With children headed back to school (whether in person or from a distance), parents should keep an eye out for the misuse of the education system to indoctrinate them into the cultish ideology of “anti-racism.”

Education about racism is legitimate and valuable, and very few Americans would object to the subject’s being handled in schools.  But anti-racism is something more like the opposite of its purported meaning.  Its application tends to suggest that race is all, that it is inescapable, and that everybody must always judge themselves and others by their race first of all so as to go out and judge others until no trace of “implicit bias” can be found.  Before the Orwellian cloud settled on our society, such a way of thinking would have been recognized correctly as racism.

For concise evidence of this claim, consider a book review by Anthony Daniels in The New Criterion.  Daniels’s essay is a service to save readers the pain of reading the two founding texts of this cult, White Fragility, by Robin DiAngelo, and How to Be an Antiracist, by Ibram Kendi.

Of the former, Daniels writes:

DiAngelo has apparently made a career of anti-racist struggle sessions in which ordinary employees of various organizations must confess publicly to their racism however hidden it might be, as university professors, primary school teachers, doctors working in slums, etc., had once in China to confess to bourgeois propensities and counter-revolutionary ideas. They may never have uttered a racist sentiment, they may never have been rude to a person of another race, let alone violent towards one, they may have friends of other races or even be married to a person of another race, but they carry racism deep within them like Original Sin, with this difference: there can be no redemption from it even after having read DiAngelo’s book and attended her struggle sessions. Personally, I should not be at all surprised if the end result of all her efforts, at least among the men she has “trained” (which is to say tried to indoctrinate), was to have acted as a recruitment officer for the Ku Klux Klan.

After thirty years of constant work of supposedly anti-racist training, she confesses—like the tearful Jimmy Swaggart—to being still guilty of racism herself, promising to reform, although reform is ex hypothesi impossible because racism is in her society’s dna, as it were.

Of the two books, Daniels preferred Kendi’s because (one can infer) it appears to be more a sincere work of consideration rather than an entrepreneurial effort to sell people on a psychological illness that can never be cured but must perpetually be treated, as is DiAngelo’s.  Still:

He is, however, consistent in one great error throughout his book: he does not distinguish inequity from inequality. He never uses the latter word. He does not appear to understand there could be no greater inequity than equality in a world of effort or lack of it. He believes that all differences in outcome between groups can be the result only of prejudice and discrimination, and that if the latter were removed the former would disappear. Nor does he recognize, even faintly, that to bring about the equality between groups that he believes is the only equitable arrangement for society would require a totalitarian regime that would make North Korea seem like a libertarian’s dream.

In short, anti-racism is ahistorical, illogical, totalitarian, and poisonous — dangerously, divisively poisonous.  This is not a cultural fad that parents can afford to ignore and let slip by.  It’s child abuse that, if too widespread, will make our country and the world a meaner, more-painful place to live for our children’s entire lives.