At least one Vermont School District (Essex-Westford, or EWSD) has instituted Critical Race Theory (CRT) "teaching" in its classrooms.  Integral to the "race as sole issue" foundation of CRT is the dismissal of free speech and "equality" as tools of white supremacy and the advocacy of direct (reverse?) discrimination and even shaming as necessary tools to redress historic racism.  As part of its curriculum, the ESWD has endorsed the poetry of a "Vermont poet and educator" (relocated from Los Angeles) named Rajnii Eddins.  The raging racism of Eddins's poetry reflects the toxic vitriol of CRT.

Eddins appears to lack any educational qualifications.  Like all of CRT, Rajnii had to be imported to dismantle and malign Vermont's cultural heritage — Vermont has few "native" poets "of color" to hold up as token urban spokesmen.  (Perhaps a grass-chewing white Vermont yokel will one day transplant to New York City and become "Harlem's White Voice," and tell everyone how racist he is because he lives on unceded land thieved from the Lenape.)

Rajnii's CRT and poetry qualifications converge...in hate.  His book, Their Names Are Mine, teaches white children in Vermont how horrible their nation, schools, police, government, parents, and skin color are.

Just like CRT, Rajnii Eddins's book is a call to racial hatred and retaliation against white people, including repeated incitement to violence.  It lacks a word of hope, reconciliation, or forgiveness, instead seething with outraged revenge.  Therapeutic as it may have been for Rajnii to poetically fantasize about hacking white families to death with a machete, it is perhaps less salutary for a generation of youths already bombarded with fears of guns, climate change, and COVID. 

I confess

I've killed a white man

And a white woman

A couple

As innocent As they both may appear

You must know

They were both

In the back

Of my head

(…)

Picked up the rusty machete

Left in the fields of my mind

Picked it up like

Some sword in the stone myth

And chopped and chopped

Until nothing I saw was

Recognizable…

(Their Names Are Mine, pp. 124–127)

Rajnii's hate-fueled invective encapsulates CRT tenets, equating "being white" in a "systemically racist" culture with white supremacy and echoing BLM's "white silence is violence" mantra.  "White supremacy is silent on race until it's convenient," writes Rajnii (p.129).  By this is meant that white people must assent to CRT — white voices opposing the race-based creed are denounced as white supremacists and targeted for persecution.

Presumably, Vermont's school administrators never actually read Rajnii's hateful filth.  Perhaps they relied on CRT-infatuated academics like Harvard's "poetry editor," Major Jackson, who exalts Mr. Eddins as writing

with extraordinary grace and a humbling consciousness that manifests light in all directions. His fiery poems ration out eternal wisdoms that call forth simply a substitution of love for hate and a spiritual reckoning so that we all can breathe[.]

To breathe the noxious L.A. poetry of Rajnii into Vermont public schools includes calling white people rattlesnakes (p. 89), anti-Semitism, and the new CRT definition of white supremacist as "being white":

...That due to the nature of racism

In and of itself

Being a system of racial subjugation

Against non-whites in every area of human relation…

Culminating in mass dispossession

And genocide of the indigenous natives

That founded this nation

Using this definition as a basis

If you got white skin and whatnot

Then you profit from the psycho-social construct

Struck Struck….

(p. 55)

That's a pretty concise summary of CRT.  In Vermont's new curriculum, CRT also separates students into different classrooms based on race while studying its bizarre race-baiting effects...on children.  Vermont's schoolchildren are now canaries in the CRT coal mine, suffocating for lack of constitutional oxygen. 

John Klar can be followed on Twitter.  His Vermont articles appear at True North Reports.

Image: Ted Eytan.

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