Don’t let race divide us
For 20 years, Bill Bloss served on Guilford’s board of education. For 14 of those years, he served as chair in a town that takes its schools seriously.
Only once in all that time, he said, did the board split on a partisan vote. The topic? Moving the start time for the high school. Debate was rigorous but respectful. People who attended the meetings marveled afterward that they couldn’t tell the political parties of the members.
Bloss said he didn’t always agree with his Republican colleagues, but that “they were reasonable and thoughtful people.”
Then, in July, Guilford Republicans sidestepped three of those reasonable and thoughtful incumbent Republicans to put up, instead, five candidates endorsed by something called “Truth in Education” and bent on serving as foot soldiers in the latest battle in our fake culture war. The five candidates oppose critical race theory. Their mission statement -- available here: https://www.truthin educationguilford.org – says they exist “To EDUCATE the citizens of Guilford about Critical Race Theory (CRT); to EXPOSE the evil that this theory poses for our children, our community, and our country; and to END the indoctrination of our entire Guilford School Community with this Marxist, Racist, anti-American ideology.”
Their vision statement/ goals say they want to (again, emphasis theirs): “EXPLAIN EXPLICITLY that systemic racism is a lie and does not exist in America.” I’d wish these modernday Know Nothings luck, but I wouldn’t mean it.
In response, the Guilford Independent Party endorsed three unaffiliated candidates, and they crossendorsed two Democrats for the local board. They call their slate Protect Guilford Schools, and their candidates include a molecular biologist, a real estate and construction executive, a public defender, among others.
Guilford’s traditional Republicans may have plans of their own. Because of the town code, “the number of members of any one political party who may be elected to or serve on any elected board or commission shall not exceed a bare majority of the whole membership of those boards.”
Guilford’s anti-fact candidates would be entertaining if Connecticut boards of education didn’t have such power. A wrong turn in local education policy can cause irreparable harm. As Bloss used to say when he was campaigning, “You only get one chance to educate a child.”
I think I’ve figured out why people fall for this nonsense. Capital R-racism, of course, drives some candidates to plant their flag on the non-existent hill that is CRT. Those who bemoan the theory hear “race” and they start shouting, driving conversation and political action all over the state in towns like Guilford, with its excellent schools that serve as a draw to new families.
But I think there’s something else at work: People who pretend CRT is a viable issue are fearful of how history will treat them, and
I don’t blame them. History called their foremothers and - fathers Know Nothings, a uniquely anti-immigrant, pro-Protestant phenomenon from the mid1800s. Leading up to the carnage of the Civil War, the Know Nothings started as a secret society (they were to tell anyone who asked that they knew nothing) but eventually included governors, Congresspeople, and even an 1856 Presidential candidate, former Pres. Millard Fillmore, who lost that round and effectively ended the Nothings’ strangle-hold on governmental power and public conversation.
The original K-Ns strapped on intellectual blinders and blamed people who didn’t look like them for the country’s ills. Their political platform was indefensible, and they, too, shared their nonsense by every means available.
Today’s Know Nothings ignore the fact that critical race theory is strictly a framework by which to study history, particularly legal history. It is not taught to children.
Last Tuesday, Guilford’s Human Rights Commission sponsored a Zoom lecture by retired judge Angela C. Robinson, who teaches a graduate-level course on critical race theory at Quinnipiac University and so we should assume, given her legal and academic background, that we are on solid ground listening to her, and that we can learn from her.
Still, Robinson, who runs Robinson Diversity Consulting, spoke to the commission in July, and received an anonymous email that said, in part that critical race theory “is an antiWhite agenda. I expect you will be met with great resistance when you are in Guilford.”
(In fact, critical race theory is based on an understanding that races are equal. But hot words like “anti-white” makes you look, doesn’t it?)
CRT, Robinson told the 300 or so attendees, has three main tenets: Race is a social construct; racism is a pervasive societal problem that goes beyond individual hatred, and a colorblind approach (“I don’t even see color!”) is ineffective.
After her hour-long talk, some attendees wanted to know if they could audit her graduate class on critical race theory, it was that engaging. Robinson said she’d check. To a query about how to dial down heated rhetoric around critical race theory and race, Robinson said that when people say outlandish things like “systemic racism doesn’t exist,” she tries to “hear the pain and the fear and the anxiety.” She also told the group that race is the tool most often used to divide us.
Don’t let it.