Let’s talk race in the classroom and more
Please send me your stories
“They left Colorado because his mom heard that their school was going to start teaching critical race theory.”
These are the words my friend, Ivy, said to me one evening last summer to explain why her son wasn’t outside riding his scooter with his friend down the block.
He was a nice kid, and we were both like … huh?
As a paralegal and a very smart mom, Ivy knew the meaning of these three words — a brainy notion that has been twisted ugly and shaped into a bugaboo for political purposes; an acronym (CRT) that apparently sends some people scurrying off to Utah.
I cannot quote Ivy, because I don’t carry a reporter’s notebook while sipping cocktails (OK, drinking scotch) with friends. But I can quote one of the early founders of critical race theory, University of Hawaii law professor Mari Matsuda, from a Nov. 8 New York Times article, Critical Race Theory: A brief history: How a complicated and expansive academic theory developed during the 1980s has become a hot button political issue 40 years later:
“For me,” she said, “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.”
CRT opposition had reached a fever pitch last summer in Colorado when U.S. Rep. Ken Buck, a Windsor Republican, cosponsored legislation to stop giving federal dollars for classrooms that teach critical race theory, calling it “dangerous and antiAmerican,” and saying it “has no place in our nation’s schools.”
I wonder if Buck owns a second home in Utah.
Buck had joined likeminded conservatives in a belief that CRT would “indoctrinate” our kids in a “divisive ideology” based on “revisionist history” and blah, blah, blah, sounding the alarm that one day our kids would come home from school with empty lunch boxes but full of hate for their moms, dads, grandparents, the dog and country, too.
Today, at least eight states (Idaho, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Iowa, New Hampshire, Arizona, and South Carolina) have passed anti-crt legislation; school boards in Florida, Georgia, Utah and Oklahoma bar Crt-related discussions. Twenty more are working to join in because supporters think our kids are too young to learn uncomfortable truths of our shared national history with race largely at the center of it. But a sanguine discussion of race won’t do anyone justice.
The coolness of fall hasn’t chilled the fever, as seen and heard in local and national politics, at school board meetings and on conservative talk radio and television. According to one study cited by the Brookings Institute, Fox News has mentioned CRT at least 1,900 times since June.
The absolutists have shown absolutely zero willingness to step off the podium and into reality, and to ask the teachers, professors and their students what it means to them when a respectful, probing and candid discussion of race, or for that matter ethnicity, culture, religion, spirituality, gender or sexual differences in historical context occurs inside the classroom.
For me, third grade carries a visceral memory of learning about the Holocaust, because a miniseries called “Holocaust” was about to air and I remember hushed conversations between my parents and our rabbi friend about how best to introduce blissfully ignorant Jewish children to the horrors of that time.
All of it is burned into my memory, because as the only Jew in my Denver Public School classroom, I went from cool-talkativekid-who-gets-eight-days-ofHanukkah-presents-to-embarrassed-silent-victim.
Victimhood is one of the main arguments against CRT (or a warped view of CRT) — the main complaint being that teaching kids who are Black and brown the unvarnished truth about all things related to race in this country will make them feel like helpless victims.
Had a meaningful and open classroom discussion about the Holocaust occurred in my public elementary school, it would have transformed oppressive victimhood to liberated understanding — and empowerment. Maybe I would have spoken up for my Jewish classmate later in middle school, who was called “Jew boy” when the teacher pretended not to hear it.
Thanks to a trip to Washington’s Holocaust Museum, I learned about Jewish resistance in places like the Naroch Forest of Belorussia, where my ancestors kept spiritual and musical traditions alive. And who doesn’t feel like a badass when they can culturally align with the Mossad, short for Hamossad lemodi ‘in uletafkidim Meyuhadim — which is James Bond stuff, but in Israel.
Personal and academic growth continued in tandem when race became a central discussion in the classroom at Brandeis University outside of Boston. I was either the only white student or one of a few in my African and AfricanAmerican Studies Department courses for the AAAS major, and our professors were fearless and brilliant at facilitating racial dialogue. A Black and Third World Women class professor asked the only white male in the class how he felt not to be at the center of the academic discussion for a change. I would be challenged, too, in ways that led to deeper, more meaningful conversations inside the classroom, as well as relationships with new friends outside of class.
Decades later, historians have amassed — and are still amassing — fuller, richer, deeper 360-degree perspectives of our history, which includes centuries of powerful Black and brown resistance to oppression. (Sorely missing are comprehensive viewpoints from people with different abilities.) We should all be running hard and fast together toward enlightenment.
When our histories are taught at school with the reverence and care they deserve, that will no doubt inspire the resilience, strength and understanding we want to see nurtured within our kids.
And no one will ever have to run away to Utah.
Julie Marshall is the Daily Camera Opinion Editor. This is her personal column. Please send in your personal stories of learning about yourself and others who are different from you in the classroom at any age, and what those experiences meant to you and how they have helped shaped your life. The Camera will be most happy to publish the pieces that inspire. Please send up to 700 words and your photograph to marshallj@ dailycamera.com.