of Kendi. Recognizing the racism in society is different than calling people “haters”.
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I have read the book you mention. Read it last year. I am white.
NOWHERE does it say for Blacks or anyone else to hate whites or anyone else. I doubt you have read the book.
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The “Gainful Barkery” handbook posits:
What they pay attention to, determines what they miss.
IOW, keep ’em barking up the wrong trees.
Fein objection to spotlighting cultural identities,
as if focusing on social divisions, rather than class
solidarity, WASN’T a gift to the ruling class.
Fein objection to the voting process, as if the vote
of “we the people” negated the dictatorial powers of
the unelected.
Fein opposition to the “other” side of the aisle,
while you both cry for us on the way to the bank.
Woof woof…
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I’m just hoping public school parents and other supporters finally, finally get the message that NONE of this is about public school students or improving public schools.
They’re ideologically committed to abolishing public systems and labor unions so they attack our schools- and our students will pay the price.
They contribute nothing positive or worthwhile or productive to public schools or public school students. It’s time to stop taking direction from the echo chamber and start serving public school students.
Your kids and your schools are just an obstruction in the way of these folks engineering privatized systems that meet their ideological requirements. If we want public schools to survive we are going to have to go our own way.
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Ed reformers finally admit the obvious that anyone outside their echo chamber already knew:
https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/three-hypotheses-explain-years-big-wins-school-choice
The ed reform agenda for public education is identical to that of Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos. There is not a dimes worth of difference between any of them.
All lockstep, all 100% focused on charters and vouchers. None of them serve students in public schools.
Public schools should break free from this “movement”. They don’t support public schools or public school students. They offer nothing of positive value to our students and schools, and there is a SUBSTANTIAL downside for our students.
Valuing public schools and public school students is wholly inconsistent with “ed reform”. They simply don’t work for our schools. We can find people who will, but they won’t come out of the Bush-Obama-Trump education echo chamber.
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“The fourth annual Reagan Institute Summit on Education (RISE) will be held virtually on July 22, 2021. The theme of RISE 2021, Disrupted: From Crisis to Innovation, will reflect America’s recovery from the convergence of a national and global crisis that has challenged every student, teacher, and parent in America. With history as our guide, the Reagan Institute believes that out of great disruption can arise great innovation. With world class thought leaders, RISE will lift voices and exemplary models that can guide us towards the most innovative policy solutions.”
Another ed reform event that is wholly composed of ed reform echo chamber members.
There are more employees of billionaire foundations invited than there are people who run public schools.
Public schools need to break out of this or they will not survive. If they continue to take direction from these folks public school students will be the big losers.
Public schools don’t serve Arne Duncan’s or Jeb Bush’s vision of privatized systems. Public schools serve public school students. They should ditch the ed reform echo chamber and get back to their mission, which is not engineering privatized systems but instead working on behalf of students in public schools.
It won’t even be that difficult to break free- 90% of ed reform isn’t relevant to students who attend public schools anyway. If you’re a public school leader take a hard look at what this “movement” has actually contributed to your schools or students over the last 30 years. If the answer is “nothing”, end the relationship. That’s permitted. It’s past time to fire the “movement” and replace them with people who actually support public school students.
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Libertarianism/Ayn Randism is a cancer on our society. It is knuckleheadism dressed up in respectable clothing or sugar coated nihilism. Many of these libertarian clowns would be perfectly agreeable with doing away with publicly funded schools and revert to all private tuition schools. Their rationale is based on greed and selfishness and hyper-individuality so that they don’t have to pay any school taxes. Libertarian thinks: why should I have to pay for other kids’ education, ergo, do away with publicly funded schools. No more public schools, just private schools or home schooling.
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Ryan Girdusky formed a PAC to help elect school board candidates opposed to CRT. (Catholic Vote wrote about it.)
A Ryan Girdusky interviewed Pat Buchanan in 2014. If it is the same person, he is using the playbook he learned from Buchanan, “…to elect Nixon you had to get Democrats…My approach was the Northern Catholics who were moving politically…Nixon went for the Northen ethnic Catholics who rejected the counter culture of the 1960’s…” Girdusky added, “I understand that. My Grandfather, a union Italian Catholic Democrat said Nixon was the first Republican he ever voted for.” Buchanan’s replies included the follllowing,
“I wrote Nixon this huge memo about how …Catholics were natural Republicans…..We were hoping for an Italian Supreme Court Justice…(Reagan appointed Scalia).”
This summer, Rep. Anthony Sabatini wrote, “I’m pushing for legislation that will permanently bar CRT in our classrooms.” He is a Claremont Institute Lincoln Fellow, along with Christopher Rufo, James O’Keefe, Jack Posobiec, Jack Murphy (his views about women and also his D.C. charter school management were written about at WAMU and Think Progress), the Daily Caller’s editor and chief and a number of people with association to Catholic organizations.
So, the question is why, during the 7 intervening years (the 2014 playbook is posted at Patrick Buchanan’s site), has the topic been taboo to liberals?
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Another ed reform lobbying promoting a completely negative portrayal of public schools:
“We’re not even midway through the summer and the start of the new academic year is in some cases just weeks away. As Tennessee Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn recently told the Wall Street Journal, students and teachers “will walk into school and it will feel like school pre-pandemic.” It’s one of many signals that Americans are eager to move on. However, in breathing a collective sigh of relief, educators and policymakers should be prepared for the tempest that’s been brewing and building: a dual threat posed by students who cannot read and districts taken hostage by our broader cultural wars.”
Public schools leaders and supporters have to ask themselves- is anyone in ed reform contributing any positive value to public schools, and if they’re not, why are they running US public education?
We really do have a choice. We can continue to follow the wholly negative, anti-public school “ed reform movement” or we can go in a different and positive direction for public school students, a direction where public schools and public school students are valued.
We can’t do both. This movement’s ideological mission is incompatible with strong public schools. They do not make stronger public schools. It’s all subtraction, all loss, all negative.
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CRT is about historical narrative. Today in the North Carolina Museum of Art we saw another narrative from another time. Rodin depicted the sacrifice of several Town Burghers who gave their lives to lift a siege during the 100 years war. Or did they? The Guardian writes of some pesky historian who tried to validate this story as truth. Turns out it cannot really be validated according to him.
Curse those historical researchers! Always looking for truth. Seems slight changes make truth into falsehood. Truth can also be changed into Trump by changing two letters. But oh what a change.
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“burghers of Calais??” Oh no, I had no idea!
One of my favorite mystery novelists, Louise Penny, refers to that story in her latest book. Good to know that the story wasn’t quite as it seemed.
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I love Louis Penny! I can hardly wait for the next book. A year seems like such a long time, but, of course, her books are so good because she researches them carefully. Wouldn’t every woman like a man as perceptive and empathetic as Armand Gamache?
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speduktr,
Agree, 100%! And I think her latest one comes out next month!
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Yup, and I already have put a hold on it at my local library due out Aug. 24.
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I believe that you are putting too much thought into this. Simply put, parents want their schools to be teaching math, science, English (composition), and social studies (history and citizenship). They do not want political indoctrination–social justice, sex, etc as part of the curriculum.
The average parent and school board activist from middle America sees no money from these well-funded groups. Parents were alerted by comments from teachers on zoom classes and from teachers who did not like what was happening plus the actions (and inactions) of their school boards. CRT entered after parents were already upset over COVID restrictions. Homeschooling, charters, and private schools did not catch the negative publicity that public schools received, and justly so.
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Are you saying we should not be teaching literature?
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Posted at Pat Buchanan’s site is, “A conversation with Pat Buchanan on his new book…” (July 11, 2014). The interview was
conducted by Ryan Girdusky who recently formed a PAC to fund school board members opposed to CRT. The interview provides insight into what motivates the “obscure foundation”.
The “opposition to the counter culture” that Buchanan identifies is, opposition to the advancement of women and blacks and an attempt to deny Americans the right to be free from patriarchal religion.
(Ryan Girdusky is interviewed at Catholic Vote about CRT) He is anti-union. In Ireland during the great hunger, profiteers were able to starve 1,000,000 people because religion kept the poor in line. And, the offsetting power to counter the wealthiest’s abuses requires unions.
The article, “The new official contents of sex education in Mexico: laicism in the crosshairs”, at the Scielo site describes the worldwide campaign against public schools ( the CRT controversy post dates the article but, is part of the agenda.) The article is much broader in scope than the title indicates.
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How come we heard nothing about CRT in 2020 yet now it’s an “existential threat” to the nation?
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The full acronym is actually CSRT: Critical Stealth Race Theory, but the originators left out the Stealth so no one would be concerned about it.
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It seems odd to me that a parent would say that educators are putting “too much thought” into something. Isn’t that, well, the job of a teacher? To think about things? Asking for a friend….
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WOW.
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It’s highly likely that James Piereson wrote, “Xavier Becerra, Biden’s HHS pick has shown hostility to non-profit institutions, scholars argue”, posted at Catholic Report (1-15-2021) and the Catholic News Agency.
Donors to non-profits shirk their obligation to pay taxes on their income unlike the rest of us. The right wingers often use the donations to undermine the common good and consumers usually pay for it because it is the profits from what we buy that lines the pockets of the rich donors.
In the case of the 3rd largest U.S. employer, Catholic organizations, they, as non-profits. avoid paying taxes. Two 2020 SCOTUS decisions by the conservative Catholic majority advanced the interests of their church. The Biel case exempted Catholic school employers from civil rights employment laws for their teachers and Espinosa forces taxpayers to fund their schools.
The U.S. is becoming more like the Middle East and less like western democracies. The American patriarchal Catholic Church plays a major role in that.
At least two executive directors of state Catholic Conferences take credit for their states’ school choice laws.
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A private foundation’s tax return is posted on the internet, year 2016 (same people as the Thomas W. Smith Foundation). Money went to the Atlas Network which was recently led by a leader of the Acton Institute (conservative religion). Nancy MacLean who wrote Democracy in Chains is currently working to expose the Atlas Network.
Money also went Koch-linked institutions, George Mason, its Institute for Humane Studies and Mercatus, to Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, and, to a single high school, Roman Catholic.
Thanks to Diane for posting about the Thomas W., Smith Foundation.
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If nothing else, it looks like trafficking in kooky right-wing ideas and general paranoia on behalf of secretive, epistemologically unaccountable foundations is a lucrative pastime.
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“If nothing else…” More than 1 in 6 of the conservative religious believe in “kooky right-wing” ideas and Fox encourages national paranoia. The susceptible vote GOP.
“If nothing else”- The nation has made a hard right turn distancing itself from other developed nations, people in states want to secede so that they can make black people and women be deferential to white men, Putin’s campaign destabilizing the country flourished under Trump and continues, wealth has concentrated, SCOTUS rules in favor of conservatives whose opinions are those of a minority, Gen. Milley feared a moment when the nation’s republic would be taken over similar to Germany’s fall to the Nazis. But, other than that…
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I believe it is spelled SCROTUS in the case of the Roberts Court
Precisely what the R stands for is a matter of some debate, but all the possibilities mean basically the same thing.
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“When I use a word, like Critical Race Theory” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “
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Critical Racist Theory: the well established theory that racists are critical of anything African Americans do or say.
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Such an edifying addition to the conversation! Obviously a carefully researched opinion. Your teachers must be proud of your erudition.
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