Ignoring history will not make problems go away
For some reason “Critical Race Theory,” an academic practice that has been in existence since the 1980s, has suddenly become a hot button issue. The real question we must ask is, why?
I would suggest political expediency, deflection, and misdirection. “If I can excite and enrage my political base with bloviations about CRT that omit nuance, context or acceptance of historical facts, I can use that issue to my political advantage and hinder the accountability and changes that should come in response to understanding those historical events and policies.”
We have recently seen this type of effort locally, spouting uninformed vitriol in an anti-CRT donations request appearing on a recent fundraiser flier in Pasadena.
Ignoring history doesn’t make historical events go away; it simply means those events have not been comprehensively understood or addressed. Unless we take the time to study, assess and learn, that history may come back to haunt us in the present or in the future.
Through Michelle Alexander’s book, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” we were introduced to the demonstrable history of injustices in our criminal justice system directed at communities of color. These systemic practices have resulted in the jailing and depriving of rights of those individuals and their families and communities throughout history. The problem became even more acute within the past 40 years, when the population of incarcerated citizens increased to over 2.3 million. That is the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world.
Richard Rothstein’s book “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America,” lays out in great detail how the intentional and codified practice of discrimination in housing has led to segregated communities throughout the country.
The great irony is that many communities already had some measure of integration in housing, but at the insistence of southern committee chairmen in Congress, segregation was codified in legislation related to all aspects of American life. The result? Southern segregation practices were spread around the country. Think of having some cancer cells in your knee removed and reinserted into your shoulder and elbow. That doesn’t make any sense, does it?
Of course, earlier this year the nation was reminded that 100 years ago, the prosperous African American community in Tulsa, Oklahoma, known as “Black Wall Street,” was brutalized, massacred and literally bombed from the sky. Until recently, there was no real official acknowledgment of that heinous chapter in American history. Ignoring it doesn’t change the historical fact that it happened, and that its consequences for African Americans in Tulsa and around the country have reverberated for the past century.
If teaching history and its implications in the present is a threat to you, I would suggest that the history isn’t the problem. Some self-examination is warranted to understand why blocking teaching and understanding the effects of past actions and events is so important to you. Your opposition will not make the fact that those events occurred go away. It will make it harder for society to overcome that albatross from the past to progress toward a brighter future if we haven’t held ourselves accountable for past actions first.
In a recent New York Times article, University of Hawaii law professor Mari Matsuda said, “The problem is not bad people. The problem is a system that reproduces bad outcomes. It is both humane and inclusive to say, ‘We have done things that have hurt all of us, and we need to find a way out.’ ”
“For me, critical race theory is a method that takes the lived experience of racism seriously, using history and social reality to explain how racism operates in American law and culture, toward the end of eliminating the harmful effects of racism and bringing about a just and healthy world for all.”
We must stop fighting against reality, facts and history. It is what it is. Learn the lessons they can teach us and move on.
Rev. Stephen Tillett is the Pastor of Asbury Broadneck United Methodist Church in Annapolis, author of “Stop Falling for the Okeydoke: How the Lie of ‘Race’ Continues to Undermine Our Country,” Political Analyst for “The Lavonia Perryman Show” (910AM Superstation, Detroit, iHeart Radio)