Fox News’ John Roberts Grills Glenn Youngkin on Critical Race Theory: A ‘Trumped-Up Phony Culture War’?

Fox News anchor John Roberts challenged Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin over the specifics of critical race theory, repeatedly pointing out how critics, including former President Barack Obama, argue the concept is not actually taught in school and is “merely a trumped-up phony culture war.”

Critical Race Theory is the graduate-level legal theory that has been repurposed by Youngkin and other Republican parent activists as a term to complain about how public schools, in their purview, have become too “woke” and focus on teaching kids that one racial group is more oppressive than another. Or at least, that is a paraphrasing of Youngkin’s defense.

“We are in fact going to increase transparency so that parents can actually see what’s being taught in schools and we have instructed our board of education,” Gov. Youngkin explained on Fox News Sunday.. “I have instructed our secretary of education, our state superintendent of public schools to review the curriculum and get racially divisive and other divisive concepts out of the school system.”

“We are not going to teach the children to view everything through a lens of race,” he continued. “Yes, we will teach all history, the good and the bad. Don’t know where we are going until we know where we came from.”

“To teach them one group is advantaged and the other disadvantaged because of the color of skin cuts everything we know to be true,” Youngkin continued, before citing the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. “We must judge one another by the content of our character and not the color of our skin,” which he said was a key principle of an executive order he signed in his first days as governor banning critical race theory from public schools.

“Is it your contention that Critical Race Theory is being taught in Virginia public schools?” Roberts pushed back.

“There’s not a course called ‘Critical Race Theory,” Youngkin conceded. “All of the principles of critical race theory, the fundamental building blocks of actually accusing one group of being oppressors and another oppressed, burdening children today for sins of the past, for teaching our children to judge one another based on the color of their skin, yes, that does exist in Virginia schools today and that’s why we have passed, I signed the executive order yesterday to make sure that we get it out of our schools.”

It’s not clear what specifically Youngkin is referring to when he cites a curriculum that is “actually accusing one group of being oppressors and another oppressed.” He has previously called for the banning of Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer-Prize winning 1987 novel Beloved,  which chronicles the life of former slaves. It is based on a true story.

Watch above via Fox.