Teach full truth of American history today
Sen. Ted Cruz, holding a copy of Ibram X. Kendi’s picture book “Antiracist Baby” asked Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson if she believes “babies are racist.” The book, which has now become a bestseller, explains that babies are not born to be racist or anti-racist — that they have to be taught to be that way. Though Jackson was too polite to give the Texas Republican’s absurd and inappropriate question the flip answer it deserve, an appropriate response might have been, “Of course babies are racists – that’s why they are dressed in white sheets.”
That was only one of questions that Republican Sen. Ben Saase of Nebraska called “the jackassery ... of people looking for short-term camera opportunities.” As part of that “jackassery,” Cruz asked Jackson a series of questions implying that the judge was a proponent of critical race theory, asking her to define the term. The judge responded by saying that her understanding of “critical race theory” is that “it was taught in law schools” and was “an academic theory ... about the ways in which race interacts with various institutions.” Jackson went on to say that critical race theory has “never been something I’ve studied or relied on” because it would be irrelevant to her role as a jurist.
Despite Jackson’s appropriate and correct answer, several senators falsely accused her of embracing what they falsely call critical race theory and gave that as a reason for voting against her confirmation.
Contrary to what the public may have heard about CRT, it has nothing to do with teaching K-12 students to hate one another or somehow convoluted with recruiting them to become gay or grooming them for pedophilia. Right wing pundits and think tanks and politicians like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, have turned CRT into a cultural bogeyman that has led to near riots at school board meetings, intimidation of teachers and banned books, and set back our need to continue our struggle to bring justice and harmony to all
Americans and American institutions. The political right, in giving an entirely new meaning to CRT, is doing what politicians of both parties often do: take a word or bumper-sticker phrase, make people afraid of it, and then use it as a rallying cry to raise dollars and votes.
Republicans running for office proudly take credit for legislation passed or introduced in 36 states banning the teaching of racism, bias and other race-related matters in public schools. I believe many of those new laws are overly broad and purposely vague and I have no doubt that they have been created to prohibit the
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teaching of the horrors visited on this country by slavery and the Jim Crow laws of Reconstruction.
Those who use the mythology of CRT as a righteous reason to ignore our past should be mindful of Dr. Martin Luther King ’s admonition: “Human beings cannot continue to do wrong without eventually reaching out for some rationalization and to cover up an obvious wrong with the beautiful garments of righteousness.”
I was educated in the rural Jim Crow South in the 1940s. I was taught a great deal about the “the war between the states” I was taught that the “Lost Cause” had nothing to do with slavery and everything to do with the protection of states’ constitutional rights and the necessity to preserve an agrarian, peaceful way of life. I was not taught of the declaration by Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, that the Confederacy’s “foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”
This was before Brown v. the
Board of Education, a period in our history when the U.S. Supreme Court held that segregation was legal. A time when Jim Crow laws touched every part of every Black life. I seldom saw any of them because they all had to get back to “colored town” before sundown. They had their own schools, hospitals, restaurants and churches on the other side of town. That was a time when they were giving up sharecropping and fleeing by the millions to the North to escape rampant racial violence, lynchings and laws that deprived them of decent jobs, education and the vote.
Children who are old enough to understand and be taught about our past will not be made to feel “uncomfortable” by studying that past. They should be taught that classifying “others” as being “inferior” or “sinful” can lead, as it has in the past, to persecution and denial of people’s very humanity. Our children should be taught that America is no longer a nation that condones enslavement, but rather a nation responsible for emancipation — a nation of freedom and tolerance, one which constantly strives to achieve the aspiration that all people are created equal.
Politicians on the far right believe that children should be taught about “American exceptionalism.” I agree. That term can be traced back to Alexis de Toqueville’s “Democracy in America.” His definition of it is worth a look by those who rail against teaching the full truth of our history today — the ability of Americans to recognize the faults in our democracy and to remedy them.
Children who are old enough to understand and be taught about our past will not be made to feel “uncomfortable” by studying that past. They should be taught that classifying “others” as being “inferior” or “sinful” can lead, as it has in the past, to persecution and denial of people’s very humanity.