I'm a liberal and I am against teaching CRT in schools. Here's why.
<p class="">I’ll be upfront and clear with my opinion: <strong>Critical Race Theory should not be taught or applied in K-12 education.</strong></p><p class=""><strong>What many Republicans are currently trying to ban is largely NOT Critical Race Theory<
Have you ever found yourself in a group of like-minded people, a crowd of friends even, going along your way in agreement and harmony, but suddenly something happens that seems just…a little bit off? You look around to see if anyone else has noticed the disturbance in the current, but nobody has. So you shake it off. You think, “maybe I misinterpreted this thing that happened, this thing that was said,” and you keep on going.
After a while, another small disturbance rocks your boat, dragging you out from the flow of bonhomie and support everyone else is in. Again, nobody else notices; again, you rejoin the group. But then there’s another disturbance, and another, until finally you can’t ignore them anymore. Even though you seem to be alone, you can’t help but stand up and shout, “does nobody else see this?”
I’ve been through this before, in a church setting. I am in such a moment again.
My context: who am I, and who really cares?
I’m a stay-at-home mother. I have been for the past 11 years, and before that, I was an editor of no consequence. I worked for a travel industry newspaper writing short, general travel guides for travel agents, and before that at a local newspaper, where I wrote wedding announcements and a few local-flavor articles for special sections. Before that, I was in college at a small religious liberal arts university: an English major.
I was born and spent my childhood in L.A. County, though I lived in Northern Ireland with my family for 3 years as a toddler. My teenage years were spent in a working-class suburb of Chicago. Since college, I’ve lived in the South (where my husband grew up).
I am not wealthy by any stretch of the American imagination, but we are comfortable in our small, inexpensive home. We have never and will never inherit property or even money from any other family member. We’ve been fortunate to support ourselves while I stayed home with our kids; my husband’s salary as a city employee supplemented by his 8 years in the Navy reserve, my occasional freelance projects, and babysitting friends’ and family members’ kids through the years. I’m not anybody of importance, or even notice, in academia or social commentary. I’m just a person who likes to read and learn and think.*
*Critics of anything I’m about to say could use these paragraphs against me, saying I’m missing the point of discussions about privilege, downplaying my white privilege. What I am actually doing, as you’ll see if you continue to read, is parsing out my “intersectional identity.” But we’ll get there.
So why does my opinion matter during this present moment? Well, in some ways it doesn’t matter at all. But it matters to me because I care about my family, my neighbors, our kids’ public education, and the freedom we have in our country to have and share thoughts of our own.
Rattled and redefined
Two decades ago as a sophomore in college, I felt the first disturbance in my way of thinking. I had walked into a dormitory lobby where a television was on, and President George W. Bush was on the screen announcing our invasion of Iraq and I thought, What does Iraq have to do with anything? (Don’t forget, I went to a religious-affiliated school where conservatism was the norm. This question came from my own mind.)
In 2015, the death of Philando Castile shook me out of nearly unquestioning support of the police community, of which I was and am tangentially still part.
In 2016, following years of personal and political evolution, I couldn’t believe my eyes and ears when people in my faith community supported Donald Trump, a man who not only embodied everything we were meant to scorn, but he did so openly and with impunity.
Then the murder of Ahmaud Arbery and the deaths of Breonna Taylor and Elijah McClain at the hands of police became national news. The certainty that something was seriously off in this country became inescapable. I woke up. Then George Floyd was brutally murdered by a police officer in broad daylight on camera.
“Woke” has now of course become a parody as much as an authentic state of being. But awakening is an apt metaphor for what happens when your understanding of reality suddenly shifts dramatically. Like being hit with a blinding light, scales falling from your eyes, as people who read the Bible would say.
I opened my eyes and found myself in a new current of thought. Although previously I was far from delusional or even ignorant of our country’s racial realities, I had a new window into the underlying rot. I swam deeply in the waters. I read more Coates and Kendi. I followed more activists on social media. I kept track of what was going on in academia, in literature, in politics. I was “doing the work.”
Then, within the past year or so, unexpectedly and uncomfortably, I felt a new disturbance. And another. And another. There have been many, but I’m not going to discuss them all today.
The main reason I felt compelled to write something down and share it is the current obsession with Critical Race Theory: what it is, what it means, and whether it should be applied in K-12 education.
I’ll be upfront and clear with my opinion: Critical Race Theory should not be taught or applied in K-12 education.
What many Republicans are currently trying to ban is largely NOT Critical Race Theory. The truth about our founding fathers who enslaved people, the horrors of slavery, the genocide of Native Americans and indigenous people, the repugnance of Jim Crow and segregation: all of this ought to be taught. I would argue that in many K-12 settings, these truths are already taught. But where they aren’t, they should be. The teaching of these historical facts is not what Critical Race Theory is all about. Any attempt to ban the teaching of historical fact, including the expansion of that teaching to include previously obscured or omitted facts about slavery and segregation, is shameful and damaging.
All that being explicitly said, I’m going to go on to explain to the best of my ability the origins of CRT, how the application of CRT (whether intended by its creators or not) can be destructive, and why it shouldn’t be taught or used as a framework for teaching kids in K-12 schools.
What is CRT and where did it come from?
The most challenging class I ever took in college had the dry, even dull-sounding title “Literary Theory and Criticism.” We were a small group of final-year English majors (maybe 15 of us or fewer) who knew each other well. In this class on “literary theory and criticism” we argued, we cried, we got angry, we struggled. Because although the title sounded benign, these theories challenged how we saw the world and situated ourselves in it, how power is distributed amongst people, and even the nature of reality. These theories are difficult to grasp, esoteric, dense in language. Feminism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, deconstructionism, Marxism, and Communism, all these movements that seek to examine and change the way society itself is structured have come out of “critical theory.” Critical theories are not simply toothless academic ramblings.
Let’s look to the incomparable Meryl Streep for help:
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In the way explained by Meryl Streep’s gargantuan dunk on Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada, kids may not be given a legal paper by Kimberlé Crenshaw to read, but the “stuff” of CRT still influences their education in significant ways.
Critical Race Theory (which I will not claim to be an expert on; I wouldn’t claim expertise on any of these theories because I don’t have a Ph.D.) emerged in the 1980s and was built upon the ideas of the theories that came before.
So what came before?
In short, a lot. But let’s pick up with Angela Davis. Angela Davis is now lauded as an academic, but in the 60s she was much more than just an academic. Guns that she owned were used in a courthouse hostage situation that resulted in four deaths. She had ties to the violent radical group the Weather Underground.* She went into hiding. She was eventually acquitted.
*So too does the current district attorney of San Francisco; his mother was imprisoned for murder for decades and his father is still in prison for it. (Source)
She was a Communist (that’s not an accusation or an epithet; it’s simply stating a fact), and perhaps most importantly to CRT, in West Germany she studied directly under a social theorist named Herbert Marcuse. (All of this is available to read on her Wikipedia page.) For the purposes of discussing CRT, one of the most important elements of Marcuse’s theory is the idea of “radical subjectivity”:
Radical subjectivity refers to the development of a form of self-consciousness that finds present social and economic conditions intolerable. … what Marcuse will call negative thinking becomes a central element in Marcuse’s critical theory.
The purpose of dialectical or negative thinking is to expose and then overcome by revolutionary action the contradictions by which advanced industrial societies are constituted. (Source)
After studying under this theorist, Davis apparently absorbed the idea that to revolutionize society, you must self-consciously decide to view your current circumstances as utterly unendurable.
Seven years after Davis published Women, Race and Class, Kimberlé Crenshaw published her first paper that would launch the theories of intersectionality and Critical Race Theory. Davis’s Women, Race and Class touched on the multiple ways women are oppressed; Crenshaw described the phenomenon that Davis delineated as “intersectionality.” (Source)
On googling “What is critical race theory?” an Education Week article at the top of the results states:
Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.
The basic tenets of critical race theory, or CRT, emerged out of a framework for legal analysis in the late 1970s and early 1980s created by legal scholars Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado, among others. (Source)
That all sounds pretty good. Race is a social construct (here’s a great, easy-to-read but well-sourced article on what that means: Scientific American) Racism has and in some ways continues to be embedded in American legal systems and policies (such as Jim Crow, redlining, the crack vs. cocaine legal disparities, and more). What that article doesn’t mention is the lineage of CRT, the “radical subjectivity” and “negative thinking” that informed it. Or the influence of the Hegelian-Marxist idea of oppressor and oppressed, which comes out in CRT as an examination of the distribution of power.
(Aside: I highly recommend the Wikipedia page on Critical Race Theory, which coherently lays out the main premises of the theory and is also well-sourced, linking directly to the work of the founders of CRT. I’m about to use the Wikipedia definition of intersectionality, but that definition links to the source material.)
In the case of the United States, CRT would classify white people (or simply “whiteness,” of which all white people are part) as the oppressor, and everyone else as oppressed. Whiteness and white people are the oppressor class because of slavery and Jim Crow, which codified race by skin color and gave superior rights to white people. (Part of the legal aspect of CRT is examining how giving superior rights to whites has reified a mindset of supremacy, what CRT calls “structural determinism.” Therefore, no matter what the law now says, white supremacy remains pervasive in our thought patterns.)
When applied to an interpretation of the law, negative thinking and oppressor/oppressed lenses make sense. It’s a way for lawyers and scholars to look at laws and their enforcement and ask, who is this benefitting? Who is this harming?
But with Crenshaw’s coinage of “intersectionality,” what once was a theory for looking at the law quite easily slipped into the realm of the personal. Consequently, the lens of oppressor/oppressed moved beyond an application to systems analysis to an application toward actual living people.
These direct applications go hand in hand with another aspect of CRT: a critique of Western liberalism itself (this tenet of CRT is the first listed on the Wikipedia page). Western liberalism is not left-leaning liberal politics; Western liberalism is a commitment to democracy, a belief that laws and rights are the best way to guarantee freedom—essentially any and everything U.S. Constitutional rights and amendments outline.
To look at our actual society of actual people as oppressor/oppressed is to move away from a rights-based society into a political-movement-based society…like Marxism and Communism.
Please hear me when I say I’m not specifically criticizing the notion of questioning liberalism, or the theories of Marxism or Communism. I am simply explaining that these ideas directly call into question the legitimacy of the ideas the United States is founded on, the ideas of rationality and democracy and liberalism that underpin the Constitution. What I’m pointing out are the foundational theories that CRT is based on, and how CRT logically manifests because of those underpinnings.
How Intersectionality has changed the game
Intersectional theory is
The examination of race, sex, class, national origin, and sexual orientation, and how their combination (i.e., their intersections) plays out in various settings, e.g., how the needs of a Latina female are different from those of a black male and whose needs are the ones promoted.
Again, this sounds good. This is an important and potentially beneficial way of looking at how our legal, economic, and education systems work and how they don’t work for everyone.
But what happens when an individual person engages first that radical subjectivity, that negative thinking, that requires you to view your economic and social circumstances as intolerable, no matter what those specific circumstances actually are, and then looks at their personal intersectionality?
Note: Radical subjectivity has been translated by CRT into “standpoint epistemology,” which means that “a member of a minority has an authority and ability to speak about racism that members of other racial groups do not have, and that this can expose the racial neutrality of law as false.”
We’ve seen through the actions and social media posts of professional activists how this can play out.
An activist can claim that their status (race, gender, sexual orientation) gives them special and unassailable knowledge that cannot be challenged. Anyone who does challenge a stance or a statement can easily be dismissed: they’re racist, or still ignorantly suffering from internalized racism.
One specific example: the mother of Tamir Rice has spoken out against Black Lives Matter activists, in this specific example the activist Shaun King, claiming activists have used her son’s story and image for fundraising and that they are personally benefitting from doing so. (source)
Shaun King responded (his full response is behind a paywall, but I’m linking to a Twitter thread that quoted and sourced it): “Ultimately, what I know is that a grieving mother like Samaria Rice has every right to be skeptical and hurt and suspicious and cynical. She wasn’t born that way, but this evil and unrelentingly racist country forced her into that corner. It’s our job to gracefully and patiently help her find her way out.” (emphasis mine)
From King’s standpoint, Samaria Rice has no agency. She’s a victim of an “evil and unrelentingly racist country” that has manipulated her very thoughts into disagreeing with, say, Shaun King. She is simply a member of an oppressed group; she can’t be held responsible for her incorrect thinking, nor can she have original thoughts or opinions—even though she’s talking about her own son and his death and what has happened in the aftermath.
True, Twitter takedowns and squabbles among activists don’t mean much for the wider community of Americans. But CRT is influencing media, the presentation of news, and it’s making its way into K-12 schools—and not merely to be used by education bureaucrats to assess the whole system and make it more inclusive and just. That would be a proper application of CRT: a lens through which education experts can assess the education system.
CRT in schools: is the theory taught? If not, what is?
In fact, CRT certainly must have already positively influenced what’s taught in schools: the vast majority of public schools today have a very different social studies curriculum than public schools did in the 1970s. (Although determining how much change has come from CRT and how much has come from other anti-racist work begun in the Civil Rights era is impossible to say.)
For instance, in the 90s in public schools, I learned about Harriett Tubman, Spanish missions, Native Americans and their way of life, the African fable of Anansi; I read books and essays by Phyllis Taylor, Richard Wright, Maya Angelou, W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Chinua Achebe, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison; I learned some basic Japanese and Spanish (my elementary and middle schools were roughly 30% white, 30% Black, 30% Asian and Pacific Islander, and the other 10% Latino and Native American); and these things are just of the top of my head.
If CRT is properly applied as a lens through which to view education, it makes perfect sense to make sure the curriculum I was taught in Los Angeles and DuPage County (Illinois) all the way back in the 1990s be taught at all schools in all states today But the proper application of CRT to educational systems is not what’s happening.
What’s happening is that CRT (thanks to the easily personalized intersectionality and standpoint theory) is being applied to actual human relationships: between teachers and students (which could potentially be helpful in teacher training sessions, especially if the teachers are white and the students are largely not), but also between students themselves.
An example: privilege walks. (sample source; this one does indicate it’s for college students, but it’s representative of the curricula and in an easy-to-link format) Privilege walk activities have participants stand shoulder to shoulder, then take a step forward or backward each time a statement is read. Examples of statements range from relatively benign (“If your family had health insurance take one step forward”) to potentially uncomfortable (“If you are a citizen of the United States take one step forward” and “If there were times in your life where you skipped a meal because there was no food in the house take one step backward”) to explicitly discriminatory (“If you are a white male take one step forward”). At the end of the questions, they look around and see where they all stand in relationship to one another.
In a setting of older teens or adults who are gathered by choice—such as at a church, or a social organization, or a voluntary cross-cultural meeting—a privilege walk activity could certainly be helpful and eye-opening. But answering some of those questions in a public setting requires vulnerability and trust—and a strong sense of self.
A K-12 school or a workplace is not an appropriate setting to do a privilege walk. An individual’s participation or choice not to would be noted. Just as “pleading the 5th” inherently carries with it the assumption of self-implication, choosing not to participate in a privilege walk would carry with it the assumption of privilege (not merely discomfort, or shyness, or unwanted vulnerability, or unexpressed gender/sexual truths, etc.)
Note: In researching my sources for this, I came across a social justice educator who offered up a much better idea for exploring the ideas of privilege, called Privilege for Sale. This activity demonstrates privilege without requiring personal disclosure or labeling in a group setting. Check it out.
Even more importantly, kids (and teens) have not yet reached a developmental stage where they have a strong sense of self. According to Erik Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development, school-aged kids are confronting the “psychosocial crises” of “competency vs. inferiority” and “identity vs. role confusion.”
If children are encouraged and reinforced for their initiative, they begin to feel industrious (competent) and feel confident in their ability to achieve goals. If this initiative is not encouraged, if it is restricted by parents or teachers, then the child begins to feel inferior, doubting his own abilities and therefore may not reach his or her potential. …
The fifth stage of Erik Erikson's theory of psychosocial development is identity vs. role confusion, and it occurs during adolescence, from about 12-18 years. During this stage, adolescents search for a sense of self and personal identity, through an intense exploration of personal values, beliefs, and goals.
This is a major stage of development where the child has to learn the roles he will occupy as an adult. It is during this stage that the adolescent will re-examine his identity and try to find out exactly who he or she is. (source) (emphasis mine)
During the school years, kids are undergoing a crucial development of self: am I competent? Am I capable? Am I worthy? They may literally be developmentally unable to maintain the kind of personal remove necessary to look around and see yourself at the front—or the back—of the privilege walk and not internalize the results as an assessment of who you are, not merely how you relate to the particular people in your particular social group at this specific moment.
A privilege walk-type activity was even facilitated in a group of third-graders at an elementary school in Cupertino (source Note: the reporter Chris Rufo is a controversial figure and uses inflammatory language in this article, such as the kids were “forced” to participate; I doubt they were “forced” any more than they were “forced” to do a math lesson, but the activity itself and the parents’ response is what I’m interested in here.)
Another example: the school curriculum developed by the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times 1619 Project. From what I understand, the 1619 Project is broad in scope and remarkably ambitious. However, it has a few key flaws that don’t serve to correct a purposefully obscured American history, but instead to retell a new version of history—with disregard for a few important facts.
The problems with the 1619 Project first came to my attention in a Politico article, written by historian Leslie M. Harris (who is a Black woman) who was hired as a fact-checker for the project. (source) She wrote,
On August 19 of last year I listened in stunned silence as Nikole Hannah-Jones, a reporter for the New York Times, repeated an idea that I had vigorously argued against with her fact-checker: that the patriots fought the American Revolution in large part to preserve slavery in North America. … I vigorously disputed the claim. Although slavery was certainly an issue in the American Revolution, the protection of slavery was not one of the main reasons the 13 Colonies went to war. …
Despite my advice, the Times published the incorrect statement about the American Revolution anyway, in Hannah-Jones’ introductory essay. In addition, the paper’s characterizations of slavery in early America reflected laws and practices more common in the antebellum era than in Colonial times, and did not accurately illustrate the varied experiences of the first generation of enslaved people that arrived in Virginia in 1619.
To compound the issue, Nikole Hannah-Jones (the journalist who spearheaded the project) has been dishonest about the controversial aspects of her claims and how those have since been reworded without any editorial notation (source). This is a big journalistic no-no: if you don’t openly announce edits, readers will be unaware of clarifications and corrections to what they’ve previously read.
Note: A further issue with Nikole Hannah-Jones has been the recent controversy around UNC-Chapel Hill refusing to offer her tenure. In fact, she was offered an enormous salary and a 5-year fixed term with evaluation for tenure at the end of that term. One reason tenure was not immediately included is that a wealthy donor—for whom the journalism school is named—raised concern about tying the university to the controversial 1619 project. (source) Hannah-Jones eventually got the tenure offer, which she then refused, instead taking a job at Howard University. She went on CBS This Morning to talk about it.: “It’s pretty clear that my tenure was not taken up because of political opposition, because of discriminatory views against my viewpoint, and I believe my race and my gender.” When Gayle King asks if she can think of any other reasons why they would not offer immediate tenure other than the 1619 Project, Hannah-Jones says no. But that one reason is the whole point: the 1619 Project, her pet project, has been called into question by historians.
I’m confident my kids can learn a lot from the 1619 Project if they happen to encounter it. I’m not even worried about a thought experiment in which 1619—when the first indentured Africans were brought to what is now the U.S.—is the nation’s founding date.
What concerns me about the 1619 Project is not particularly its content, but how scholarly pushback on those key claims has played out. The 1619 Project controversies are pitting classical liberal thought against CRT thought. The inability to criticize Nikole Hannah-Jones or even simply her work is straight-up CRT; her standpoint remains untouchable, her intersectionality renders her uniquely qualified while also being able to claim she is uniquely discriminated against. Even though she’s a wealthy Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at a legacy newspaper and now is an extremely well-paid academic.
If the academics who are qualified to discuss and debate these issues in higher-level education are being silenced because of the principles of CRT, what chance do younger/developing students have to ask questions or voice disagreement? Especially if their disagreements are wrong. Being unable to voice them or being shouted down as being racist will never lead to dialogue, where wrongs can be righted.
The argument about white kids and guilt
During his first presidential campaign, Barack Obama gave a speech in which he referred to slavery as America’s “original sin.” I agree. Dr. Ibram X. Kendi has taken it further, referring to racism as America’s original sin. Maybe so (although the construct of race, which is a tenet of CRT, was developed to justify and codify the already-existing institution of slavery in the U.S.). (source) But whether it’s slavery or racism is neither here nor there. Both are essential to understanding the modern-day United States.
But in that same opinion piece where he calls racism the original sin, Dr. Kendi proposes a constitutional amendment for a department of antiracism that does not answer to the other departments, which “would make unconstitutional racial inequity over a certain threshold, as well as racist ideas by public officials (with “racist ideas” and “public official” clearly defined).” By racial inequity he does not mean racial discrimination; he means unequal outcomes (it would not be enough, for example, to offer all students free college education; if Black students didn’t graduate at a rate proportional to white students, it would mean the education system is racist).
But he doesn’t go on to offer the definition of “racist ideas.” Those definitions are being hashed out right now, in this very moment.
In this moment, mathematics standards and even offering advanced math are being defined as racist. (source)
Punctuality and a strong work ethic are considered white supremacist. (source)
Journalists, scholars, writers, and other consequential thinkers of our time are speaking up for free speech and exchange of ideas—a classically liberal, American ideal. (source). And many are being ostracized for doing so.
People who dare to speak up and say “something seems off” feel compelled to leave the institutions meant to be pillars of Western liberalism. (source and source and source and source)
A practicing psychologist can lecture about “the psychopathic problem of the white mind”—in which she confesses fantasies about “unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way.”—and be enthusiastically received at the Yale Child Study Center (source), while a low-level staffer at Smith College feels she has no choice but to resign because of the persistent and personal rhetoric about white supremacy and white fragility (source).
This ideology seeps all the way down to baby board books. Dr. Kendi’s book Antiracist Baby, published June 2020, contains some really solid lessons, like “Antiracist baby doesn’t see certain groups as ‘better’ or ‘worse.’ Antiracist baby loves a world that is truly diverse.” But then along comes some troubling, nearly religious language: “Nothing disrupts racism more than when we confess the racist ideas that we sometimes express” and “Babies are taught to be racist or antiracist—there’s no neutrality” and “Antiracist babies are bred, not born” (reread that: antiracist babies are bred, not racist babies are bred; his statement is that babies are born racist. Go ahead and read the link below, where he claims babies as young as 2 imbue racist ideas.) [all emphasis mine]. Dr. Kendi insists that unless we teach toddlers and school kids antiracism (by his definition of “antiracism”) “if we wait till they’re 10 or 15, they may be a lost cause, like some of us adults.” (source)
In contrast, Kristen Bell’s children’s book, The World Needs More Purple People, also published in June 2020, received backlash and accusations of racism for including such radical statements as “Purple people look all sorts of ways” and “Purple is a magic color when red and blue work together” and “Purple work is the kind of work that’s done together to change something that needs changing.” (The images don’t portray literally purple people; the illustrations include a diverse group of kids.) The summation of a purple person: “You ask really great questions. You laugh a lot. You use your voice all the time. You are a really hard worker. And you are totally You!” Yeah. It’s essentially a word-for-word retelling of Birth of a Nation.
Bell’s response: ’When I say find sameness or common ground, I mean look at each other as human beings, right? We have an identifiable feature. We can tell we’re human beings, so you first start with someone’s humanity and that is step number one. And the second step is absorbing all these differences that create us, that provide the beauty within all of our human race and each individual culture. But I personally think you’ve got start with looking at everyone’s humanity and then you can say, ‘OK, now let’s see what makes you uniquely you and me uniquely me and figure out how we can do it together.’” (source)
Note: I chose these two books because they were published in the same month and on similar topics, and also were received quite differently, not because Kendi is Black and Bell is white.
These results are not a distortion of CRT. They are a feature. In a theory whose underpinnings are a purposeful stance of intolerance toward present circumstances (no matter what those circumstances actually are), in which Enlightenment rationality and even the idea of legal, rights-based equality are viewed with suspicion if not outright disdain, there can be no other logical expression of that theory than what we’re seeing today in the “culture wars.”
How this all plays out
This requirement to find one’s circumstances utterly intolerable, to seek out grievances, is how we have arrived at a moment when a bookseller apologizes for the “serious, violent incident” of “horrific harm” they perpetrated…by sending out in a subscription box a controversial book. I have no doubt the subject matter of the book is sensitive and potentially upsetting for transgender people. But the simple act of sending out the book among other items is…”violent?” Receiving the book in the mail caused “horrific harm”?
A lot of the media-hyped opposition to CRT revolves around right-wing conservatives not wanting white kids to feel “bad.” Which is so ridiculous, I don’t feel like spending time on it. (That anyone could expect teachers not only to be responsible for the material and how well the students absorb the material, but also for how students feel about the material, is asinine. I wasn’t great at physics; I felt like an idiot. That was not my teacher’s fault, nor was it the fault of physics itself.)
More than worrying how white kids might feel if they’re taught they are inescapably part of the oppressor/white supremacist class, more than worrying what being taught they are inescapably part of the oppressed class might do to the self-image and mental health of Black and brown kids, I’m worried what these types of lessons will to do kids and their relationships.
Kids are aware of differences in skin color, differences in culture. It’s okay to feel unsure or even uncomfortable around someone who is different. As the diversity and inclusion expert Verna Myers said on NPR in 2016,
Myers: I think if we could get people to understand that - hey, your comfort is real. Like, everybody wants to be in their comfort sometimes, right? It's just - what are you missing about other groups and ways of being? And can you remember that ultimately we are the same? Like, we are the same.
Interviewer: OK. So what do we know that is the most effective tool in getting people to not just tolerate each other, but respect and like each other?
Myers: Contact (laughter). (source)
The problem is when we assigning differing value to those differences. CRT does nothing to address the problem of value assignment. It describes value assignment, and some of its practitioners seek essentially to swap those historically assigned values in the name of equity, not eliminate them.
What, for example, would happen to the relationship between my middle child—a white boy—and his best friend—a Black girl—if they, who are 8 years old and heading into 3rd grade, had to parse their privilege in school? What would Oliver and Zoe—who spend hours together in the pool, who read together on Zoe’s porch, who sing and dance on our back deck, who whisper well past bedtime on walkie talkies that span the distance between our houses, who skateboard together in the driveway, who walk two houses down to visit Ms. Missy and look at her fish tanks—how would Oliver and Zoe look at each other if they participated in such an activity and found themselves several steps apart? Would that even accurately describe their relationship?
My point is not that Oliver might feel bad, or Zoe might feel inferior. My point is that Oliver-and-Zoe as a friendship would be changed, and probably not for the better. My point is that Oliver and Zoe’s relationship is likely more representative of kids today than are the still-present segregated bubbles of white and Black kids in the United States. (Coleman Hughes and Chloe Valdary, both born in the 90s, are doing work on this topic and seem to have a very different view than slightly older social justice activists do. I’ll be linking to them below.)
In our school district, we definitely have a couple of schools that—thanks to geography and school-choice initiatives—are overwhelmingly white. A couple are majority Black. That’s a big problem. That problem needs to be addressed. But the vast majority of our district’s schools are racially diverse. We need to pop those bubbles, not burn everything to the ground, including the real, measurable material and ideological progress we’ve achieved since the 60s.
My point is, shouldn’t we be building on the possibilities evident in friendships between kids like Oliver and Zoe instead of institutionalizing the negative thinking that requires everyone, of all races, to remain adrift in radical subjectivity?
What I am for
I know for certain there are some people who would label me racist and white supremacist for the arguments I’ve made against CRT. Because of the political climate, I feel compelled to explicitly state what I am for.
So here are a few of the liberal—not just Western liberal, but left-leaning liberal—values I am unequivocally for:
Equal rights and protections under the law for everyone; changes and amendments to the law when equal rights are not possible without them (a great, uplifting contemporary example: the 2015 Supreme Court decision on Obergefell v. Hodges for marriage equality)
The ability for every person to gender themselves however they wish, while also acknowledging the reality of biological sex
Support for families—traditional, single-parent, same-sex, grandparents, guardians (affordable quality childcare, robust public-school education, child tax credit, free birth control for all)
Healthcare as a human right
Equal opportunity for all (unlike Kendi, I do not believe that the only explanation for inequality of outcome is racism; there are so many factors that can lead to unequal outcomes, and racism is one of them)
A living wage for all working people (including people who are caregivers in their families)
Police institutions that have increased public accountability, including civilian oversight boards (I also believe any civilian on an oversight board must participate in regular police ride-alongs)
Affirmation of all types of competencies (a college degree or excelling in academics shouldn’t be the only types of competency that are appreciated, rewarded, valued, or compensated)
The kind of interpersonal calculus that CRT yields is not appropriate for or beneficial to kids who are still forming a personality. Kids don’t have the psychological capability of dealing with the repercussions of CRT. They don’t have the developmental capacity to untangle the illogical pretzels people like Robin DiAngelo (author of White Fragility) have served up. They don’t yet have the capacity to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to complex sociological issues.
Instead, I propose a different radical application of CRT. Adults, who remain in total control of the lives and wellbeing and education of children, must examine our privilege, and stop exerting our ideological and political power on the most vulnerable members of society: kids. Schools and teachers already bear the burden of too many social problems. Let’s not add another.
I highly recommend Coleman Hughes (Conversations with Coleman), Chloe Valdary (Theory of Enchantment), and Brittany King, and the website Free Black Thought for contemporary, non-sensational, reasonable, and thought-provoking commentary on our current cultural moment. Also, I mentioned at the beginning that I’ve been through the experience of feeling as though I must be missing something before, in a church setting. Matthew Yglesias (formerly of Vox) and John McWhorter (a linguist at Columbia) have made some interesting comparisons between the current political left and religion. Wesley Yang (author of The Souls of Yellow Folk) is at the beginning of an ongoing project chronicling what he’s called Successor Ideology. And just in case you were wondering, none of them are white.