Critical Race Theory

It’s time to have an honest conversation

It’s time to have an honest conversation about “Critical Race Theory”.

It is a term that throws everyone into a fit of rage. Right wingers hate it, and left wingers pretend they don’t know what it is in the context of schools.

In fact, the NJ Public Education Coalition – a far left wing organization which has taken it upon itself to save our children from, well, us – has an entire page dedicated to “dispelling the myths about CRT in schools.”

Ok, so let’s do it. As a multi-racial American (Dominican and Irish), this subject is of particular interest to me, in particular because of the typically decidedly white liberal slant of the folks usually espousing this nonsense. Let’s take their page paragraph by paragraph:

This paragraph starts off true – that is indeed where CRT started. If you are interested, look up Kimberle Crenshaw, who coined the term.

Where the intellectual dishonesty starts is what follows. What has happened – even if folks may not want to admit it - is that the teachings of CRT have become an ideology – let’s call it “new age racial theory”, to get away from the CRT term.

Those who follow New Age Racial Theory do not believe in eliminating racism by simply not being racist yourself, and teaching your children not to be. They believe that you need to take an active approach to dismantling the racist systems that you are a part of, regardless of whether that perceived racism is rooted in anything tangible other than it perhaps was created in a time before CRT existed. You don’t have to take my word for it – the highlighted passage above proudly shown on the NJPEC literally says it.

This ideology is problematic not for its goals – we all want racism eliminated, myself, as a bi-racial American, certainly included. The problem is its methods. Like Communism, which desires workers rights by destroying the foundations of any system it deems as capitalistic, this new-wave racial theory desires racial equity by dismantling any system that it deems as “rooted in white supremacy” – which, in the eyes of many of these people, is anything that was built by the United States before 2008. This includes our school systems. Which leads to the next section…

No, teachers are not pulling up a CRT curriculum on Google and teaching that to your kids. This needs to be made clear. Nowhere in the curriculum is “CRT” as a subject being taught in the way it is in colleges. Let’s put that to rest. This is where everyone gets tripped up, and where the left is so easily able to dismiss our arguments.

That doesn’t mean, however, that the New Wave Racial Ideology espoused is not impacting how our children learn today. This is where the intellectual dishonesty comes into play, and where we need better tools to describe what is happening. In the real world, the public schools are almost exclusively run by those following the New Age Racial Theory ideology.  

A real-world example of this is the false equivalence here about “teaching full history”. Dare I say that not a single person reading this was not taught the examples listed in this paragraph. Let’s take them one by one:

• Decimation of Native Americans – please comment below if you were entirely oblivious to the fact that the Native American were unfortunately eradicated by a combination of disease and European (and later, yes, American) massacres. I remember vividly being taught about Andrew Jackson dismissing the US Supreme Court and engaging in the Trail of Tears despite their ruling. “Warts and all” indeed.

• World War II Japanese Internment Camps – Again, please comment below if you have never heard of this. Certainly the textbooks I had in middle school in the 2000s included vivid pictures of these horrible camps.

• “All of the mistakes of our forefathers”, hopefully the website author is including every forefather in history, because the entirety of human civilization is far more warts than not. Human history is the story of people doing the best of what they can – and others trying to stop the best from being achieved. US history is no different. Our history of racism and slavery for example is paralleled by a history of a robust and equally militant abolitionist movement. Both of those are American truths, and both of those have been taught at least as long as I have been alive.

So what does “teaching the full history” mean, given the examples listed were already taught? This is the question you need to ask yourself when you listen to these people speak, given their stated desire to uproot our foundational systems.  

This is my favorite part of the website, where we are told “CRT isn’t what we want taught but IF IT WAS – here is why it is still great.” Where I grew up, that is called pissing in my hand and calling it rain.

To their actual point, I do not want my child believing that the systems that exist – the ones that put food on this Dominican-American’s table, that brought my Abuela and family here from the DR decades ago – are the enemy. This is the exact problem I have always had with New Age Racial Theory. I am mixed race (I myself am 20% African by DNA, 3% Native American), and I love 99% of what these systems have created.

The key is not to demonize the systems, it is to democratize them. African Americans, waves of immigrants over the centuries, have always wanted an equal shot at the American Dream, not to destroy the possibility of achieving it at all.

Again, the same as Truth 1, it is interesting that they are defending something they pretend has nothing to do with the public schools. Nonetheless, this is a “moot truth” as it were – all of the things they are talking about are already taught in schools and have been since before I was born. If kids are being made to feel guilty, it isn’t because of our history, but the way things are being taught, which could be different than years past due to the hiring of ideologues.

Last but not least, “Truth 4”, where they walk us through Yale’s experts telling us that children can see colors. Yet again, they highlight that despite Point 1, they are indeed desiring to use the schools to “become an extension of the education about race that the children should get at home”.

This is an area where I have personal expertise, with my mixed background exposing me to different races from a young age. Children absolutely see color, and our job as parents is to teach them that colors do not matter, not that colors do matter, and it is their job to fix it. The reality of adult life may not match that experience, and that is an adult problem to fix.

Being mixed, something that was clear to me at a young age when navigating relatives of vastly different skin colors is that you do not excise racism from society with a scalpel, aimed with the pseudo-intellectualism of a University lens – no, instead, you smother racism haphazardly with love. You teach children to love each other, that colors don’t matter, and you will end up with a society that reflects that.

The fact that “many white parents are uncomfortable with the discussion of race” is evident, as it ever was, on this website – except it is the guilt-ridden liberal Whites whose viewpoints exemplify this fact, not us.

The New Jersey Public Education Coalition decries on their website that:

“The radical right school board takeover initiative and strategy comes from a place of fear that schools are being taken over by the government and controlled by the unions in an attempt to push a liberal agenda to indoctrinate and “groom” children. But it also comes with a collective goal of dismantling public education.”

I have no desire to indoctrinate anyone or dismantle public education, of which I am a product of, but based on their own write up… apparently they do – despite their insistence to the contrary.