Written by Michael Palomba
President-elect Joe Biden has chosen San Diego Unified School District Superintendent Cindy Marten to be his Deputy Secretary of Education. Ms. Marten is described as a “sympathizer of critical race theory (CRT)” by The Daily Wire and has a history of controversial statements. For example, it has been reported that Cindy Marten praised a speaker who spread the idea that schools “spirit murder” black children and that white teachers should undergo “antiracist therapy.” Biden’s pick for Education Secretary, Miguel Cardona, is also a CRT supporter.
Investigative reporter Christopher Rufo wrote, “According to whistleblower documents, Martens personally introduced the speaker, Bettina Love, and praised her presentation about ‘spirit murder,’ ‘antiracist therapy,’ and ‘abolitionist teaching.’”
BREAKING: Joe Biden announces San Diego school superintendent Cindy Martens as his Deputy Secretary of Education.
Martens promoted the concept that schools "spirit murder" black children and that white teachers should undergo "antiracist therapy."
Read more👇 https://t.co/WKrk7A6zVF
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) January 18, 2021
Rufo noted that a whistleblower “took detailed notes of the speech and captured screenshots of the presentation” despite the district’s ban on attendees from recording the session. He continued, “According to these notes, Love began her presentation by claiming that ‘racism runs deep’ in the United States and that blacks alone ‘know who America really is.’ She argued that public schools in particular ‘don’t see [blacks] as human,’ are guilty of systemic ‘anti-Blackness,’ and ‘spirit murder babies’ in the education system.”
“At the end of her presentation, Love told the teachers that whites are directly responsible for the plight of ‘dark children,’” Rufo reported, adding that a slide labeled “Teacher Education Gap” stated, “Whiteness reproduces poverty, failing schools, high unemployment, school closings, and trauma for people of color.”
Additionally, under Ms. Marten’s leadership, San Diego Unified began offering ‘white privilege training‘ to its staff. The training included slides about “white fragility,” and “land acknowledgment,” as well as “You are Racist”, “You are upholding racist ideas, structures, and policies”, and “What can you commit to do?”
Last year President Trump issued an executive order combating critical race theory, which he described as “un-American.”
“I ended it because it’s racist. I ended it because a lot of people were complaining that they were asked to do things that were absolutely insane, that it was a radical revolution that was taking place in our military, in our schools, all over the place,” Trump said. “We were paying people hundreds of thousands of dollars to teach very bad ideas and frankly, very sick ideas. And really, they were teaching people to hate our country, and I’m not going to allow that to happen.”
What critical race theory essentially does is look at everything through a lens of past racism, despite the fact that many of those who committed the racist acts are long gone. It declares most of our systems and customs as ‘racist’ because of the past and holds a new generation responsible for the sins of prior generations.
“It’s an approach to grappling with a history of white supremacy that rejects the belief that what’s in the past is in the past, and that the laws and systems that grow from that past are detached from it,” said Kimberlé Crenshaw, one of the founding scholars of CRT, said to TIME in an email.
So, while Biden has said he will work to unify the country during his Presidency, he has already started to inflame racial tensions by choosing 2 people who believe in a racist ideology to head the Department of Education.
