Right-wing propagandists like to push people’s buttons. Their favorite button to push is fear. If Democrats and the political left can be accused of harming innocent schoolchildren, the propagandists can be sure to get the angry, hysterical response they love to create.
Critical race theory (CRT) has become a new boogie man for people unwilling to acknowledge our country’s racist history and how it impacts the present.
Rashawn Ray
Like most of the Republican Party’s endless series of dramatic hot-button issues, the teaching of Critical Race Theory in the K-12 public schools is a phony, deliberately vague, non-issue. It is a problem that doesn’t exist.
The actual CRT is a complex, college-level, academic theory. K-12 teachers have other things to teach. Almost none of them had even heard of CRT before the Republicans manufactured the current sham controversy about it.
Manipulating your own people
It’s a typical strategy of right-wing figures to drastically underestimate the intelligence of their base and push the most simple-minded explanation of a given topic.
Ahmed Baba
The CRT “controversy,” however meaningless and overblown it is in the reality-based world, has great value to the right-wing:
- It is distracting. It takes up media time that could otherwise be devoted to the latest findings of the January 6th Commission or to Donald Trump’s ongoing legal troubles.
- It fires up the base. All those ignorant, angry people who are showing up to shout at their local school board are sure to vote – and vote Republican.
- It demands loyalty. Every Republican legislator who votes for an anti-CRT bill, even though they know it is meaningless, is further compromised into the fascist fold.
- It weakens public education. Right-wing Republicans have always secretly feared a well-educated public that can think critically.
- It lets racists know that the Republican Party is on their side. By making the teaching of undefined “CRT” illegal in the public schools, it becomes much harder to teach anything about race and racism to schoolchildren.
In politics, a dog whistle is the use of coded or suggestive language in political messaging to garner support from a particular group without provoking opposition. Dog whistles use language that appears normal to the majority but communicate specific things to intended audiences. They are generally used to convey messages on issues likely to provoke controversy without attracting negative attention.
Wikipedia
Blame the teachers
The lie that the riled-up crowd has been told about CRT is that teachers are deliberately trying to make innocent young schoolchildren feel bad about themselves by telling them they are racists. Again, this is not happening.
Teachers, especially teachers in the younger grades, care very much about their students and work very hard to build their self-esteem and give them the tools they need for success in life. I know these wonderful, unselfish, hardworking, people personally. I was a public school teacher for nearly 40 years.
The thing is, good teachers want students of color to have success and self-esteem just as much as the white kids. This puts educators at odds with racist white parents. Of course these parents never (well, rarely) come right out and speak negatively of efforts to help and support students of color. But, they CAN argue against CRT as a proxy for their real desire – which is to block teachers from educating children about racism.
Those who acknowledge America’s history of systemic racism don’t hate America. On the contrary, we love it enough to point out these uncomfortable truths so we can pursue that seemingly elusive, more perfect union. How can we make improvements if so many Americans deny the existence of these flaws?
Ahmed Baba
What does the theory actually say?
Critical Race Theory posits that racism and unequal racial outcomes are caused by complex social and institutional dynamics rather than by explicit, intentional prejudices by individuals. It says that racism is a systemic social construct and can exist even where individual people, themselves, are not racist.
In other words, even if CRT was taught in k-12 schools, it would specifically not be teaching that any individual student was racist (or “bad”). That is not what the theory is about.
Those who are passionately striving to ban the teaching of what they call “Critical Race Theory” are actually opposed to the teaching of the true history of people of color in America. They hope to whitewash (pun intended) the sins of America’s past by ignoring them and pretending they never happened.
Even worse, they turn truth on its head by claiming that the teaching of the actual history of Blacks in America is, itself, racist and divisive. These people (all white Republicans, by the way) are engaged in a systematic, political, legal, and social effort to maintain white privilege and indoctrinate (through forced ignorance) the schoolchildren of America.
In other words, their actions prove the theory they renounce.
Sources
“Critical race theory,” Wikipedia.
“Dog whistle (politics),” Wikipedia.
Rashawn Ray and Alexandra Gibbons, “Why are states banning critical race theory?” Brookings, August 2021.
Richard VanWagoner, “By vilifying the history of Africans and Blacks in America as racist ideology, policy makers snare themselves in a trap of their own making,” Medium, October 17, 2021.
Ahmed Baba, “Buttigieg is right – America’s roads are racist. Ted Cruz and Tucker Carlson are pretending to misunderstand,” Independent, November 9, 2021.
Yep. I still remember how shocked I was when I ran across things that I was not taught in grade school. Notably, what happened to minority voters so suddenly and completely at the end of Reconstruction when federal troops left the South. We were taught that Lincoln freed the slaves, end of story. I did not learn in school about an average of at least one lynching a week til the 1950s. Nor of the Tulsa Massacre… and the systematic housing and loan and wage issues. Jim Crow laws, whites only signs…
I read recently that the Utah congress people voted against the John Lewis voter protection act on grounds that the federal government should not tell localities what they can and cannot do. History does tell us what localities do. And alas, so does the news of widespread voter suppression laws being passed.
Joseph Campbell reports on how a mythology supports a social order. Hence, the pushback against any uncomfortable self reflection.
I do think that schools and districts could do a better job of getting the word out to parents as what is approved to be taught to students. Just ignoring the hot button issues with the idea or hope that only radicals are concerned enough to be informed isn’t helping. Many parents have heard of the CRT issue and genuinely wonder what their children are being taught. I’m familiar with my district and state’s learning standards, but let’s face it, they are written for teachers, not for parents. And even if parents go online and view the standards for their state or district, they are in the dark as to the curriculum being taught to support those standards.
As an example, although not at all related to social studies curriculum, a secondary mathematics education major of my acquaintance who is approaching her fourth and final year of training expressed recently the concern that she had yet to be shown where to find the standards and curriculum for the district in which she lives, but having looked at it online independently was still clueless as to what curriculum guidelines, text books or other lesson plans would be required. Imagine a parent’s concern as they wonder what leeway teachers may be given to express their own opinions – that does happen.
Those of us who have taught in the public school sector know that there is barely enough time to teach just the facts. We also know that many administrators urge us to teach to the test and wouldn’t have time to explore subject area passions if we wanted to do so. We know that the vast majority of teachers have only the interests of the students at heart. We also know, that the occasional bad teaching day and bad teacher pops up to make parents question what IS going on. Because anyone can impose their own opinions on impressionable minds, and when teaching the history of racism in general, radical opinions have popped up, no matter how rarely, administrations with access to a variety of communication methods need to better inform parents what SHOULD be taught in language they can understand.