The commission was formed as an apparent opposition to Project 1619 of The New York Times, a Pulitzer Prize winning project designed to teach American students about slavery that Trump, speaking last fall, called “toxic propaganda”. The announcement came just two days after the commission released an inflammatory report on the day of Martin Luther King Jr. and just hours before Biden replaced Trump, whose term was marked by racist statements and actions.
In its report released Monday, the commission stated that “the Civil Rights Movement almost immediately turned to programs that went against the founders’ high ideals”, specifically criticizing affirmative action policies and arguing that identity policies are “the opposite of King’s hope that their children live in a nation where they will not be judged on the color of their skin, but on the content of their character. ‘”
Calling current ideological divisions similar to those experienced during the Civil War, members of the commission also targeted feminists and the widespread use of ethnic and racial identities in American life, arguing that they were built by “activists”.
“A radical women’s liberation movement has reimagined America as a patriarchal system, claiming that every woman is a victim of the oppression of men. The Black Power and black nationalist movements have reimagined America as a regime of white supremacy. Meanwhile, other activists built artificial groups to further divide Americans by race, creating new categories like ‘Asian American’ and ‘Hispanic’ to teach Americans to think of themselves in terms of group identities and to awaken various groups into politically cohesive bodies, ” said the report.
Trump announced that he was setting up the commission last fall, after a series of Black Lives Matter demonstrations across the country. He blamed the school curriculum for the violence that resulted from some of the protests, saying that “the revolt and chaos of the left are the direct result of decades of indoctrination of the left in our schools”.
Larry Arnn, the president of Hillsdale College, who had received criticism for his comments in 2013, when he said that state officials had visited the college to see if there were enough “dark” applicants, was chosen to chair the committee. Carol Swain, who once wrote that Islam “poses an absolute danger to us and our children”, was chosen as vice president.
Other Republicans criticized Project 1619 and expressed similar feelings about adopting ethnic and racial identities.
Senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, introduced legislation last year that would prevent schools from teaching the curriculum. And Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, with a day left of his term, accessed his taxpayer-funded Twitter account and denounced multiculturalism, saying “that’s not what America is”.
“Awakening, multiculturalism, all the isms – they are not who America is. They distort our glorious foundation and what this country stands for. Our enemies feed these divisions because they know they make us weaker,” he wrote on Tuesday.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of Project 1619, said that Pompeo’s tweet proved the project’s thesis.
“When you say that multiculturalism ‘is not who America is’ and ‘distorts our glorious foundation’, you involuntarily confirm the argument of Project 1619: Although we were … a multiracial nation since our foundation, our founders established a government of white rule. Cool, “she wrote in
Twitter, also saying that the Trump administration had tried to censor Project 1619.
In September, Trump said the United States Department of Education would investigate whether schools in California were using The 1619 Project in public school curricula and banned federal agencies from conducting racial sensitivity training related to “white privilege” and ” critical racial theory “.
CNN’s Maegan Vazquez, Jennifer Hansler, Kylie Atwood, Nicole Gaouette and Kevin Liptak contributed to this report.
.Source
Related
