What happened to the University of Tennessee’s Critical Race Collective? Parts of the University of Tennessee were all into the extremes of diversity, inclusion and equity as exemplified by its Critical Race Collective. That was a group of professors from across disciplines committed to the mantra of “anti-racism”. It was part of a larger national group focus on developing “knowledge justice tools for dismantling white supremacy and oppressive hierarchies as they manifest in spaces of work, education and society.” See their website at https://crtcollective.org. The website is telling with pictures of Marxists like Angela Davis and Che Guevera prominently displayed.
Perhaps it was because of the dictates from the Trump Administration that the University of Tennessee’s webpage for its Critical Race Collective has been taken down. I wonder if it has just gone underground rather than gone away. Again, I am amused by white leadership at most universities and businesses embracing a racist Marxist movement intended to sow resentment and distrust amongst the races. Consider that the University’s now defunk website listed these five tenets of critical race theory that it adhered to:
1. Centrality of Race and Racism in Society: CRT asserts that racism is a central component of American life.
2. Challenge to Dominant Ideology: CRT challenges the claims of neutrality, objectivity, colorblindness, and meritocracy in society.
3. Centrality of Experiential Knowledge: CRT asserts that the experiential knowledge of people of color is appropriate, legitimate, and an integral part to analyzing and understanding racial inequality.
4. Interdisciplinary Perspective: CRT challenges ahistoricism and the unidisciplinary focuses of most analyses and insists that race and racism be placed in both a contemporary and historical context using interdisciplinary methods.
5. Commitment to Social Justice: CRT is a framework that is committed to a social justice agenda to eliminate all forms of subordination of people.
The university also sponsored CRT seminars on the application of critical race theory to “research, teaching and scholar-activism.” Sessions included Assessing Systemic Inequity: Diversity, Whiteness, and Teacher Education, Black Travel Movement: Systemic Racism Informing Tourism, and How toDisrupt Racism and Anti-Blackness in Academia. Although the university has pulled down many of its CRT websites, they still exist at the usual suspects, the departments of education, sociology, and sadly at the medical center. For example, on the website “Critical Race Training in Education” is
“Students in the Master’s of Social Work program were urged to attend trainings that separated the students by their race, provided by the White Accountability Group and the Black, Indigenous, Multiracial People of Color Affinity Group.” Isn’t it ironic that the left is now segregating us by race?
All this is interesting because in 2021 the governor signed a bill prohibiting CRT from being included in school curricula. Yet a year later the University of Tennessee announced the creation of its Critical Race Collective seeking to integrate social justice and anti-racism into various aspects of the school. It was criticized by Sen. Marsha Blackburn “Critical race theory is a dangerous agenda that teaches that we are either oppressors or victims. It has no place in our schools, and it creates a false narrative of division that pits Americans against each other. We should be bringing folks together and students should be taught to be independent thinkers. In Tennessee, we believe in equality, civility and opportunity for all.” Yet the university went ahead and created the Collective to “enhance research and scholarship capacity in this area of study and identify current racist policies and practices on campus.”
So despite the criticism from the state’s governor and senator, the UT collective was established and only now with the advent of Donald Trump threatening to cancel federal funding, has the University of Tennessee’s critical race collective disappeared from sight or again has it just decided to go sub rosa until the next democrat becomes president?
haroldblackphd.com 