Critical Race Theory is scaring some white people into a panic.
This is not a complicated issue. In a few words, CRT makes the case that you cannot fully tell the story of this country without considering the impact of systemic racism in government and politics, on the fact that the nation’s economy was established on 246 years of slave labor, and that racial bias has been on full display in public education, in all forms of the media, in the criminal justice system, in workplaces across the country, and even in the way the country has conducted its foreign policy.
The United States has consistently operated from an assumption of white supremacy in terms of who can and should be the primary beneficiaries of the resources and privileges of this country. Now that demographic changes are resulting in whites in the United States becoming a minority in the population, it seems that desperation has taken hold among many white people; especially those who embrace the current Make America Great Again rhetoric.
CRT insists that the history of the United States cannot be fully told unless it includes the story of 1619 and the establishment of slavery in this country that gave way to Jim Crow laws, legalized segregation, lynch mob justice, and the way in which that history has fueled the current brutalization of black bodies by police officers and the rush by many state legislatures today to impose race-based voter restriction laws.
The United States has consistently operated from an assumption of white supremacy in terms of who can and should be the primary beneficiaries of the resources and privileges of this country.
To begin our nation’s story in 1776 or 1787, as the so-called 1776 Project would prefer, is to ignore the fact that concessions to slavery were written into the U.S. Constitution, and that many of those who signed both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were either slaveholders themselves, or were complicit in the creation of a country that allowed the enslavement of African Americans, attempted the near extermination of Native Americans, and even waited 133 years before granting voting rights to women.
Several state legislatures have banned teaching CRT or the 1619 Project in all state-funded schools and colleges, because it might make some white people uncomfortable by hearing the truth of U.S. history. That is a form of white privilege that is preventing this country from overcoming its tragic past. Black and brown people have been made far more than “uncomfortable” over the last 234 years. We have suffered injury, indignity, and insult at every turn. This story must be told!
I write this reflection on the 100th anniversary of the destruction of the Greenwood community in Tulsa, Oklahoma when a white mob burned and bombed and massacred an entire black community. That was NOT an isolated event over the history of this country. CRT challenges the country to face up to this history whether or not it makes some white people “uncomfortable.”
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free!
• • •• • •
RELATED:
