What the Critical Race Theory Panic Was Really About (and the Data to Prove It)
When, this past spring, a succession of stories about communities pushing back, angrily, against the supposed teaching of critical race theory in their school districts began to overtake my social media feeds, I had a hunch that it was a direct result of white fear. But a recent data analysis from NBC News confirms it.
Reporters found that the districts hosting some of the most combative debates over diversity and inclusion initiatives—including just teaching about racism—have seen a steady increase in students of color attending their schools. In Gwinnett County, Georgia, where parents have squared off over critical race theory, there has been a 52.4 percent increase in students of color since 1994. And in Loudoun County, Virginia, where the rights of transgender students and teaching racism have become ugly, loud battleground issues, there has been a 29.5 percent increase in that span of time.
If you’ve been following how whiteness has evolved since the 2016 election, this isn’t surprising. But it is nice to have the numbers to back it up. It reminded one of my colleagues of a similar, equally unsurprising yet very real finding following the Capitol riot. Political scientist Robert Pape, after going through polling and demographic data, discovered that most people who participated in the riots came to D.C. from places where residents were terrified of being replaced by people of color and immigrants. More specifically, as the New York Times put it, “counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic white population are the most likely to produce insurrectionists.”
“If you look back in history, there has always been a series of far-right extremist movements responding to new waves of immigration to the United States or to movements for civil rights by minority groups,” Pape told the New York Times. “You see a common pattern in the Capitol insurrectionists. They are mainly middle-class to upper-middle-class whites who are worried that, as social changes occur around them, they will see a decline in their status in the future.”
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/09/critical-race-theory-nbc-news-school-districts-diversity-data.html