by John Klar
Vermont’s Legislature has embraced a panoply of race-based bills during the 2021-22 session, including:
- H.268 seeks to legalize prostitution, claiming that its prohibition was “historically … used to prosecute men of color for having relationships with women.” (In fact, Vermont banned prostitution in response to national feminist fervor.) Status: Currently in House Judiciary Committee, whose chair Maxine Grad is one of the bill’s sponsors.
- H.273 would create a “BIPOC Land Bank” for “Black and Indigenous People of Color” to be granted money to purchase farmland. The Bill alleges (among other bald slanders) that Vermont excluded blacks from farmland using Jim Crow and sharecropping laws. Currently in House General, Housing, and Military Affairs Committee.
- H.210 alleges that racial health and other disparities in Vermont are caused by “systemic racism” without regard to the influx of refugees and other low-income people “of color.” Enacted into law May 18.
- S.25 allows black residents (“social equity applicants”) to receive loans, or fee reduction, to grow or sell cannabis. Enacted into law June 7.
- Vermont House Devotionals have been used to vilify Vermont and its residents.
Bills that did not pass this year may be brought up for consideration in 2022, the second year of the biennium.
Concurrently, Vermont’s academic and executive circles have fueled the race focus:
- Vermont’s newly minted (and recently arrived from NYC) “executive director of racial equity” has claimed that Vermont’s land-use laws (and CO2 deadlines) are racist and has scorned Vermont’s dairy farms.
- Vermont’s police have been maligned as racists based on arrest disparities without consideration of the state-of-origin of suspects — in the midst of a heroin and fentanyl scourge.
- Governor Scott has been quick to condemn Vermonters as racists.
- COVID relief funds for sole proprietorships were distributed to minority but not white applicants.
Most disturbingly, the indoctrination of Vermont’s public-school children with CRT is in full swing. Segregating citizens by race in safe spaces has become commonplace in Vermont. Now public schools will allow “students of color” to move to separate rooms during race discussions, and violent, white-hating poetry is being endorsed in school curricula. (“Discrimination” is necessary, per the “theory” of CRT, to redress and cure discrimination.)
CRT seeks to eliminate First Amendment and other constitutional protections, in order to craft a novel society based on race and other identity attributes. It posits no foreseeable end to this cycle of recrimination, offering not even the pretense of a world in which the MLK standard of “judge by character, not skin color” might be achievable. This was exhibited in Vermont when a high school student who criticized CRT at a school board meeting was fired from his lifeguard position as punishment for his speech.
Thomas Sowell warns that no society in human history has achieved “equity” in the form of universally equal outcome — it is impossible. But this does not dampen the allure of what Sowell dubs the “seemingly invincible fallacy” of CRT — that all racial disparities are necessarily the product of discrimination by white people.
Vermont is the ideal Petri dish to prove the fallacy of Critical Race Theory. It is inequitable in distribution of resources, contemptuous of Vermont’s rural culture and abolitionist history, and divisive. CRT is offensive to both moderate (MLK) Democrats and traditional conservatives.
Once dragged into the light of discussion and analysis, CRT will fail in Vermont, as it is failing across America. It is racist opportunism dressed up as enlightened Utopia. Vermont’s poor, white, rural inhabitants have witnessed equally pernicious liberal elite efforts previously — in the eugenics and lobotomy movements.
They won’t be fooled again!
(Editor’s note: the op-ed above was excerpted from a longer piece published in the June 25 American Thinker)