(Edwin Sandy Jordan’s five sons and two grandsons are now co-owners of this Blog, and from time to time they may post an article. The sons’ names are Edwin Jr, Stuart, Harold, Robert and Eric. The grandsons are James and Scott. The following item was posted by Harold Jordan.)

In August 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., while commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation in front of the Lincoln Memorial, challenged our nation to fully bestow its blessings of liberty and opportunity on people of every color and creed, and to overcome the practices of segregation and discrimination which were still abundant.  

Dr. King exhorted us to live up to the ideals stated in our Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” and “are endowed by their Creator” with the “unalienable rights” of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Perhaps his most powerful and moving statement to a crowd of hundreds of thousands was “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.  I have a dream today!”

I grew up in the 1960s and 70s learning about Dr. King’s dream and adopting it as my own.  I was blessed to live in the town of Columbia, MD, founded by a Christian developer who was committed to the ideals of racial equality and equal opportunity, and who made sure that the new town offered decent, affordable housing and job opportunities to those who would not otherwise be able to enjoy the community.

While discrimination and prejudice hasn’t disappeared (and never will until Christ’s second coming), our nation made great strides over the next 50 years reducing racial inequality and providing greater opportunity for blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. In 2008, Barack Obama was elected President of the United States with much of his support coming from white voters.  The final glass ceiling for racial equality had been shattered.

About the same time that President Obama became president, a new ideology called “Critical Theory” or “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) was rapidly gaining ground in universities among former proponents of Marxist and pseudo-Marxist views.  Unlike Dr. King’s dream where race would no longer be a primary trait affecting our opportunities and success, CRT emphasizes the importance of race above all else. While Marxism, with its secular view that society is forever engaged in a class struggle between land and factory owners and the exploited workers, never gained much traction in this country, Critical Race Theory spread quickly throughout academia and overflowed into other spheres of our society. CRT replaces the owners and workers in traditional Marxist views with the privileged people (whites) and the exploited (non-whites).  Furthermore, CRT holds that no matter how enlightened or race conscious one may be, a white person is always privileged and a non-white always exploited.  Sadly, the new theory has moved rapidly from the ivory tower of former Marxist academics into secondary schools and even primary school curricula.  

The pervasiveness and hate-filled power of this new theory was discovered almost accidentally by parents who were monitoring their children’s online classroom content during the COVID pandemic.  A memorable recent example focused national attention on the parents in Northern Virginia who confronted school boards over CRT instruction, contributing to the upset election victory by Governor Youngkin over the heavily favored Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe.  While many schools have denied teaching CRT by its formal name, the concepts and racial implications have clearly permeated the entire curriculum in many schools and regions of the country.

Where does this leave us?  I believe we are in a battle for the minds and souls of our children.  We either fight for Dr. King’s Christian view of the dignity and worth of all people of all races, and a desire to be viewed according to the “content of our character”; or we allow an atheistic Marxist based philosophy teaching us that white people are the evil oppressors in a unending race war with everyone else — which has already devolved into race hatred, rioting, and anarchy in the streets of some American cities.

I choose Dr. King’s beautiful dream over the nightmare of CRT.  Let us all awaken to CRT’s threat before it becomes our pervasive reality.