A Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) research analyst said the movement to remove sexually explicit content and Critical Race Theory (CRT) from schools is rooted in white supremacy.
In its annual report on the State of Black America, the National Urban League teamed up with the SPLC and The University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) to assess the rights of black Americans.
Maya Henson Carey, an SPLC research analyst, equated the modern parental rights movement in education to the “white Citizens’ Councils or Uptown Klans” that pushed for segregation following the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling that outlawed segregation in public schools.
“In the nation’s collective memory of the days following the 1954 landmark—unanimous—U.S. Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation in public schools, a rallying cry for parental rights echoes,” Carey wrote. “It arose as the outcry of a massive resistance countermovement that birthed such groups as white Citizens’ Councils or ‘Uptown Klans,’ comprised mostly of middle- to upper-class white Southerners seeking to preserve their segregationist way of life.”
She added that today America is in the “chokehold of a new wave of so-called parents’ rights advocates.”
Further, the leftist political groups accused parental rights advocates of “centering whiteness in the classroom.”
“Operating under the guise of ‘parents‘ rights,’ extremists are labeling diversity initiatives in
education, and culturally competent curriculums, as critical race theory to suppress the teaching of Black history and center whiteness in the classroom,” the National Urban League report said. “They are disrupting school board meetings and, under the leadership of extremist state leaders, have even introduced laws to arrest and prosecute teachers for doing their jobs.”
The State of Black America report labeled nearly every conservative policy agenda as “far-right extremists advocating for the erasure of our civil liberties.”
The report blamed those who call for taking America back to being a “Christian nation” for policies that these organizations claim are inherently racist and harmful to black Americans.
In addition to slandering the parental rights movement, the report attacks the overturn of Roe v. Wade, initiatives to protect election integrity, and those who have called the results of the 2020 presidential election into question.