Donald Trump Endorses Critical Race Theory

According to maps, history and actual critical race theorists, Donald Trump's first official act as president fit the actual definition of CRT.

Wikimedia Commons/ContrabandCamp

First, allow me to present my credentials.

Long before my career as a professional race-baiter, I was a young diversity hire who benefited from affirmative action, identity politics and the only recorded case of Black privilege. After earning my undergraduate degree, I was tentatively approved for a graduate school fellowship for minority students. But, because Florida’s public university system has always been “merit-based,” my GPA, my application and the fact that I had scored well on the GRE and the LSAT were not enough. In order to receive free tuition, I had to pass at least one graduate-level course. There was just one problem:

I was broke.

OK, there were a few problems. At the time, I was not living in Florida. Not only did I not own a car, but because I started college early, I didn’t even know how to drive. Fortunately, I had briefly met a fellow affirmative action beneficiary named Lance, an Army reservist who was preparing to leave the University of Florida for an active duty assignment overseas. But after one desperate phone call, Lance picked me up in Alabama and taught me how to drive a stick shift. When we reached Gainesville, he gave me the keys to his car, a fully furnished apartment and the name of a professor who shall remain nameless (for reasons that will soon become apparent). “Go to this office. Don’t make an appointment — just wait for him to come out,” Lance explained. “Tell him you want to take his class, but you don’t have the money. He’ll figure out the rest.”

“Wait … How does he look?” I asked, apprehensively. “How will I even know who it is? And what class does he teach?”

He’s the Black one,” Lance replied. “It’s a law school class … Well, technically it’s an experimental workshop, but you get graduate credit.”

Even though the program was merit-based, the people who assume I benefited from affirmative action and DEI are technically correct. I had rent-free housing, free transportation and an entire college education because I am Black. Then again, those people always overlook the fact that Black people have had to find a way to gain entrance to the “merit-based” systems for which white privilege has provided a master key.

But if you’re wondering why I am more qualified than Christopher Rufo, Donald Trump or the New York Times journalists whose fingers are apparently incapable of typing the words “racism” or “white supremacy,” you can just check the first line of my graduate school transcript:

Transferred From: UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
Course Code: 69XX
Credits Attempted: 2.00
Credits Earned: 2.00
Grade: A
Course Description: CRITICAL RACE THEORY

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Lost among the pile of preposterous statements, executive orders and policy reversals that defined Donald Trump’s first 24 hours in office was a statement that excited the MAGA cinematic universe. Donald Trump explained how he would whitewash American history.

“A short time from now, we are going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America,” Trump whistled doggedly. “And we will restore the name of a great president, William McKinley, to Mount McKinley, where it should be and where it belongs.”

A few hours after Trump’s sequel to the “American Carnage” inaugural address that some people (mostly me) have nicknamed the “Caucasian Carnage” speech, the new president signed an executive order “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness.” The decree directs the U.S. Board on Geographic Names to “promote the extraordinary heritage of our Nation and ensure future generations of American citizens celebrate the legacy of our American heroes.”

This is critical race theory.

While journalists allow less-educated, far-right activists to redefine a field of academic study that has existed since the 1980s, one scholar defines CRT as “a practice — a way of seeing how the fiction of race has been transformed into concrete racial inequities.”

First of all, the people who named Denali are the original Americans. It wasn’t until 1917 that the federal government officially adopted Denali’s white nickname. In 2015, former President Barack Obama restored the centuries-old actual name of North America’s highest peak. According to the National Park Service’s now-deleted page on Mount Denali: “The Koyukon called it Deenaalee, the Lower Tanana named it Deenaadheet or Deennadhee, the Dena’ina called it Dghelay Ka’a, and at least six other Native groups had their own names for it.”

Ditto for the word Mexico, which was derived from the Indigenous Náhuatl words for moon (metztli), center (xictli) and place (co). The name refers to the fact that the Aztecs built the place that would become Mexico City in the middle of the Lake of the Moon. Historian John S. Sledge notes that the Golfo de Mexico appeared on maps “widely and consistently since 1550.” According to my studies in an arcane academic area known as “math,” that’s two centuries before America existed.

If you believe Americans’ feelings or William McKinley’s legacy are harmed when we refer to things by their actual names, you must also believe that the Indigenous people were harmed when these natural landmarks were named after white people. And if you prefer the white people’s feelings over the Indigenous cultures, you believe in “a way of seeing how the fiction of race has been transformed into concrete racial inequities.”

For transparency’s sake, that quote is from a personal friend of mine whose work I revere. Although she has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post and other outlets, for some reason, the “most trusted” news sources have never asked my friend to write an op-ed about critical race theory. To be fair, it is possible that those overwhelmingly white editors aren’t racist. They may simply think my Black friend is less qualified to speak on CRT than Trump, DeSantis and uneducated white scammers like Christopher Rufo.

After all, why should they ask Kimberlé Crenshaw, the greatest living CRT scholar who literally wrote the book on the subject?

Some are more concerned with how Trump’s caucasian race theory executive order will affect children.”

“This is how history is whitewashed,” one former school superintendent told ContrabandCamp. “It’s an existential threat to the education of children…This is not just about geography. It affects how students learn science, history and even the textbook purchasing process.”

While most states have committees that set standards for textbooks, a pro-Trump governor or state education superintendent could theoretically use Trump’s executive order to promote this form of white nonsense. While this wouldn’t necessarily require individual educators to teach this form of name-based white supremacy, it would mean that textbooks purchased with state funds must refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.”

Citing Oklahoma State Superintendent of Education Ryan Walters’ recent plan to purchase Trump Bibles for every student in the state and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s 1836 Project that whitewashed Texas history to make Caucasian children feel comfortable, the educator noted that this happens all the time. He added that a teacher couldn’t use Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ recent executive order about the winter storm to teach about weather patterns, current events or geography because students would find the “Gulf of America” doesn’t exist on a map. Not only could this force teachers at underfunded schools to spend more money, time and resources to find maps that accurately represent the real world, but conservative parents could also accuse teachers of breaking anti-CRT laws by teaching from “woke,” non-MAGA maps. If this all sounds like a hypothetical “slippery slope argument,” it’s exactly how a white, anti-woke “affinity group” ousted a South Carolina superintendent from his job. They even created a playbook.

“The point is not about the legitimacy of these [CRT, anti-racist] movements,” reads Woke Schools: a Toolkit for Concerned Parents. “Parents like you can get together and become an intransigent minority. If you’re more stubborn than the most stubborn proponent of critical pedagogy in your school, you may win through intransigence alone.”

This is how the white supremacist Confederate traitors became “freedom fighters” in the “War of Northern Aggression” in South Carolina schools. It’s how Texas textbooks transformed enslaved Africans into “immigrant workers,” who Virginia’s seventh graders learned were “generally happy.” Even if this executive order was Trump’s petty way of needling Obama, erasing the history of the Black president, ignoring the first Americans and colonizing natural landmark to appeal to fragile MAGA sensibilities is the perfect example of white affirmative action. It’s geographic diversity, equity and inclusion.

More importantly, by transforming the fiction of race into a concrete racial inequity as his first act as president, Trump is officially a critical race theorist.

Then again, what do I know?

I’m just a diversity hire.