Dr. Carol M. Swain went from rural Virginia poverty and dropping out of high school to earning five college degrees, becoming a tenured professor at both Princeton and Vanderbilt, authoring 13 books, and receiving the 2025 Frederick Douglass Lifetime Achievement Award. Today she is one of the most credentialed and fearless critics of critical race theory in America. Her book Black Eye for America: How Critical Race Theory Is Burning Down the House — co-authored with America First Education’s Christopher Schorr — is essential reading for any parent, pastor, or citizen who wants to understand what’s actually being taught in American schools right now.
In this episode of Disturbing the Peace, Minister Stephen David sits in for John Amanchukwu to host an extended conversation with Dr. Swain about critical race theory’s Marxist roots, why schools deny they teach it while teaching it under different names (“cultural competency,” “anti-racism,” “DEI”), who Derrick Bell was and why he matters as the godfather of CRT, and how this ideology is causing measurable damage to the Black community in the name of helping it.
Dr. Swain explains why the Smithsonian’s now-infamous “whiteness chart” labeled individualism, hard work, planning for the future, and being on time as “white values” — and what that signal does to young Black Americans who are being told that the very habits that lead to success are racially coded against them. She walks through the destructive cycle of hostility toward law enforcement that is driving real consequences for Black youth, why some elected officials like Jasmine Crockett perform “blackness” for media attention while knowing better, and why she believes there should be no Black Caucus, Hispanic Caucus, or any racial caucus in Congress.
Then in the second half of the episode, Stephen takes the audience through a deep-dive analysis of CRT’s actual texts and theorists — Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic’s foundational Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, Derrick Bell’s Faces at the Bottom of the Well, the Ibram X. Kendi anti-racism framework, and Robin DiAngelo’s claim that focusing on merit “keeps racism in place.” He plays the viral clip from a Black community member declaring that “the white man is going to lie, going to steal, going to kill, not to be trusted” — and shows how that mindset is the direct downstream effect of CRT’s worldview being taught to a generation.
The episode closes with the response: Booker T. Washington’s eternal observation that “merit, no matter under what skin found, will in the long run be recognized and rewarded,” and Frederick Douglass’s reminder that “with character we shall be powerful — nothing can harm us long.” The path forward is colorblindness, individualism, and merit. Not race-coded equity.
