The Michael Knowles Show - Rampant Racism, CRT, and The Fall Of Education ｜ Dr. Carol Swain

00:00:00.000 There's a black professor at Emerson College has just been promoted to become an interim

00:00:12.580 dean. She says that whites and blacks can't really have meaningful relationships, should 1.00

00:00:19.200 not have meaningful relationships. And I thought to help me work through this, I would like

00:00:24.780 to invite on a black woman happens to be a professor herself with whom I do have a wonderful

00:00:31.100 relationship to see if we can disprove this theory. I'm talking, of course, about Carol

00:00:35.440 Swain, former tenured professor at Princeton and Vanderbilt, has lots of fancy degrees,

00:00:40.000 has lots of fancy awards from academic institutions. The author of, among other books, Black Eye

00:00:45.440 for America, How Critical Race Theory is Burning Down the House. Carol, thank you for coming

00:00:50.540 on.

00:00:51.180 It's my pleasure.

00:00:52.140 Are we allowed to have a relationship anymore? No, that's over because the interim dean

00:00:56.140 said so.

00:00:56.940 Isn't that so sad? All I can say in the truest Southern sense, bless her heart.

00:01:04.760 I would say I can't believe she said this, but I can believe it. And I'm not even surprised

00:01:11.220 when I read these things anymore. You know, they seem to occur day by day and week by week.

00:01:17.780 Some other divisive, outrageous, false racial ideology. I mean, we've just seen justice for 0.99

00:01:24.820 that racial attack on Jussie Smollett. His attacker was brought to justice, happens to

00:01:30.380 be himself. Complete racial hoax. So I guess my first question for you is, Carol, how is 0.55

00:01:36.880 critical race theory burning down the house?

00:01:38.560 Well, first of all, the house is America. And if you look at what was happening last summer

00:01:45.340 after George Floyd's death, I think we had 50 straight days of some city, you know, in

00:01:51.800 turmoil, vandalism, fires, deaths. It has turned apart the country because it is pitting whites 1.00

00:01:59.540 against blacks. And that professor at Emerson College, she was married to a white man. She 1.00

00:02:08.100 divorced him because of his race. And I would say that CRT is so divisive that it's reached

00:02:14.200 the point, you know, that it's breaking up marriages and this racial visceral hatred that

00:02:20.340 she has espoused. Had she been a white person, she would have lost her job by now. 0.98

00:02:26.600 Right. Because it would have been it would have risen to the level that even a tenured

00:02:33.000 professor would not be able to get away with that if they were white. And so what I feel 0.99

00:02:37.780 about America when I look at all of these racial incidents that are occurring and I look at

00:02:44.180 how they handle it if the perpetrator is black versus a white perpetrator and the whole idea 0.57

00:02:50.700 that people make the argument that black people cannot be guilty of racism. 1.00

00:02:56.600 That white people cannot be victims of hate crimes. It is ludicrous and we cannot have true 0.90

00:03:03.180 equality in America until we hold everyone to the same standards of conduct and behavior

00:03:09.880 and moral decency.

00:03:11.520 Well, it seems like this professor's actions undermine her claim. And you see this in a lot

00:03:17.220 of the left's racial theory. She is espousing this idea that black people and especially black women 0.97

00:03:22.600 are exceptionally oppressed and white people and especially white men are the oppressors.

00:03:29.400 And so she says this view. She says white people and black people can't have relationships. She leaves

00:03:35.580 her husband because of his race and she gets away with it. Whereas, as you say, if a white person had 0.84

00:03:41.100 done that, obviously their life would be ruined. So doesn't the reaction to what she has said and done

00:03:46.600 suggest that perhaps she is of the privileged sex or race and that maybe the situation is kind of the

00:03:52.860 opposite of what she's saying that it is? Of course, it's the opposite. There's no truth to it. But

00:03:58.500 the whole idea that we would give her a free pass, that she would be able to make those outrageous, 0.99

00:04:05.560 dangerous, damaging statements, be in a position to be a role model, you know, for hundreds,

00:04:11.600 if not thousands of students. And it would just, you know, we treat black people as if that kind of

00:04:19.140 behavior and attitude is somehow normal behavior. It is not normal behavior. It's obscene. It should

00:04:26.840 be condemned. And it grows out of this critical race theory because it's all about dividing people

00:04:33.060 on the color of race, on the color because of the color of their skin, but whites as the oppressors 0.99

00:04:38.640 and racial and ethnic minorities as the victims. But it is rooted to critical theory, which takes many

00:04:46.620 forms. There are other critical theories. And so they divide homosexuals from heterosexuals, males from

00:04:53.000 females, rich from poor, blacks versus whites. These are all critical theories. They're rooted in

00:05:00.940 Marxism and, you know, postmodernism and all kinds of other things. And it is dangerous and destructive

00:05:08.060 for our society. In my book, Black Eye for America, which happened to be co-authored with a young

00:05:15.100 white guy who started off as a research assistant. And because this young white guy was such a good

00:05:21.920 scholar, I promoted him to co-author. We look at what CRT is, where it came from,

00:05:29.880 how it manifests itself in our society, why it's un-American, why it runs counter to our constitution

00:05:37.380 and our civil rights laws. And then we have two chapters on how to fight back against it.

00:05:44.180 And so we see CRT as a danger. In fact, I have argued that it is the civil rights issue of our day.

00:05:51.180 You know, we're told that, and it seems that a lot of people know, that CRT began

00:05:58.080 in Harvard Law School with theorists such as Kimberlé Crenshaw. And after that,

00:06:05.980 things get a little confusing because what the left says is CRT remained in Harvard Law School

00:06:11.300 and didn't really go anywhere else. And it's not being taught in lower schools and it's not in our

00:06:15.100 corporations. And then, of course, out of the other side of their mouths, they're saying,

00:06:18.860 and actually CRT is in all of these places and that's a good thing. But it's a little hard to

00:06:24.320 pin down. I remember, I think it was Martin Jay, the sympathetic historian of the Frankfurt School

00:06:29.940 and critical theorists generally, said that critical theory is less its own discipline than it is

00:06:36.840 a gadfly on other disciplines. That it's sort of an analytical framework that begins to infect

00:06:43.040 all of the other disciplines. It does. So how do you go from Harvard Law School to

00:06:47.760 CRT ostensibly everywhere else? You mentioned Kimberlé Crenshaw, and so I'm going to give credit

00:06:54.260 to Derek Bale. I don't know if you read in school, Faces at the Bottom of the Well and his

00:06:59.280 fictional account, Space Traders. I think Kimberlé was a student of his and she brought us

00:07:05.600 intersectionality. But the CRT is clearly rooted in the critical theories related to the cultural

00:07:17.980 Marxists. And it just morphed and it has infected every institution and discipline within the academy.

00:07:27.480 And I guess it would have been OK if it had stayed at the universities, but it got into departments of

00:07:34.220 education. And when the Obama administration came to power, it was not long. By 2012, that was when you

00:07:42.920 saw it really infecting K through 12 education and the criminal justice system with arguments about

00:07:51.020 restorative justice. And and so, you know, people are becoming more aware of it because of George

00:07:59.240 Floyd's death and the money that's been poured into it from corporations trying to buy peace and

00:08:05.360 virtue signaling. Money has given it, you know, more strength than it should have. But it is something

00:08:12.080 that we should all fight against. It's very harmful to racial ethnic minorities as well as to, you know,

00:08:20.800 Caucasians. It's harmful to our American society. And we should not give people that divide us in the 1.00

00:08:29.140 way CRT theorists do a free pass. And we should not give them access to our children.

00:08:35.160 So now, how do you stop it? Because there are governors such as Ron DeSantis who are going in

00:08:40.400 using the power of the state and saying, look, the state has obviously a role in education. A lot of

00:08:45.620 these are public schools. And so we're going to say, no, you're not going to teach this stuff to our

00:08:49.980 kids. Then you have some people, maybe the more libertarian minded who say, no, we don't want to kick

00:08:54.840 any books out of school. We just want to teach all sort of points of view and we'll open the curriculum

00:08:59.820 up to everyone. And we don't really want to use state power. So in terms of the nuts and bolts of

00:09:04.800 how you get this poison out of our lower school, you know, middle school, high school, even elementary

00:09:10.000 school. Right. How do you do that? Well, I can tell you that it is in K through 12. And you may have seen

00:09:17.420 some of the research. I know that you have a, you're a little boy. How old is he now? Like

00:09:22.760 eight or nine months? Yeah, he's a little over 10 months now. Okay. Well, according to some of

00:09:28.520 these race theorists, by six months, a baby can be racist. And so little white babies and little

00:09:34.740 Jewish babies or whatever, they can be racist. And so Sesame Street and Nickelodeon and all of those

00:09:41.120 children's programs are trying to indoctrinate these children. And they're trying to make them 0.94

00:09:49.060 see color because naturally kids just, you know, they see their friends, they see people around them,

00:09:54.840 they see who they like, but we're trying to consciously teach them to see color and to guilt

00:10:00.660 out white people to make them feel ashamed, especially if they come from a normal family,

00:10:06.060 a two parent family. If they've been successful, then that's undeserved wealth.

00:10:10.740 You know, that's white privilege. And I have been around long enough to know that,

00:10:16.800 you know, white privilege, a lot of it, there's black privilege, there's Hispanic privilege.

00:10:22.840 In most cases, it means that your parents made good decisions and you're benefited from it.

00:10:29.020 And it is in the K through 12, there are books that they may not be quoting Derek Bell and

00:10:35.280 Kimberly Crenshaw or Richard Delgado, but they're taking their ideas,

00:10:40.740 and they're distilling it down to children. And it creates, I would say, a hostile learning

00:10:46.020 environment, shaming, bullying of children and teachers. And it's just unacceptable. And it's

00:10:53.280 un-American to allow that. We should all fight back against it.

00:10:58.120 You know, I have no evidence that my son is racist, but I'm open to the possibility because I know that 1.00

00:11:05.120 my son is sexist because he loves mommy and he has absolutely no interest in daddy.

00:11:10.960 So I don't know, maybe he's racist. Who knows? These kids, according to the left, they're so evil

00:11:15.780 these days.

00:11:16.560 Guess how the research is? It's my understanding that part of the research to determine that these

00:11:22.020 babies are racist is that they prefer some faces better than others. And I'm thinking that if I'm a

00:11:28.220 baby, I'm going to prefer the faces that are changing my diapers and beating me and hugging 0.99

00:11:33.840 me, those are going to be the people that I prefer. And so if that makes me racist as a baby, then,

00:11:39.140 you know, so be it. That means that in every ethnicity, there's a whole bunch of racist babies

00:11:44.480 if they're being raised by their biological parents that took care of them and show them love.

00:11:50.400 That's right. I know my baby. I suppose he is anti-Italian because my wife is not Italian. I

00:11:56.600 am. He doesn't have any interest in me. So it's, as they say in The Sopranos, it's anti-Italian

00:12:01.920 discrimination. And really, I mean, we're kind of joking about it, but you are seeing the left go

00:12:07.440 more and more into not just putting this stuff in the minds of grad students or college students or

00:12:13.060 high school or middle, but it's going down to elementary. It's going down to preschool.

00:12:16.540 And at the same time, you're seeing this coupled with a move from the left to get more and more

00:12:22.340 kids into preschool earlier on and to keep them in college later on. I mean, you see the growth of

00:12:28.000 education too. Well, Michael, we're focused on CRT and, you know, that's what we're talking about

00:12:33.600 today. But just as dangerous is a critical queer theory, critical gender theory, because they are 1.00

00:12:41.520 sexualizing kids that are in kindergarten and, you know, they're confusing them, telling little

00:12:47.780 boys that they may not be little girls and they can. I've heard stories of children after they get

00:12:53.420 this sex education being terrified that they're going to turn into the opposite sex. And so we're 1.00

00:12:59.500 focused on one thing, but there are other critical theories that are just as dangerous. They don't

00:13:04.140 belong in K through 12 education. And we have to root it all out.

00:13:10.280 It's a very good point because while we focus on critical race theory, frankly, the critical

00:13:15.880 sex and the gender theory is probably more dangerous. I mean, the sexual distinction in

00:13:22.920 human beings is much more fundamental than any kind of racial differences. And so what is the solution

00:13:29.280 to this though? Because in the old days, you would say, look, we know that there are boys. We know

00:13:34.460 that there are girls. We know that boys and girls naturally want to do certain things together and

00:13:39.300 people might have aberrant desires and understandings. But look, there's true, there's

00:13:44.240 false, there's natural law, there's certain things we're supposed to do. And so get in line with what's

00:13:48.860 with the telos, get in line with the natural order and the theology of the body, if you wanted to use

00:13:55.300 a technical term. Today, we're not allowed to say any of that. We're not allowed to say

00:13:59.580 that there's any better sexual behavior than any other sexual behavior. We're not allowed to say

00:14:04.920 there's any substantial difference between men and women. We're barely allowed to say that there's

00:14:09.380 such a thing as objective truth. So how do you go back? Well, I can tell you that again, like

00:14:15.440 the Obama administration, I don't want to say it was the root of all evil because evil preceded the

00:14:21.580 Obama administration. But the activism of the LGBT community, where it pertains to our children,

00:14:32.440 where you have transgenders and, you know, lesbians and homosexuals talking about their sexual behavior 0.97

00:14:39.580 to the children, you know, and just really pushing the activism that some people warned about. They said

00:14:47.420 it would happen. And of course, they said, Oh, no, it wouldn't happen. And I don't know if you

00:14:51.860 followed the fact that the Biden administration is trying to change the policy at the Department of

00:15:01.280 Education, so that they no longer track sexual activity between adults and children. Like these

00:15:08.240 teachers, you know, that assault their students, engage in pedophilia, they don't want to track those

00:15:14.520 numbers. And it's just, and I don't see that getting a lot of attention. It's not getting the

00:15:20.300 immediate attention that it should. You know, we should be up in arms about it, because it does lay

00:15:26.880 the groundwork for normalizing pedophilia. We know a lot of it takes place in the classroom with

00:15:33.640 teachers, because we see all these teachers, you know, that are having sex with their students. 0.96

00:15:38.080 The whole idea that an administration would argue that we don't need to collect that data and make

00:15:44.620 it public. It's absurd. You know, I actually had not heard about that story, but I'm not surprised.

00:15:50.500 Some years ago, conservatives said, as we always do, we said, this is a slippery slope. And if you

00:15:55.680 permit certain sexual ideologies, the next thing you know, the left is going to try to normalize

00:16:00.080 pedophilia. And they told us that was completely insane, and it was never going to happen. And you just

00:16:04.340 had a professor who came under fire recently for using the term minor attracted person. He said he

00:16:09.780 wanted to, he or she, I don't really know because his gender was sort of confused. So I'll use him as

00:16:14.960 the single gender neutral pronoun. But he said that we need to destigmatize pedophilia because

00:16:22.240 they're born that way, because they have these desires, and the desires are static their whole lives.

00:16:27.400 And his view was that they can't change them in any way. And so if you're going to begin with

00:16:32.800 those premises, then what's the flaw in that logic? Well, let me tell you, his research is not

00:16:36.880 very original because back, I would say, 20 years ago, they were using the concept, some people

00:16:44.100 are intergenerational intimacy. And that was a euphemism, you know, for sex between adults and

00:16:51.280 children. And so in academia, you know, you get paid for coming up with ideas, and usually the more

00:16:57.440 bizarre, the greater the reward. And so he just gave it a new spin. I think it was a professor at Old

00:17:03.740 Dominion University, and I believe he lost his job. But he was clearly confused sexually by just

00:17:12.540 looking at him. And, you know, I don't know. But he was certainly laying the groundwork for

00:17:18.660 relationships between adults and children. And they have openly made the argument at times that it

00:17:25.320 benefits the children. We have a sick society around us. And I think that if we are going to

00:17:33.900 restore anything that resembles, you know, our Judeo-Christian roots as Americans, we're going 0.92

00:17:39.940 to have to confront some of this stuff. And they may call us names. They will call us names because

00:17:44.800 they do always call us names. But it is worth it. If you speak up, then someone else will speak up.

00:17:51.280 And before you know it, you have Moms for Liberty and Moms for America. And you have all of these

00:17:57.400 groups of people that were not activists, but they are there fighting hard for their children.

00:18:02.620 But if we're going to transform the culture in this way and transform the whole conversation

00:18:08.000 and get rid of some of these crazy ideas, then it seems to me we have to be able to say that some

00:18:14.260 things are better than other things. Some desires are better than other desires. That we actually can

00:18:19.700 kind of shape, to at least some degree, shape our desires. You know, you practice the virtues,

00:18:25.100 then it gets a little easier. You start practicing vices, it gets a little harder to stop. It's kind

00:18:29.620 of like a drug addiction, right? The more drugs you do, the harder it is to stop doing it.

00:18:34.000 But then what you're going to be told is, hey, you can't legislate morality. Stop forcing your

00:18:39.900 religious views on me. Who's to determine what's right and wrong? And you get this breakdown.

00:18:45.400 We're told that in a totally secular society, total separation of church and state,

00:18:49.880 you're not allowed to have those kinds of opinions in the public square.

00:18:53.480 But wait a minute. You know, they make that argument, but they actively proselytize. They

00:18:59.220 actively indoctrinate our children. They actively recruit. And so we need to have enough courage to

00:19:05.620 call it out for what it is. And it doesn't matter what they say. Look at what they do.

00:19:10.800 Hmm. That's a good point. Yeah. You say, I'm going to proselytize at least as much as you are,

00:19:16.200 guys, which means basically you could bring back the Spanish Inquisition and it would probably 0.98

00:19:20.700 be not even close to what they're doing. Carol, I've got to let you go, but where can people find

00:19:26.200 the book? I think you had two books out last year?

00:19:29.280 I do. Let me tell you this, Michael. Black Eye for America, How Critical Race Theory is Burning

00:19:35.020 Down the House. It's my first bestseller. It was self-published. It sold over 20,000 copies,

00:19:41.780 you know, with me promoting it. And then I had a book released in September. Now this book is not

00:19:46.840 as popular, so I need you to help me popularize it. It's a counter-cultural living. What Jesus has to

00:19:54.460 say about life, marriage, race and ethnicity, gender identities, and materialism. And I use my life and

00:20:03.840 my mistakes. And I've had a messy life. I'm in my 60s, Michael. When you reach my age, you know,

00:20:08.980 you've been through a lot of stuff. And I can talk about how not to do life, but Jesus has a better

00:20:15.360 way. And it's a short book. I mean, it's shorter than Black Eye for America. And both of those books

00:20:22.220 are well under 200 pages because I know people are busy. They don't have time to sit down with a long

00:20:27.540 book. And so I want, I'm writing for the American people and I'm writing to be read and I'm writing

00:20:35.280 to help transform lives. And I believe that we will win this victory. And I tell people to be

00:20:42.420 encouraged. What you see with your eyes is not the true reality. There's more of us than there are of

00:20:48.660 them. I love it. I'm very pro short book, Carol. You know, some of my favorite books ever written,

00:20:54.160 I think are the most profound are really short because they say most books should be essays.

00:20:58.180 Most essays should never be written. And people go on and on and on, but you just distill it,

00:21:03.120 give them exactly what they need. So the two books, I can't believe you would write. I've written two

00:21:07.080 books ever. And one of them didn't even have words. You write two books in a year. Black Eye for America,

00:21:11.720 How Critical Race Theory is Burning Down the House, and Countercultural Living, What Jesus Has to Say

00:21:15.480 About Life, Marriage, Race, Gender, and Materialism from one of the greats,

00:21:19.160 Carol Swain. Carol, thank you for being here. Thank you. My pleasure. And Merry Christmas.

00:21:24.620 Merry, you're not allowed to say that, Carol. You can't say that, but Merry Christmas to you as well.

The Michael Knowles Show - December 28, 2021

Rampant Racism, CRT, and The Fall Of Education ｜ Dr. Carol Swain

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