An immigrant from the Soviet Union to the United States is warning against critical race theory, saying school curricula drawing from it resemble the Marxism that once flourished in the USSR.
Elina Kaplan, who said she’s a registered Democrat, said in particular that the state ethnic studies model curriculum in California reflects what she was taught as a child.
“All of a sudden, I was reading the same concepts and language, in English this time, in the guiding principles of the California Ethnic Studies model curriculum,” Kaplan said Friday.
The California Board of Education approved its model curriculum March 18, which defines ethnic studies as a field that “critically grapples with the various power structures and forms of oppression that continue to have social, emotional, cultural, economic, and political impacts.”
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The outline also aims to “connect ourselves to past and contemporary resistance movements that struggle for social justice on the global and local levels to ensure a truer democracy,” something Kaplan claimed was an explicit Marxist reference.
“True democracy is a Marxist term that refers to the abolition of private property,” she said on Fox News. “What is this doing in an ethnic studies curriculum?”
The model curriculum also provides that “the foundational values of ethnic studies are housed in the conceptual model of the ‘double helix,’ which interweaves holistic humanization and critical consciousness,” ideas discussed by critical race theorist Tara Yosso, who is cited in a curriculum footnote.
“In that [critical race theory] model, what we have is a paradigm where kids, human beings, are either an oppressor or a victim,” Kaplan said. “And anytime you put human beings into two boxes and then pit them against each other, especially by the color of their skin, nothing good is going to come out of that.”
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Activists opposed a previous ethnic studies model curriculum on the grounds that it was antisemitic, accusing it of excluding antisemitism from a list of forms of bigotry.
Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom in September vetoed a bill requiring that high school students take an ethnic studies course using the curriculum, saying that although he supported students learning about “the experience of marginalized communities in our state,” the controversy over content led him to withhold his signature.
