Critical race theory: The culture war over schools
The Right has a new culture-war “obsession,” said Adam Harris in TheAtlantic .com. As conservatives tell it, American schoolchildren are in grave danger of being brainwashed by Critical Race Theory (CRT), a once obscure academic framework conceived by a Harvard law professor in the 1970s. CRT examines how “the nation’s sordid history of slavery, segregation, and discrimination is embedded in our laws” and continues to affect how people of color are treated by banks, police, employers, and schools. Conservative critics make it sound as if there is a specific CRT curriculum being forced on schools, but what they actually oppose are school districts choosing to re-examine “the role that slavery and segregation have played in American history” and possible ways of redressing “those historical offenses.” Republicans have proposed legislation in at least a dozen states to bar public schools from teaching that the U.S. is “fundamentally racist” or addressing concepts such as “social justice.” The alternative, said Brian Broome in WashingtonPost.com, is the “white-centric” view of U.S. history I was taught growing up, in which Christopher Columbus “discovered” a largely empty America, slavery was a minor flaw fixed by Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr. was a nice man who preached racial unity. Opponents of CRT want kids to be told, as I was, “There is absolutely nothing wrong with America. Nothing to examine.”
CRT is “more than just teaching kids to ‘think critically’ about the role that race has played in American history,” said the National Review in an editorial. It’s a form of indoctrination, pushed by far-left political activists “seeking to renovate the American social order from root to branch.” In CRT’s “dogma of division,” everything is seen through the prism of race, and the only remedy for past discrimination is the pursuit of “equity” through racial quotas and race-based policies. As anti-racist activist Ibram X. Kendi puts it, “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” This toxic ideology “is going to destroy the country,” said Rod Dreher in TheAmericanConservative.com. The Biden administration wants to push CRT “on all public schools,” proposing a rule that would give priority to federal-grant applicants for history and civics programs that emphasize CRT concepts. More than half of Republican voters oppose teaching CRT in schools, so how is using taxpayer dollars to promote CRT “in any way” democratic?
If that all sounds panicky, said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times, it’s intentional. Republicans are having a hard time generating fear and resentment of President Biden, whose agenda is quite popular. “They need a more frightening, enraging villain to keep their people engaged,” and “critical race theory fits the bill.” CRT has become a “catchall” on the Right for any history curriculum reform or attempts to make schools more inclusive. In conservative states, the political backlash to CRT is ferocious. In 2018, the affluent suburb of Southlake, Texas, got unwelcome national attention when a group of white students were videoed laughing and shouting the N-word, and another student was videoed telling a joke about lynching. Black students subsequently described experiencing “unambiguous racism,” so local officials created a plan to address these incidents and educate students about bigotry. Conservative parents were so “furious” that the town elected a new mayor, two new school board members, and two new City Council members who pledged to fight any teaching of CRT.
Good for Southlake parents for saying no to “woke education,” said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. Voters overwhelmingly rejected “a wholesale makeover of their children’s education” that would have included “diversity and inclusion” training at every grade level and encouraged students “to report each other for microaggressions.” Not surprisingly, Southlake voters were immediately labeled bigots in the national media, said Christopher Rufo in NYPost.com. That illustrates the CRT “mousetrap”: Any objection to critical race theory “becomes irrefutable evidence” of a dissenter’s “white fragility, unconscious bias, or internalized white supremacy.”
These “fevered narratives” oversimplify the CRT debate, said Clarence Page in the Chicago Tribune. As a Black man, I don’t agree that the U.S. is an innately racist nation akin to “apartheidera South Africa.” Nor do I believe discussing CRT and white privilege is “divisive, anti-American propaganda,” as former President Trump said last year. Yes, CRT too often “devalues the racial progress that Americans have made.” But at the same time, those who want students to focus on “the heroic and joyful side of our nation’s history” without being taught about its ugly racial past are engaging in a different kind of indoctrination.