Last week, Gov. Doug Burgum signed House Bill 1508 into law just a day after the GOP-controlled legislature sent him the one-page bill that was approved by an overwhelming majority in both chambers. Supporters of the legislation say it will prevent extremely divisive and incorrect materials from being used to brainwash North Dakota students and also serves to address concerns held by most parents in the state.
“Our parents are seeing these types of ideas, these types of concepts in critical race theory being brought home by their children,” said Republican state Rep. Jim Kasper, one of the legislation’s sponsors, according to The Bismarck Tribune.
The Epoch Times adds:
Unlike anti-CRT laws enacted in some other states, such as the Texas law targeting individual concepts derived from CRT, the new North Dakota law specifically mentions the ideology—which is rooted in Marxism—by its name and prohibits its incorporation into the K–12 curriculum.
Under the new law, school districts in North Dakota must ensure “factual, objective” instruction for students and “may not include instruction relating to critical race theory in any portion” of the curriculum that they require or offer. The law defines CRT as “the theory that racism is not merely the product of learned individual bias or prejudice, but that racism is systemically embedded in American society and the American legal system to facilitate racial inequality.”
This bill is about critical race theory, and it's mostly about preventing it from being taught in our state," Republican state Sen. Donald Schaible said Friday, according to Fox News.
"It's a political ideology ... It is an ideology that if we can indoctrinate it into our children young it would have a political consequence on our children later," Republican state Sen. Janne Myrdal, who introduced the bill in the Senate, added. "We're not talking about teaching history and racism, I deplore racism as I think everybody in this body does ... We need to teach true history, and we need to teach all of it."
The measure defines critical race theory as "the theory that racism is not merely the product of learned individual bias or prejudice, but that racism is systematically embedded in American society and the American legal system to facilitate racial inequality."
As expected, however, banning the inherently racist curriculum drew criticism from the North Dakota chapter of the American 'Civil Liberties' Union, which wrongly claimed that banning the materials will also bar students from being able to engage in "an open and honest dialogue about America's history."
“This bill treats honest and frank discussions of race and its place in American history as a threat and attempts to censor classroom conversations,” the organization claimed in a statement. “This is particularly egregious in consideration of the North Dakota government’s turbulent history with Indigenous people who have been here since before colonization.”
What a crock; in fact, whether some of our founders owned slaves or not, the fact is they established a form of government that gave later generations the ability to change the laws and the Constitution itself to bar the abhorrent practice as well as ensure the founders' vision of equality for all.
That there are still 'civic leaders' in our country who are claiming that zero or little progress has been made throughout our country's 240-plus year history is insane.
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