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“Florida’s state Board of Education banned ‘critical race theory’ from public school classrooms [last] Thursday… The Black Lives Matter movement has helped bring contentious discussions about race to the forefront of American discourse, and classrooms have become a battleground. Supporters contend that federal law has preserved the unequal treatment of people on the basis of race and that the country was founded on the theft of land and labor. Opponents of critical race theory say schoolchildren should not be taught that America is fundamentally racist. Governors and legislatures in Republican-led states around the country are considering or have signed into law bills that would limit how teachers can frame American history.” AP News
The right worries that curriculum changes have gone too far, and argues that focusing on “privilege” undermines personal agency.
“One family that had moved to Beaverton [Oregon] partly for the city’s highly rated public schools sent me a folder of lessons being taught to their third-grade child…
“[The curriculum] includes a video presentation in which the speaker directly accuses the children of being racist themselves: ‘Our society speaks racism. It has spoken racism since we were born. Of course you are racist. The idea that somehow this blanket of ideas has fallen on everyone’s head except for yours is magical thinking and it’s useless.’ The speaker then tells the students that if they don’t convert to the cause, they will ‘affirm the status quo of certain bodies being allowed resources, access, opportunities, and other bodies being literally killed.’…
“The final modules present the solution: students must immerse themselves in ‘revolution,’ ‘resistance,’ and ‘liberation.’ The teacher introduces these principles through photographs of child activists, Colin Kaepernick, the Black Power fist, and Black Lives Matter demonstrations, as well as protest signs reading ‘White Silence = Compliance,’ ‘Black Lives > Property,’ ‘AmeriKKKa,’ and ‘Stop Killing Us.’… A parent who emigrated from Iran to the United States told me that the lessons were ‘absolutely unacceptable’ and reminiscent of the political indoctrination in the Islamic Republic.”
Christopher F. Rufo, City Journal
“Herein lies the great danger of this moment: The next generation of Americans—black and white—might grow up believing that the entire destiny of one race rests in the hands of another, which must first renounce its ‘privilege’ before any progress can be made. The potential damage is that young people are robbed of their sense of personal agency—the belief and ability they can control their own destiny…
“Census data show that more than three million black students were enrolled in college or graduate school in 2018. According to the Washington Post, 23 unarmed black people were killed by police that year. This is 23 too many, yet roughly 136,000 black students were in higher education for each unarmed black person killed by police. George Floyd’s tragic death isn’t emblematic of how most middle-aged black men experience American life. Yes, for black men like me, racism is a reality—sometimes with fatal consequences. But 57% of black men have made it into the middle class or higher as adults today, up from 38% in 1960…
“There are pathways to power for young black people. That’s why our nation’s educators must help black girls and boys cultivate a sense of personal agency and convince them that their deliverance is determined more by their own actions than by the incantations of a newly enlightened majority.”
Ian Rowe, Wall Street Journal
“According to [critical race theorists], the first white slaver who landed on the coast of West Africa some 400 years ago inadvertently opened a kind of tab of oppression on behalf of every other white person alive or yet unborn, that has been growing with each passing year. Until this tab has been paid in full, we are told, justice will not have been done. In the anti-racist view of [Ibram X.] Kendi and his fellow critical race theorists, discrimination against whites is the only way to begin to settle the tab…
“[But] no one has yet come forward with a definition of what atonement will look like. How will we know if and when enough anti-racist policies have been pursued finally to reach equity? At what point will Kendi repeat to white people the words uttered by Christ on the cross that ‘it is finished,’ letting those who stand under judgment know that their sins have finally been washed away?…
“[Kendi’s logic] would seem to suggest that unless and until black Americans discriminate negatively against white Americans for as long and to the same degree as black Americans have been oppressed themselves over the past 400 years, white people can have no legitimate objection to the policies that critical race theorists want to pursue. Such a view would surely have vanishingly little purchase on most Americans of any race.”
Cameron Hilditch, National Review
The left argues that historically schools have not accurately portrayed the treatment of Black Americans, and that curriculum changes are long overdue.
The left argues that historically schools have not accurately portrayed the treatment of Black Americans, and that curriculum changes are long overdue.
“The ‘critical race theory’ being talked up on Fox and right-wing radio has little in common with the academic discipline that emerged from the Ivy League 40 years ago. It is, instead, a mash-up of a clutch of right-wing tropes. Primarily, however, it is a reaction to students being taught the actual history of America—warts and all—instead of a puffed-up faux-patriotic rendition… there is a deep insecurity in acknowledging the racism of American institutions or the country’s often brutal past; the attacks on critical race theory are essentially an attempt to sweep the less-than-rosy stuff under the rug, in favor of glossy American exceptionalism.”
Alex Shephard, New Republic
“Materials used in public schools across the South for decades taught that slave masters were a kindly lot, that the ‘war for Southern independence’ was not about slavery but resisting Northern ‘tyranny,’ and that the KKK was formed to keep the peace by keeping Black people in their place… Until recent years, the Tulsa massacre had been largely hidden from history. The truth was systematically covered up, deliberately erased from our collective memory, by public officials, news media, and textbooks.”
Ben Jealous, The Nation
“At the public Texas schools I attended in the ’80s, we learned that freed slaves were allotted 40 acres of land and a mule. What we did not learn was that the federal government quickly overturned that agreement, returning those acres to their previous white owners. We were told that America is a land of opportunity for anyone willing to work long and hard enough. We were not told that for decades many unions excluded Black Americans, thwarting them from the opportunities, pay and work protections offered their white counterparts…
“Studies suggest that when people aren’t provided the reasons for differences in their worlds – such as why the net worth of a typical white family is nearly 10 times that of a Black family – we routinely default to what Andrei Cimpian, a psychology professor at New York University, calls ‘shortcut’ explanations attributing ‘inherent’ qualities to groups of people…
“In 1982, the year I entered middle school, for instance, a jaw-dropping 57% of Houstonians in a Kinder Institute survey said that the main reason Black Americans had, on average, worse jobs, income and housing than white Americans, was because most Black people don’t have the motivation or willpower to pull themselves out of poverty… What divides us is not teaching the truth, but leaving kids to fill in the blanks for the vast inequalities they see around them.”
Kendra Hurley, USA Today
Dated but relevant: “[Recent surveys] show that young people in America have enormous gaps in what they understand about the history of slavery in this country. According to a 2018 report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, only 8 percent of high-school seniors surveyed were able to identify slavery as the central cause of the Civil War. Two-thirds of students did not know that a constitutional amendment was necessary to formally end slavery… Telling the truth about slavery is not ‘indoctrination.’”
Clint Smith, The Atlantic
“Three months ago, Educating for American Democracy, a scholastic initiative to redesign K-12 history and civic education for the 21st century, released a road map for states and school districts to strengthen the teaching of civics and history, and make it more inclusive. It didn’t set out a specific curriculum. It didn’t choose between a view of America as a land of glory or one that sees only racial injustice and exploitation…
“Instead, its message — the result of two years of study by more than 300 historians, political scientists and educators from diverse backgrounds and different political viewpoints — was to embrace and celebrate the contradictions, tensions and paradoxes in the country’s past, challenging students to think critically and form their own judgments. States should stop the misguided political interference that is already having a chilling effect on teachers and follow the lead of this thoughtful initiative.”
Editorial Board, Washington Post
