Is there an uncontroversial way to teach America’s racist history?
"Ask the Expert: What is critical race theory and why is it under attack in our schools? "A Lesson on Critical Race Theory "Labeling everything as "woke" is becoming as common and disingenuous (as many don't even know what it means) a tactic for conservatives as Trump's "fake news." Don't like it? It's fake news. Don't like it? It's woke. Why Attacking ‘Cancel Culture’ And ‘Woke’ People Is Becoming The GOP’s New Political Strategy" .. just back those two .. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=163742865]";"
A historian on the unavoidable discomfort around anti-racist education.
By Sean Illing @seanilling sean.illing@vox.com Jun 11, 2021, 8:30am EDT
A second grade teacher and her students pledge allegiance to the flag circa 1970. Bettmann Archive via Getty Images
If you follow politics at all, you’ve likely encountered phrases and terms such as “critical race theory” or “anti-racism” recently.
There’s a debate raging over the history and legacy of American racism and how to teach it in schools. The current iteration of this debate (and there have been many) stretches back to 2019, when the New York Times published the 1619 Project, but it evolved into a kind of moral panic in the post-Trump universe, in part because it’s great fodder for right-wing media.
The hysteria over critical race theory, or CRT, has now spilled beyond the confines of Twitter and Fox News. As I explored back in March, conservative state legislatures across the country are seeking to ban CRT from being taught in public schools.
There are lots of angles into this story, and frankly, much of the discourse around it is counterproductive. The main issue is that it’s not clear what these concepts mean, as tends to happen when ideas (à la postmodernism) escape the confines of academia and enter the political and cultural discourse.
Conservatives have appropriated critical race theory as a convenient catchall to describe basically any serious attempt to teach the history of race and racism. It’s now a prop in the never-ending culture war, where caricature and bad faith can muddy the waters. But the intensity of the debate speaks to a very real and difficult question: What’s the best and most productive way to teach the history of racism?
His essay is mostly about the blind spots in the public discourse around race and education. But in it, he raises a point that seems overlooked: The uproar over CRT isn’t about anti-racist education itself — Black educators in Black schools have practiced that for more than a century. Rather, it’s about the form anti-racism takes in classrooms with white students. Teaching this history to Black students comes with its own complications, but we’re having this discussion because white parents are protesting and entire news outlets are obsessed with it.
So, I reached out to Givens to talk about why this conversation is so hard, how he responds to some of the criticisms of CRT, why he thinks it’s crucial to not get stuck with a single narrative of Black suffering, and why an honest attempt to teach the history of race in America is going to create a lot of unavoidable discomfort.
A transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows.
Sean Illing
The term “anti-racism” has become so muddled that a lot of people probably have no idea what it means. How are you using it?
Jarvis R. Givens
It’s about teaching the history of racial inequality and the history of racism, to understand that it’s about more than individual acts of racism.
The idea is that students — and educators — should have a deep awareness of how racist ideas and practices have been fundamental in shaping our modern world. Students need to be able to have these discussions honestly so that new generations of students aren’t just aware of this history, but can also acknowledge and comprehend how our actions can disrupt those historical patterns or reinforce them.
But one thing I tried to do in my piece .. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/whats-missing-from-the-discourse-about-anti-racist-teaching/618947/ .. was remind people that anti-racist teaching isn’t new. We’ve been talking about it in public as though it’s this novel thing, and perhaps it’s because so much of this discussion is about how to teach white students, but for well over a century, Black teachers have been modeling an anti-racist disposition in their pedagogical practices. They recognized how the dreams of their students were at odds with the structural context in which they found themselves. And they had to offer their students ways of thinking about themselves that were life-affirming, despite a society that was physically organized in a way that explicitly told them they were subhuman.
You gestured at the criticism I hear the most: that CRT (and, I guess by extension, “anti-racism” education) is built on an assumption that the study of racism has to be anchored to a commitment to undoing the power structure, which is seen as a product of white supremacy. To the extent that’s true, the complaint is that it’s not really an academic discipline or an approach to education — it’s a political ideology.
Jarvis R. Givens
I hear what you’re saying, and I’m not going to argue that there are no clear political commitments on the part of those scholars who gave us CRT. One thing I’d be interested to hear, however, is an alternative approach to teaching the history of America, or the history of anything, quite frankly, that doesn’t have an embedded set of political commitments.
Any approach to framing history is going to have some political commitments baked into the narrative. The choices we make about what to highlight or omit, all of that reflects certain values and biases. It’s just that we often take these for granted when it’s the “preferred” or “dominant” history.
In the end, I don’t see how you can completely remove politics from the work of education or the production of history. I don’t think it’s ever fully possible, and that’s something that isn’t usually acknowledged in these conversations. - "“Unfortunately, we haven’t had the courage to teach our history honestly”" - Sean Illing
From your perspective, what’s missing from the current discourse around anti-racism education?
Jarvis R. Givens
The best educational models can teach us to recognize injustices, and they can cultivate a commitment to resisting those things, but equally important — and this is something Black educators have done for a long time in their own communities — is modeling other ways of being in the world, other ways of being in relationship to the world.
If you’re striving to create more justice in the world, you can’t do that if you’re only focusing on the things you’re trying to negate. You can’t just be “anti” whatever. You have to have some life-affirming vision that you can hold on to, a vision that’s more meaningful and points us in the direction of a better world. You have to teach people not just to resist injustice but to transcend it. This is what the Black educational models I’ve studied have always done, and it’s lost in so much of the debate about anti-racism and CRT today.
Sean Illing
Why is it so important to move beyond the “anti”?
Jarvis R. Givens
I think it’s important because I don’t want to be stuck with this narrative of Black people as frail and suffering and nothing else. If that’s the image that’s necessary to advance some agenda, we need to rethink some things. I’m not interested in painting this picture of Black folks as only living lives in suffering. If our strategy for seeking justice relies on this image of black folks as damaged and down and out, well, it just falls into a lot of old tropes that we have to be wary of.
Absolutely, there’s injustice. This is a part of the story, part of our story, but Black life is much more expansive than that. It always has been. And so many of our efforts to demand justice have relied on painting an image of Black people as damaged and deficient, and I’m always interested in trying to resist that, and to expand the aperture for how we have these conversations.
Our strategy can’t be just about proving injury. At the same time, the public has to stop denying that harm and violence has been and continues to be done. Both of these things are challenges before us.
Sean Illing
Take an enormous concept like “structural racism,” which is a catchall to describe how contemporary inequalities have their roots in history and institutions. On the one hand, that’s just obviously true. But at the same time — and I think you share this instinct — we don’t want to reduce people to historical props with no agency, and we don’t want to define any oppressed group by the actions of their oppressors.
So, how do you walk that line as an educator?
Harvard University Press
Jarvis R. Givens
Yeah, it’s about taking both structure and agency seriously.
This is one of the things I tried to get at in my book .. https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780674983687 . I was interested in writing against the dominant narrative that we tend to have about Black life and education prior to Brown v. Board. And this is not to diminish the significance of Brown v. Board of Education, but I was interested in thinking outside of the single narrative we’ve inherited: that Brown was necessary because Black people only had schools that were falling apart, with outdated secondhand textbooks, [because] the self-image of Black children was damaged and Black folks had no power.
All of this was baked into the Jim Crow school structure, this racially divided school structure. Proving this, and demonstrating the inherent inequality of Jim Crow, was necessary to achieve the Brown decision.
But to take that as the total narrative of Black educational life is a mistake. Having studied the history, it’s hard for me to paint the story in such a broad stroke. This concern, for me, began with the story of Black teachers that were writing textbooks that challenged the distorted representation of Black life in the dominant curriculum. You have all of these organizations that were created to advocate on behalf of Black educators and students. You have people like Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis and Angela Davis, who are the products of these schools and the teaching within them. There was still more to that story than just the narrative of aggressive neglect, of Black schools being starved of resources.
This is all to say, we can hold both things in our minds. We can talk about the violent resistance against Black educational strivings and the intentional underdevelopment of African American schools, but we also have to rigorously account for the things Black folks were doing on a daily basis to make meaningful education possible despite the neglect. And I think that’s necessary if we are to appreciate the suffering and the beauty of Black people’s experience in education, if we are to account for their human striving across generations.
It’s liberating, as a student of history, to realize that so much of it is manufactured. This is essential not just for those of us who write history, but also those of us who are consumers of it. We have to know that the histories presented to us consist of narratives based on decisions people made to represent some aspect of the past. It’s all distortion in some way. It’s important to know that our narratives and origin stories about the past … well, we create them.
One of the best things my high school US history teacher did for me was help me understand that no history is an exhaustive representation of anything. She made me aware of silences. When you allow students to have the agency of knowing that history is not always as authoritative as we tend to imagine, it actually invites them to establish a deeper intellectual relationship with the past. It allows us to think about why certain scholars might have chosen to represent certain aspects of the past in the ways that they did. - "“I’m not interested in painting this picture of Black folks as only living lives in suffering”" - Sean Illing
So much of your work focuses on anti-racist education during the Jim Crow era, but we live in a different world today — a flawed world but undoubtedly a better world. How should anti-racist teaching evolve to meet the realities of this moment?
Jarvis R. Givens
This is actually getting at another element that I think is important: A lot of the conversations around anti-racist teaching are directed at white teachers and white students, without actually being named as such. This is obviously very different than talking about how Black educators engaged Black students in the Jim Crow South, or even my own experience growing up in Compton, California, where I attended majority-Black schools with mostly Black teachers.
I’m not going to offer any prescriptive elements about what it means to try and do this work. But I’ll go out on a limb and say this: A fundamental part of being a critical educator, an educator committed to justice and equality, means being committed to reckoning with the history of racial injustice and trying to teach students in a way that supports the development of a critical awareness of that past, which includes acknowledging how that past continues to structure the ways in which we’re in relationship with one another in the present. It means recognizing that many of the institutions we have inherited have very long roots in this history.
There’s a moral imperative for all teachers who choose to face those realities of history and own it in the present. Being an anti-racist teacher in this moment means to honor the depth of human suffering reflected in that history by telling the truth about it. But then again, that’s what anti-racist teaching has always demanded of those educators who chose to teach in a manner that was disruptive to the racial inequality in our society. You can’t look away from it because it’s in every direction you turn.
I do recognize that learning the truth about our histories as different racial groups, and as a country, can be difficult. There’s going to be some level of discomfort, and we have to be real about that. Confronting the history of slavery and Jim Crow has always been difficult for Black people, those who lived through it and their progeny. We don’t experience our ancestors’ suffering in full, but the marks are still there.
Sean Illing
“Discomfort” is probably key here. And in that spirit of keeping it real, let’s just say it: There are a lot of white people in this country, especially white parents, who see all the scary headlines about CRT and the 1619 Project, and they don’t like it. They see “anti-racism” as “anti-white” and it’s … uncomfortable. I don’t know how to teach the truth about America’s past in such a politically fraught environment, but it’s something we’re going to have to figure it out in real time, and it’s going to be messy.
Jarvis R. Givens
To be honest, I don’t really have an answer, because unfortunately, we haven’t had the courage to teach our history honestly. We just haven’t tried it. What we’ve always had instead is a lot of resistance to talking about our past beyond a surface level.
But one thing I do know is that there are some people in this country who never had the luxury of not facing this stuff. And they’ve always encountered a lot of discomfort. It’s not comfortable for Black folks or Native American communities to think about the history of land dispossession or slavery or Jim Crow or lynchings, and how the legacy of these things persist today.
I guess what I’m saying is that certain folks never had the luxury of being comfortable. So now we’re at a place where we’re trying to figure out how to be more intentional in acknowledging our history and its consequences, and that means that discomfort is going to have to be shared in a way it hasn’t been up to this point.
And if we’re going to talk about how to unify the country, the onus can’t just be on the people who are the descendants of enslaved Black people and displaced Native communities, whose forced labor and stolen land were the primary factors of production in building this country. This is something we all have to encounter, and it’s going to be discomforting for everyone.
Slavery and conquest. The foundation upon which America's wealth and power was built. That's pretty much simply a statement of fact yet many whites in particular find it difficult to face.
Many Americans embrace falsehoods about critical race theory
"Ask the Expert: What is critical race theory and why is it under attack in our schools?"
July 16, 20214:13 AM AEST Last Updated 4 months ago
By Chris Kahn
VIDEO
NEW YORK, July 15 (Reuters) - Critical race theory, a once-obscure academic concept that has sparked school board protests and classroom bans in some states, is largely misunderstood among the general public, even by those who say they are familiar with what it teaches about racism in America, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll.
The national opinion survey taken on Monday and Tuesday found that 57% of adults said they were not familiar with the term, also known by its shorthand, CRT, which asserts that racism is woven into the U.S. legal system and ingrained in its primary institutions.
Many of those who said they were familiar with it answered follow-up questions that showed they embraced a variety of misconceptions about critical race theory that have been largely circulating among conservative media outlets.
For example, 22% of those who said they were familiar with critical race theory also think it is taught in most public high schools. It is not.
Thirty-three percent believe it “says that white people are inherently bad or evil” or that “discriminating against white people is the only way to achieve equality.” It does not.
Among respondents who said they were familiar with CRT, only 5% correctly answered all seven true-false questions that the poll asked about the history and teachings of critical race theory. Only 32% correctly answered more than four of the seven questions.
The poll showed that a bipartisan majority of Americans say that high school students should learn about slavery and racism in America. Yet respondents were more opposed to teaching critical race theory, which maintains that the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow racial segregation laws continues to create an uneven playing field for nonwhite Americans.
Parents and community members attend a Loudoun County School Board meeting which included a discussion about the academic doctrine known as Critical Race Theory, in Ashburn, Virginia, U.S. June 22, 2021. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein/File Photo
For example, 78% of adults, including nine in 10 Democrats and seven in 10 Republicans, said they supported teaching high school students about slavery in the United States. Seventy-three percent of adults, including nine in 10 Democrats and six in 10 Republicans, support teaching high school students about racism and its impact on the country.
Still, 36% of Americans said they would support a ban on CRT in public schools. The responses were divided along party lines: a majority of Democrats – 51% - opposed a school ban, while a majority of Republicans – 54% - supported one.
TEACHING BANS
As Americans tackle racial and social injustice after the police killing of George Floyd last year, several Republican-led states including Florida, Georgia and Texas have enacted rules to limit teaching about the role of racism in the United States.
Proponents argue they are protecting students from what they consider to be a divisive ideology and a distortion of history.
But Paula Ioanide, a professor of race and ethnicity studies at Ithaca College in New York, said the public is being fed bad information about the CRT theory from conservative activists hoping to invigorate the Republican base and dissuade teachers from talking about racism in schools.
“This is a manufactured crisis by the political right in response to the Black Lives Matter movement,” Ioanide said. “It’s a proxy for a debate that the country is reckoning with on the right and the left over the degree to which racism is alive and well."
The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted online, in English, throughout the United States. It gathered responses from 1,004 adults, including 453 Democrats and 377 Republicans. The results had a credibility interval, a measure of precision, of about 4 percentage points.
Reporting by Chris Kahn; Editing by Soyoung Kim and Peter Cooney
Conservatives actually love critical race theory -- when they turn the subject to 'oppressed' White people
"Ask the Expert: What is critical race theory and why is it under attack in our schools? "A Lesson on Critical Race Theory "Labeling everything as "woke" is becoming as common and disingenuous (as many don't even know what it means) a tactic for conservatives as Trump's "fake news." Don't like it? It's fake news. Don't like it? It's woke. Why Attacking ‘Cancel Culture’ And ‘Woke’ People Is Becoming The GOP’s New Political Strategy" .. just back those two .. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=163742865]";"
(CNN) -- If you're trying to figure out why so many conservatives despise critical race theory, here's some historical context you should remember:
White conservatives oppose critical race theory -- only when it's applied to Black people.
But many have no problem adopting some of CRT's language and core insights when complaining that contemporary America discriminates against White people.
This is the audacious double standard that's often overlooked in the current debate over critical race theory. Many White conservatives roll their eyes when Black people claim that systemic racism exists, that racism is baked into the nation's policies and legal system, and that it can't be reduced to individual prejudice -- all key CRT concepts.
Yet White conservatives have steadily built a legal and political movement that claims White people are the primary victims of covert forms of racism embedded in American institutions such as religion, education, and throughout popular culture.
There's a name for this rhetorical sleight of hand, which insists that systemic racism exists for White Americans but not for people of color. Ta-Nehisi Coates, the renowned author and essayist, calls it "frame-flipping."
Coates says that while overt, ugly acts of bigotry attract the most attention, the most potent component of racism is "positioning the bigot as the actual victim."
"So the gay do not simply want to marry, they want to convert our children into sin," he wrote. "The Jews do not merely want to be left in peace, they actually are plotting world take-over. And the blacks are not actually victims of American power, but beneficiaries of the war against hard-working whites. This is a respectable, more sensible, bigotry, one that does not seek to name-call, preferring instead 'to' change the subject and strawman."
The recent debate over CRT is the latest variation of frame-flipping. But conservatives have used similar tactics to thwart the feminist movement and to notch victories in the culture wars on American campuses.
- CRT is a complex subject that can easily be mischaracterized -
Critical race theory is a perfect candidate for the latest version of frame-flipping because so many people do not know what it is .. https://www.rawstory.com/pete-ricketts/ -- including some conservatives who condemn it.
Critical race theory emerged in the 1970s as legal scholars and activists sought to figure out why racial inequality persisted despite the passage of landmark civil rights laws in the 1960s, which penalized the most blatant forms of discrimination. They concluded that racism had mutated and embedded itself in policies and institutions, such as housing and the justice system.
These modern forms of racism are what some call "racism without racists." They are often hardwired into institutions, and can't be traced back to a White person being overtly racist. For example, a critical race theorist might point to an actual 2011 case .. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-reaches-335-million-settlement-resolve-allegations-lending-discrimination .. of a lender caught charging Black and Latino customers higher fees than White applicants with similar credit histories.
Demonstrators protest critical race theory being taught in Springfield, Missouri, schools on Tuesday, May 18, 2021.
Many critics, though, ignore how CRT exposes how racism persists in the contemporary world. They say critical race theory "poisons our .. https://www.heritage.org/civil-society/commentary/how-leftists-critical-race-theory-poisons-our-discussion-racism .. discussion of race" by suggesting that those who question CRT are automatically assumed to oppose fighting racism. They also argue it teaches White students to be ashamed of their color and country.
[INSERT: Those critics misrepresent woke. They misrepresent CRT. They create a culture war based on false premises. Like Bush Jnr's Iraq War was launched under fraudulent pretense, so is the current Republican culture war.]
Conservative lawmakers have now passed laws in at least six states to ban what they describe as the teaching of critical race theory in public schools, with similar legislation being proposed in at least a dozen more. One commentator called this campaign the "most far-reaching assault on academic freedom since the McCarthy era in the 1950s."
But it is something more. It is a textbook example of conservative hypocrisy.
- Critical race theory opponents borrow from the anti-racists they denounce -
Conservatives accuse critical race theorists of "planting hatred in the minds of the next generation" and being obsessed with skin color.
Yet many continue to rally behind a former President who is widely perceived to have spread hatred against Americans of color with such remarks as telling four nonwhite Democratic congresswomen to "go back" to the crime-infested places they came from and rose to political prominence partly based on a racist birther conspiracy theory that reflected his obsession with the first Black President of the US.
Protesters against critical race theory being taught in Loudoun County schools gather in Leesburg, Virginia, on June 12, 2021.
Conservatives admonish critical race theorists for saying racism transcends individual prejudice and is embedded in American institutions.
Yet they insist that White Americans are the victims of bias in such institutions as mainstream media, law schools and in corporate America, where some now say that White conservative men can't get ahead.
Conservatives say critical race theory teaches "that Blacks should forever be regarded as helpless victims," and that "America is not a racist country."
Yet they also warn of pervasive "anti-White mania" in America. A large number of Whites even say they face more discrimination than Black people, while a majority of White evangelicals say Christians face more discrimination than Muslims.
- Some conservatives deny White privilege but believe in 'Black privilege' -
The battle over critical race theory is actually the latest outbreak of an older phenomenon: More White Americans in recent years have come to see themselves as a racially oppressed majority group.
This belief is reflected in how casually many White people use the language of racial persecution to describe their state in contemporary America, a fear that Trump has stoked for years.
Numerous studies show that Blacks lag behind Whites in many socioeconomic categories. White people make up the bulk of the country's CEOs, billionaires and political leaders. There is no widely cited study showing that job applicants with a White-sounding name on their resume like Emily or Greg are 33% less likely to get called back for a job interview than a Jamal or Lakisha.
A man holds an "All Lives Matter" sign at a pro-Trump demonstration on August 1, 2020, in Yucaipa, California.
Still, many White people talk today as if they are an embattled racial minority. Powerful White men lament they are increasingly "being silenced by 'woke" culture." Conservative politicians describe critical race theory as being as racist as "Klansmen in White sheets" and complain that Democratic voting proposals represent "Jim Crow 2.0."
One conservative leader called it a "monstrous evil" that would enable people of color to rise up and use the "whip handle" on their White neighbors.
White privilege is bogus, conservative commentators say, but "Black privilege," where Blacks get "automatic victim status' that makes it easier for them to land affirmative action slots, is a real problem.
Critics don't accept CRT's premise that systemic racism persists in contemporary America.
Like critical race theorists, though, many see racism as a subtle and adaptable force woven into contemporary American institutions -- except they believe these racist forces are arrayed against White people.
- Opponents of critical race theory follow a well-worn script -
This new language of White persecution is no accident. It reflects in part real sentiments from White Americans who are anxious about demographic changes in their country. But it also reflects a strategy.
Much of this can be traced to conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who has vowed to lead a "one-man war" against critical race theory and has been open about his desire to turn CRT into a negative term.
"We have successfully frozen their brand—"critical race theory"—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category."
More than 100 people gathered at a diner in Howard County, Maryland in June to listen to a panel held by local Republican groups on school Covid-19 shutdowns and critical race theory.
Bending left-leaning language and concepts to attack progressive reforms is something conservatives have been doing for centuries, political theorist Corey Robin argues in "The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump."
In his book, Robin looked at how conservative movements have traditionally specialized in absorbing "the ideas and tactics of the very revolution or reform it opposes."
Robin cited another cultural war battle that grabbed a lot of headlines not too long ago -- the battle over political correctness on college campuses.
He says conservative leaders deftly advised conservative college students to use the language of the left to take on campus liberals. They accused colleges of lacking intellectual "diversity," said conservatives were "underrepresented" and that schools should be more "inclusive" of right-leaning students.
Robin also pointed to another conservative movement that borrowed the language of the left in the 1970s to defeat a progressive dream: The Equal Rights Amendment, an update to the Constitution that would have guaranteed equal rights to women.
After the feminist movement of the 1960s, ratification for the Equal Rights Amendment seemed assured by the early 1970s. But Phyllis Schlafly, a conservative activist, led the successful campaign to torpedo the ERA movement by shrewdly using the language of the left.
Phyllis Schlafly leads members opposed to the equal rights amendment in protest in this undated photo.
She argued that the ERA would be "a takeaway of women's rights," said she was defending "the real rights of women" and added, "a woman should have the right to be in the home as a wife and mother."
Schlafly used the language of human rights to "put women back into the home," Robin noted. He says Schlafly's semantical maneuver was a common tactic of conservative movements, which, "without directly engaging the progressive argument," absorb "the deeper categories and idioms of the left."
Rush Limbaugh, the late conservative talk-show host, used the same rhetorical trick. He used the language of the civil rights movement to attack progressives. He once argued that conservatives are an "oppressed minority" in need of a "civil rights movement" because its members willingly sit in the "back of the bus" and were "afraid of the fire hoses and the dogs."
Some opponents of critical race theory are using the same ploy. They won't directly confront what critical race theorists actually say about incidents like George Floyd's murder and what it implied about the persistence of White supremacy in America. They simply absorb the language of critical race theorists to deflect and discourage any deeper discussions of systemic racism.
US Rep. Lauren Boebert speaks at a press conference about banning federal funding for the teaching of critical race theory on May 12, 2021, in Washington.
This was the point echoed by Sam Hoadley-Brill, a fellow at the African American Policy Forum, which is headed by the scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, one of the founding scholars of CRT. He wrote in a recent essay:
"Today's attacks on critical race theory aren't meant to rebut its main arguments. They're meant to paint it with such broad brushstrokes that any basic effort to reckon with the causes and impact of racism in our society can be demonized and dismissed."
There is a legitimate debate to be had over critical race theory. Does it accurately reflect US history? Does it really teach hatred? And who gets to define racism: its perpetrators, or its victims?
But there is a segment of White conservative America that is not interested in debate. As they dismiss CRT as bogus -- while employing its concepts and language to describe their own perceived racial oppression -- the message they're sending to Black Americans, other people of color and their White allies is clear:
"Critical race theory for me -- but not for thee."
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