Jonathan Hoffman: Keep 'critical race theory' out of Tucson government

The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:

For whatever reason, the city of Tucson is in the process of creating an “Office of Equity” with an annual budget of $500,00 and three staff members.

Weird, because the fact is that Tucson already has the equality thing, and the equity thing, covered with the Office of Equal Opportunity Programs (OEOP). According to the city of Tucson’s website, “The Office of Equal Opportunity Programs (OEOP) is responsible for implementing and enforcing equity policies for the City of Tucson and is a branch of the City Manager’s Office.”

So, why does the city of Tucson need a new Office of Equity?

That’s an excellent question. I think the key to answering it lies in the special use of the term “equity.” It does not have the same meaning in this context as, say, it would when discussing your financial holdings. It clearly does not mean the same thing as the described purpose of the OEOP, why else would we need a new office?

When we think of equal opportunity and equity in city government, we think of an even playing field in which all internal personnel issues — employment, compensation, advancement — are race and ethnicity neutral, meaning no discrimination based on those aspects.

Externally, we think of providing services on the same basis. It also includes monitoring compliance with internal, state and federal regulations.

My search for indications of how the new Office of Equity might treat “equity” different from the OEOP took me to Tucson’s online recruiting ad for the Chief Equity Officer position. Under the heading “The ideal candidate will have” I found these descriptions: “A passion for advancing equity and social justice solutions” and “An understanding of systemic and institutional racial bias.”

Under the heading of “Experience” I found: “At least five (5) years of demonstrated success in the administration of community, government, educational or social justice programs; performing racial equity, diversity, and inclusion program and/or policy planning and evaluation.”

“Social justice,” “racial equity” and “systemic and institutional racial bias” are terms of art from the Critical Race Theory (CRT) philosophy.

Early expositors of CRT asserted that there is no such thing as race; rather, it is a social construct designed to divide people into the oppressors and the oppressed. Harvard University’s website explains, “Critical race theorists reject the idea that ‘race’ has a natural referent. Instead, it is a product of social processes of power.

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“People do not have a race, writes Kendall Thomas; they are ‘race-d.’ Unveiling the legal, social, and cultural operations by which people are assigned and invested with races is one central project of critical race theory.”

They also dismiss all the achievements of the Western world as fake, and actually designed to maintain the power of those “of whiteness” over people of color.

In Tim Steller’s May 5 column on the proposed Office of Equity, he quoted University of Arizona Ph.D. student Jamie Utt-Schumacher, who was brought before the City Council by Lane Santa Cruz. “If I am of whiteness, there is no hope for me to be able to act toward equity or to act toward justice,” he said. “The reason this is so important is that, it tells us, no matter how great our intentions might be, no matter other aspects of our identity that make us marginalized — whether it’s our LGBTQ identity or our disabled identity or what have you — we can still make choices that invest in systems that were built to serve the idea of whiteness.”

It’s bad enough that CRT has infected the local university; let’s keep it out of our municipal government.

On a personal note, my heart and mind lie in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, in the Rev. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech delivered in 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial.

There are those who would deny any progress against racism since before that time. They are wrong.

There is nothing more offensive to a racist than the idea of interracial marriage. Gallup has conducted polling on black-white marriage approval going back to 1958. According to Gallup, in 1958, 4% approved; in 1968, the year the Rev. King was assassinated, 20% approved; in 2013, 87% approved. Not bad for a “systemically racist” culture.

CRT is fighting that success. I am haunted by an article by Bari Weiss, “The Miseducation of America’s Elites,” which ran March 9 in City Journal. It talks about CRT being taught to kids in elite prep schools.

The article ends, “One day at home, in the midst of the application process, she was drawing with her daughter, who said offhandedly: ‘I need to draw in my own skin color.’ Skin color, she told her mother, is ‘really important.’ She said that’s what she learned in school.”

That breaks my heart.