CHAMBERSBURG – Critical Race Theory is a framework for examining society and culture as they relate to race, law and power in the US – and many schools want to make it part of the curriculum, if they haven’t already.
State Representative Paul Schemel joined Pat Ryan and Michele Jansen on News Talk 103.7FM Friday morning, 19 February 2021, to discuss the issue.
Opponents of Critical Race Theory (CRT) point to the training which seems to call white people inherently racist.
“This is not a universal, affirmed truth,” Jansen pointed out, adding that she had received disturbing information from a listener saying the “Veteran’s Administration is reapplying Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) training. This isn’t just sensitivity to race. This is buying into the full ideology of Critical Race Theory and systemic racism.”
Schemel said that while the Wolf administration in Pennsylvania does have a commission that deals with racism and inequalities, he hasn’t seen any particular push for CRT. However Jansen reminded him that several departments of the Wolf Administration have specifically put out press releases and new guidelines embracing the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion CRT principles just in the last few weeks.
Schemel told listeners to ask, is it equality or equity?
“Martin Luther King Jr. dedicated his life to equality, to everyone being treated the same, to a color-blind society,” Schemel said. “Critical Race Theory is saying we want the same outcome. We don’t really care about equality. We don’t care whether people are treated equally. We want the same outcome.”
He had a friend in medical school more than 20 years ago in the University of Mississippi, which had a quota system.
While the University of Texas went into middle schools and high schools and worked with students in underprivileged neighborhoods to educate them so that they would be viable candidates for college, the University of Mississippi did not.
For “Ole Miss” it was strictly a numbers game in terms of its African American population.
The result? Racially diverse classmates of Schemel’s friend in the University of Mississippi that came in through the quota system after the first year of medical school flunked out.
“They were smart, but they weren’t prepared to go to medical school,” Schemel said. “So now they had a year’s worth of medical school debts, and no MD. So is that equity or equality? We should have equality. Critical Race Theory advances just equity, which is anything but equal.”
