PA State Senator Doug Mastriano Misunderstands CRT

We'll get to Sen. Doug in a few minutes.

Hey, before we get to it, did you know he was subpoenaed by the January 6 Committee?

The Committee is looking into his involvement with the January 6 insurrection - Donald Trump's failed coup attempt - and as part of that investigation they've subpoenaed PA State Senator Doug Mastriano.

So a sitting Pennsylvania State Senator (and candidate for Governor), a man who took an oath to "support, obey and defend the Constitution of the United States" has been subpoenaed to provide records and testimony to one of the three branches of government defined by the document he took an oath to obey.

So far PA State Senator Doug Mastriano has not said a damn word publicly about that subpoena. 

But this blog post is not about that. This blog post is about something else - something the insurrection adjacent Mastriano does want to talk about.

Let's start the story here:

The threatening 54-second voicemail left Sunday night at A.M. Kulp Elementary in Hatfield Township, which is now being investigated by local law enforcement and has caught the attention of the FBI, was at the heart of the North Penn School Board virtual-only meeting Tuesday night.

The phone call was triggered by an allegation that a fifth-grade teacher separated students by race and made white students apologize to Black students during a classroom exercise in May 2021.

According to the district, at last week’s Education/Curriculum/Instruction Committee meeting, Kulp Elementary School Principal Christina Carter took part in a Diversity, Education and Inclusion (DEI) presentation that highlighted the work being done at the school board’s request. Afterward, she was, according to the district, subjected to vicious attacks on social media. Fifth Grade Teacher Kelly Chappell was also harassed because of the activity, according to the district.

North Penn Now continues with the story:

[North Penn School Board President Tina] Stoll then said the board wanted to set the record completely straight on what occurred in the Kulp Elementary classroom.

“To be very clear, this board supports the DEI work being done in this district. One of our goals when we got elected was to advocate for policies that make sure every student that comes through North Penn feels welcome, safe, heard, represented and has every opportunity afforded to them to succeed,” Stoll said. “Part of that work is providing professional development lessons to our staff on these topics. Mrs. Chappell took a PD lesson on teaching Perspective and Empathy and tailored it to her fifth-grade students.”

“The students were asked to line up – and not by color,” Stoll said. “As students are asked to line up for things every day, they lined up in their groups of friends. They were asked a series of questions,” Stoll said.

According to the district, those questions were as follows:

1. Do you pack a lunch?
2. If English is your first language, take a step forwar
3. If you were told by your parents that you are smart or attractive, step forward.
4. If it’s expected of you that you go to college, step forward.
5. If you can find Band-Aids designed to blend with or match your skin tone, step forward.
6. If you never skip a meal or were hungry because there wasn’t enough money to buy food, step forward.
7. If both your parents are still married, step forward.
8. Live in a house?
9. Own a vehicle?
10. Own more than one vehicle?
11. Have your own bedroom?
12. Have a cell phone?
13. If your phone is latest iPhone or Android?
14. If your family has internet?
15. If you have a non-school computer?
16. Have been to Disney World twice?
17. Have a pool or pool membership?

What Stoll is describing is commonly referred to as a “privilege walk,” which is an exercise designed to show the differences in background between participants. With each yes answer, participants — in this case, students — take a step forward until all questions have been asked. Then, the distance between students is used to highlight the difference in background, societal advantages and perceived privileges.

And that's what triggered our voicemailer.

Here's an expletive deleted transcript of that voicemail.

This is for the administration. Pass it along. Ok? 

Apparently, you have a teacher making white kids apologize for their skin color? 

Well you got my phone number, come to Las Vegas and I'll apologize to you, at six foot nothing, 245 pounds. And I'll shove my you-know-what up your a** so far your mother will feel it, you c**t.

You fire that c**t.

A mass of people who know who you are. They will f**king see your head swinging from a pole, you f**king c**ts. Douche bag. F**king losers. Come and get some of these white mother-f**ckers.

B*tch.

Got the number. Do it.

F*gg*t.

Let's settle on a few facts here, Ok? A citizen and employee of the state of Pennsylvania was meant to be on the receiving end of that voice mail. The voice mail clearly threatens rape and murder.

And how did PA State Senator (and GOP candidate for Governor) Doug Mastriano respond?

With this: 

Senator Mastriano is demanding answers and accountability after hearing multiple accounts from parents at North Penn School District who say their children have been subjected to “privilege walks” as part of a broader critical race theory curriculum.

According to at least five parents of children attending AM Kulp Elementary School, the children were lined up against the wall and told to step forward for each attribute of “privilege” they possessed. According to the parents, certain students in the class were also made to feel ashamed or embarrassed for their “privilege.”

Wait, hang on. Critical Race Theory? Doug ignores the rape and murder threats and defends wants to talk about Critical Race Theory?

Yep. And it's dangerous:

A classroom made up of young impressionable minds is certainly not an appropriate place for fringe critical race theories, said Senator Mastriano. Any exercise that demonizes and separates certain students based on their race or privilege can have detrimental effects on a child’s mental health and lead to an increase in bullying in the classroom.

Does PA State Senator Doug Mastriano understand what Critical Race Theory actually is?

First off, it's a decades-old college level legal theory that isn't taught in Pennsylvania public schools.

The AP frames it this way:

Critical race theory is a way of thinking about America’s history through the lens of racism. Scholars developed it during the 1970s and 1980s in response to what they viewed as a lack of racial progress following the civil rights legislation of the 1960s.

It centers on the idea that racism is systemic in the nation’s institutions and that they function to maintain the dominance of white people in society.

The architects of the theory argue that the United States was founded on the theft of land and labor and that federal law has preserved the unequal treatment of people on the basis of race.

And Derrick Bell, legal scholar and important proponent of CRT, framed it this way in 1995:

Although critical race theory is not cohesive, it is at least committed. As John Calmore observes, “almost all the critical race theory literature seems to embrace the ideology of antisubordination in some form.” It is our hope that scholarly resistance will lay the groundwork for wide-scale resistance. We believe that standards and institutions created by and fortifying white power ought to be resisted. Decontextualization, in our view, too often masks unregulated—even unrecognized—power. We insist, for example, that abstraction, put forth as “rational” or “objective” truth, smuggles the privileged choice of the privileged to depersonify their claims and then pass them off as the universal authority and the universal good. To counter such assumptions, we try to bring to legal scholarship an experientially grounded, oppositionally expressed, and transformatively aspirational concern with race and other socially constructed hierarchies.

And:

Professor Charles Lawrence speaks for many critical race theory adherents when he disagrees with the notion that laws are or can be written from a neutral perspective. Lawrence asserts that such a neutral perspective does not, and cannot, exist—that we all speak from a particular point of view, from what he calls a “positioned perspective.” The problem is that not all positioned perspectives are equally valued, equally heard, or equally included. From the perspective of critical race theory, some positions have historically been oppressed, distorted, ignored, silenced, destroyed, appropriated, commodified, and marginalized—and all of this, not accidentally. Conversely, the law simultaneously and systematically privileges subjects who are white.

If I am understanding CRT correctly (and let's remember, I am not an attorney and haven't seen the inside of a college classroom in decades) the legal system, for all of it's self-congratulatory claims of neutrality, actually privileges white supremacy by virtue of that neutrality.

I am sure there's a great deal more to it. It's a law-school level legal theory, for gosh sakes. Boiling it down to a paragraph or three (as I just did) will inevitably do it in justice.

For whatever it is, it isn't what Doug Mastriano is investigating in that classroom in Hatfield Township.

But none of this matters to our friends in the insurrectionist party:

“We have successfully frozen their brand—'critical race theory’—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category,” Rufo wrote. “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think 'critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”

Anything that makes white conservatives uncomfortable about race is that evil CRT. 

With that in mind, let's get back to something else Doug said:

Any exercise that demonizes and separates certain students based on their race or privilege can have detrimental effects on a child’s mental health and lead to an increase in bullying in the classroom.

I'm not sure he realizes that he's correct here - but for the wrong reasons. If we view our legal system (or any governmental system, for that matter) through the lens of CRT, then we have to see that the system has already been separating students based on race and privilege. Has been for centuries.

He's just not seen it because the kids on the losing end of that separation weren't the kids of his white conservative supporters.

Oh, and let's all remember that a Pennsylvania citizen was threatened with rape and murder and in response, candidate for Pennsylvania governor Doug Mastriano wants to defend the same status quo that our Vegas caller is also looking to defend.