Montgomery County Schools spent half a million on Critical Race Theory “System Audit”
Judicial Watch has obtained documents from the Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) uncovering details about their critical race theory classes. Judicial Watch is a conservative, non-partisan educational foundation, which promotes transparency, accountability, and integrity in government, politics, and the law.
The group received these documents through a freedom of information request. They uncovered that at the Thomas Pyle Middle School, a class course slide titled “What is systemic racism?”[i] contained a pyramid depicting “Differences between overt and covert hateful white supremacy.” According to the pyramid, “Make America Great Again” is an example of “covert white supremacy.”
The phrase is ranked on the pyramid just below “lynching,” “hate crimes,” “the N-word” and “racial slurs.” Students were also taught that “white privilege” means being favored by school authorities and having a positive relationship with the police.
Examples of other covert “white supremacy” include thinking “but we’re just one human family,” “colorblindness,” “cultural appropriation,” “celebration of Columbus Day,” “police murdering POC [people of color],” and “bootstrap theory.”[ii]
The class was given “definitions” created by www.racialequitytools.org. The terms that are defined include:
- Black Lives Matter – which is defined as “A political movement to address systemic and state violence against African Americans.” It claims that “Black Lives Matter is an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise.”
- Power – defined among other things as: “Wealth, whiteness, citizenship, patriarchy, heterosexism, and education are a few key social mechanisms through which power operates.”
- Racist policies – defined with the statement, “There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy.”
- White Privilege – defined as “to the unquestioned and unearned set of advantages, entitlements, benefits and choices bestowed on people solely because they are white.” And “Structure white privilege” is described as “A system of white domination that creates and maintains belief systems that make current racial advantages and disadvantages seem normal.”
- White supremacy culture – defined as referring, “to the dominant, unquestioned standards of behavior and ways of functioning embodied by the vast majority of institutions in the United States.” White supremacy culture is further defined as “the glue that binds together white-controlled institutions into systems and white-controlled systems into the global white supremacy system.”
A slide titled “What is Intersectionality” [iii] indoctrinated students that “Exposing [one’s] multiple identities can help clarify the ways in which a person can simultaneously experience privilege and oppression….”
The Pyle Middle School’s Social Justice class material also included a request for students to fill out a form letter with contact information addressed to federal, state, and county education officials asking for more critical race theory classes in schools.
Additionally, the documents show[iv] that Montgomery County Public Schools allocated over $454,000 for an “Anti-racist system audit” by the Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium. This organization claims that its “expertise in using intersectionality as part of its theory of change makes us uniquely positioned to conduct the Anti-Racist Audit and mitigate the root causes of systemic barriers.”[v]
According to Critical Race Theory academic Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw:[vi] ‘Intersectionality is simply a prism to see the Interactive effects of various forms of discrimination and disempowerment. It looks at the way that racism, many times, interacts with patriarchy, heterosexism, classism, xenophobia – seeing that the overlapping vulnerabilities created by these systems actually create specific kinds of challenges.’
“The racist, revolutionary claptrap in these documents should be nowhere near a school classroom,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “These documents show that extremists have access to our schools and are willing to abuse this access to children in order to advance a dangerous, divisive, and likely illegal agenda.”
[i] https://www.judicialwatch.org/documents/thomas-pyle-mcps-2021-pgs-44-45/
[ii] https://www.judicialwatch.org/documents/thomas-pyle-mcps-records-2021-pg-9/
[iii] https://www.judicialwatch.org/documents/thomas-pyle-mcps-2021-pg-40/
[iv] https://www.judicialwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/MCPS-Anti-Racist-Audit-2021-pgs-56-60.pdf
[v] https://maec.org/
[vi] https://www.law.columbia.edu/faculty/kimberle-w-crenshaw