Critical race theory should not be banned! But it should also not be taught…
A centrist and CRT education survivor’s perspective
When skimming through your favorite news website these days it’s almost impossible not to see at least one story about critical race theory (CRT). Reading some of these articles makes it quickly apparent that CRT is just one more litmus test for extremes on either side of the aisle to prove their partisan purity to each other. Those on the far left swear by CRT and believe it is essential for kids to learn in school, while those on the far right call it an abomination biased against White students that should be banned. So, what happens when you’re a left-leaning centrist who was taught CRT in school and think both sides are ridiculous?
Two crucial questions that seem to be missing from the CRT debate are: 1) what do students actually need and 2) when are we going to ask them what they need? Well, let me introduce myself…
Hello, my name is Jeff and I’m a recovering CRT education survivor. Here’s my story…
I’m a Gen Xer who grew up in the 1980s and 90s and lived in the left-leaning suburbs just southwest of Philadelphia. My parents were former hippies and instilled in me the values of tolerance, peace, and acceptance of other races and cultures. I really didn’t understand the concept of racism until I went to elementary school.
My childhood school district was very liberal and extremely politically correct (PC) in its teaching philosophy. It was there that I was introduced to an early iteration of CRT that was just referred to as “multicultural education.” In third grade, I began to learn that being a white male was a terrible thing. I was taught that white males were responsible for all of the worst horrors and atrocities throughout human history and that they were born inherently evil and racist to the core. I was told that I did not have any ethnicity and that my views and opinions on social matters and history were essentially irrelevant. In this environment, the only salvation for the white male was total acceptance of the original sin of being born evil, and to embrace salvation in the warm light of multicultural education.
Many of the lessons we learned in school regarding social norms, values, or history were taught in a very accusatory manner. We did not just learn about the detrimental impacts of slavery and Jim Crowe on Black Americans; White students were made to feel as if we had a hand in committing these atrocities. There seemed to be a concerted effort to instill a sense of guilt and shame in the minds of innocent young children. Somehow, the guilt and shame were supposed to prevent past racial atrocities from being committed again in the future. The assumption was that by tearing down the self-esteem and racial identity of White students they would be less likely to engage in racially motivated hatred as adults. In essence, the ends were supposed to justify the means.
To those on the far left, this insanity seems to make sense. And, in reality, a small percentage of young white students completely accepted the misguided teachings of a handful of teachers with obvious political agendas. However, the majority of White students I knew either didn’t care, weren’t paying attention, or were deeply offended by the weekly racial chastising. I fell into the latter camp.
I was not a fan of the way my teachers implemented the instruction of multiculturalism and CRT and the accusatory and revisionist style of American history. I was deeply offended by the insinuation that I was evil and racist upon birth and that I somehow played a role in atrocities that were committed decades and centuries before I was even a twinkle in my father’s eye. What’s worse is that my needs and feelings — and those of so many other White students — were not even considered by the school administration and faculty that created the CRT curriculum. No one asked us if we were offended, and it seemed that no one really cared.
Even if White students did express their outrage at the CRT material, they were quickly silenced and told something to the effect that what the teachers were doing was acceptable because “your ancestors weren’t slaves.” This type of “sins of the father” (or sins of the ancestor) justification is beyond ridiculous. It’s basically saying that because people who looked like you did horrible things before you were born, teachers have the right to guilt, shame, and accuse you of being party to past atrocities. Because you live lives of “great privilege” you must pay a penance and it is OK for us to wrong you in any way we see fit to make up for the past. Keep in mind this was being taught to middle school-aged children.
While I agree that what my teachers did to me was not AS WRONG as what was done to various minority groups throughout history, at the end of the day, it was still WRONG to treat innocent children in this manner. Two wrongs don’t make a right no matter how they are justified.
Ironically, the long-term effects of my CRT education did not bear the results that my activist teachers were hoping for. I did not become the social justice warrior they were training me to be. I did not accept their system of racial demagoguery and indeed became quite resentful of CRT and the way multicultural education was being implemented. I’m not alone in this belief either. Many of my friends and fellow students privately expressed a similar hatred and disdain for all things CRT.
Like so many other things over the last 30 years, the CRT debacle only seems to have gotten worse. Schools across the US are going overboard in an attempt to be “inclusive” and implementing a more aggressive version of CRT than the one I experienced.
There was a recent example of an “elite” Manhattan school named Grace Church coming to terms with the type of racial punishment they are forcing their White students to endure. Paul Rossi, a math teacher at Grace Church, spoke out against the school in an essay published in the New York Times. There was a recording made of a conversation between Rossi and George Davidson, the head of the school. In the conversation Rossi stated “Having a teacher, an authority figure, talk to you endlessly, every year, telling you, that because you have whiteness, you are associated with evils, with all these different evils, it’s not the same as taking a physical thing…” Davidson was recorded admitting “We’re demonizing white people for being born.”
This scandal sparked a great deal of justified outrage from the parents at Grace Church as well as around the country. For me, it was comforting to hear a school administrator admit that CRT-based tactics were wrong since I was never afforded that luxury during my schooling.
Another example of over-the-top CRT education, once again, comes from a New York City school named East Side Community Highschool. In this instance, the principal distributed a survey only to White parents that was based on the curriculum of the “8 White Identities” conceptualized by Northwestern University professor Barnor Hesse (see the chart below). The 8 White Identities theory makes the claim that “there is a regime of whiteness, and there are action-oriented white identities” ranging from white supremacist to white abolitionist. It is aimed at the vast majority of White people in the US who identify with being white and “whiteness.” The overall goal of this theory is to dismantle and/or abolish “whiteness” from our society. Ironically, the racial makeup of the student population at East Side is 55 percent Hispanic and only 18 percent white.
One social media critic of the East Side Community experiment, psychology professor Geoffrey Miller stated “Applied to any other group, this would sound like a monstrous euphemism for mass extermination & cultural annihilation.” In addition to critics like Miller, East Side has also reported that its staff and faculty have been targeted with racial, anti-Semitic, and homophobic slurs since the dissemination of the 8 White Identities material.
While the examples above represent the more extreme cases of CRT education in the US, they nonetheless indicate a huge problem with how our kids are being educated and how politics is seeping into every facet of our lives. To someone like me, it is frightening to see just how off-the-rails CRT has become since my time in school. My experience left me with a lifetime of suspicion, distrust, and resentment towards politically motivated liberal educators. I can only imagine the depth of the emotional scars that the current iteration of CRT is going to have on the kids enduring it now.
This article has illustrated why CRT should not be taught in schools highlighting the personal and emotional impact it can have on students and the controversy it brings to school districts that implement it. But more importantly, CRT simply doesn’t work! Its main goal is to facilitate an environment of “anti-racism.” Unfortunately, practitioners of this “anti-racist” ideology go about the implementation of CRT in a very racist and anti-white fashion.
CRT ultimately ends up creating an environment of guilt, shame and, in many cases, hatred and resentment; the White students end up feeling guilty and shameful while the minority students are pissed-off and resentful of their White counterparts. Then there are students like me that become resentful and distrusting of CRT education and the educators that perpetuate it. The hypocrisy is also overwhelming; CRT divides students into arbitrary, prejudicial, and racially-based categories while at the same time stating that splitting people into such categories is racist. Lastly, CRT is implemented in a way that stifles classroom debate. The way CRT is currently taught can be described as a one-way street. You either accept it or you are branded a “racist” or “white supremacist” and effectively ostracized by your teachers and classmates.
Meanwhile, on the other end of the political spectrum, conservatives are doing everything in their power to impose outright bans on CRT. Currently, CRT education has already been banned or is in the process of being banned in Tennessee, Oklahoma, Idaho, North Carolina, Texas, Arizona, Louisiana, Iowa, Missouri, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Georgia, Arkansas, South Dakota, and West Virginia. Many Republican lawmakers — and even some Democrats — have expressed the same type of concerns mentioned in this article. While I may personally be in the center right of this particular issue in principle, I whole-heartedly disagree with the movement to ban CRT. Whenever something is banned or censored, the public loses the ability to engage in a civilized debate. We cannot live in a free society with the constant, looming threat of censorship coming from either the extreme left or right.
The solution to the CRT debacle isn’t more cockamamie demagoguery and grandstanding from partisan extremists with political agendas. We need to turn the one-way street of CRT into a confluence of streets, alleyways, and multilane highways to truly be more accepting of not just racial identity but also individual viewpoints. More importantly, we need to sit down and talk to one another instead of screaming from the bully pulpit and imposing arbitrary bans. We should also sit down with our children and find out what they need from their education instead of making assumptions based on our adult biases. If we can just sit down and talk, we might actually be able to come to an agreement that takes into account the need for anti-racism education but without the inherent divisiveness and racial demagoguery. If we could all just calmly and rationally talk to one another, perhaps we could solve many of the problems that plague this country.
