After O.C. school district bans critical race theory, it faces Cal State Fullerton backlash
By Mike Riggs
26 June 2019
This week, the Office of Safe Schools of Los Angeles County and a number of associated media outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, the San Diego Union-Tribune and the Santa Ana Independent, published letters from “students” accusing California State University, Fullerton, of violating the California Education Code and the United States Constitution.
These students assert that their school, after decades of being “racially insensitive and oppressive to students of color,” has finally adopted a critical race theory (CRT) curriculum.
The program, they claim, teaches that white people are superior because they were better at their “whiteness.”
To the students’ credit, they are not attacking the CRT ideas of scholars who defend them, such as Angela Davis and Cornel West. Rather, they are making a case for the removal of the entire curriculum from the school.
The first letter, from an anonymous student, claims that the OCSLA letter, which was signed by more than 20,000 faculty and staff, is “inconsistent with California education law and the U.S. Constitution.”
The letter is copied to the San Diego Union-Tribune, the Santa Ana Independent, the Times, the Orlando Sentinel, the Chicago Tribune and other outlets.
The letters appear to be the work of student writers from the University of California, Berkeley, who, in recent years, have been known for their radical left-wing political rhetoric. In 2018, the Daily Beast revealed that at least two of the Berkeley writer-activists—who were described by the New York Times as “a small cult-like group of students who engage in ideological battles online”—were activists in the far-left group Students for Bernie Sanders.
The second of the OCSLA-inspired letters is from a student at San Francisco State University in California.
The letter purports to be from SFSU’s College of Liberal Arts