Union boss Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), said Friday evening that schools are “mired in culture wars” for trying to teach about “gender and honest history.”

In a speech to the Paraprofessionals and School-Related Personnel Division of the AFT, Weingarten — who leads the nation’s largest teachers’ union — said, “Our public schools are getting mired in culture wars—about masks, books, gender and honest history. And while they are doing it for politics, to try and divide and conquer, the nonpolitical consequences are very deep.”

She then went after critical race theory investigator Christopher Rufo, who has exposed many cases of race essentialist theory in America’s public school curriculums.

“Take Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist. I want you to remember his name,” she said. Weingarten went on to claim, “He proudly admits he distorted and stoked a furor over Critical Race Theory in order to make any discussion of race, racism or discrimination toxic.”

Schools are not merely engaging in “discussion of race, racism or discrimination,” however. They are actively teaching children that some are inherently oppressors and some are inherently oppressed, and that is entirely due to the color of their skin. Moreover, schools are teaching children that race should be the single most important characteristic taken into account when judging others — a far cry from the message of the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

The US clergyman and civil rights leader Martin Luther King addresses, 29 March 1966, in Paris’ Sport Palace the militants of the ‘Movement for the Peace’. ‘(AFP/Getty Images)

Furthering her attack on Rufo, referencing a speech he gave at conservative Hillsdale College titled “Laying Siege to the Institutions,” she tried to defend public schools, calling them “the institution that most Americans still trust, value and are connected to.”

“He called for a campaign against public education that starts with sowing mass distrust in public schools in order to win ‘universal school choice,'” she said, attacking one of the only ways children can escape failing public schools.

Breccan F. Thies is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter @BreccanFThies.