Rightwing money, institutes, and foundations are behind the political manipulation of white grievance about the transformation of American society stirring up and exploiting covert and overt racism. It funds campaigns challenging affirmative action as anti-white, even though the largest beneficiary of affirmative action has been white woman, and as a result, the income of white families.
In an essay for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Steven Brint, a professor of sociology and public policy at the University of California at Riverside, documented the rightwing forces behind efforts to suppress academic freedom in American schools and the war on mythologized Critical Race Theory and the teaching of supposedly “divisive concepts.” Brint accuses the political right of perverting the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment to the Constitution, passed after the Civil War to protect the rights of newly freed African Americans, as a vehicle to protect white people from efforts to rectify racial inequality in the United States.
Brint found that in 2021, Republican controlled state legislatures began proposing almost identical legislation banning what they claimed was the teaching of “divisive concepts” in public schools and universities and the promotion of racial and ethnic diversity in hiring. Brint believes the war against Critical Race theory and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion was a response to the protest movement following the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.
According to Education Week, as of September 2023, 18 states had passed laws to prevent the teaching of critical race theory in public schools and universities or what legislators considered “divisive topics” such as lessons on diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Brint traced the anti-CRT, anti-DEI campaign to a December 2020 workshop sponsored by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) attended 30 state legislators and representatives from corporations and rightwing think tanks. ALEC is the creation of the rightwing Koch Foundation. Christopher Rufo, working with the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Woodson Center, convened the workshop. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and director of its initiative on critical race theory. He is an ally of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis who appointed him to the board of Florida’s New College. Rufo has accused DEI of turning public schools into "hunting grounds for sexual predators.”
The Heritage Foundation is responsible for model legislation outlawing the teaching of “divisive concepts.” The Manhattan and Goldwater Institutes drifted model legislation restricting DEI. Hillsdale College, a religious institution in Michigan, the Claremont Institute, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, North Carolina’s James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, and the National Association of Scholars ate supporting the campaigns.
The central provision of the Heritage Foundation model legislation banning “divisive content” in public education is “No public education employee shall compel a teacher or student to adopt, affirm, adhere to, or profess ideas ... [including] the following: 1. That individuals of any race, ethnicity, color, or national origin are inherently superior or inferior; 2. That individuals should be adversely or advantageously treated on the basis of their race, ethnicity, color, or national origin; 3. That individuals, by virtue of race, ethnicity, color, or national origin, bear collective guilt and are inherently responsible for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race, ethnicity, color, or national origin.” Most of the proposed state “divisive concepts” bills n included language taken directly from the Heritage Foundation’s model legislation.
Key provisions of the Manhattan and Goldwater Institutes model anti-DEI DEI bill are that “Public … institutions of higher education in the state ... may not ... expend any funds … to establish, sustain, support, or staff a diversity, equity, and inclusion office or to ... hire an individual to serve as a diversity, equity, and inclusion officer;” “A public ... institution of higher education may not make diversity training mandatory;” and “No diversity statement shall ever be required or solicited as part of an admissions process, employment application process, hiring process, contract renewal process, or promotion process.”