My Take on the Critical Race Theory Controversy in Schools

I met an extremely lovely person last night named Laura who said she'd read my stuff and though I normally post to Medium and Patreon these days, I thought I'd add one of my more complex pieces on critical race theory to give her (and whatever audience I have left here) some fuel for banter. 

While I have been vocal of wokeness (which I would define as the overapplication of critical race theory as a weapon), the early 2000s version of Orrin Konheim was an enthusiast of critical race theory.

I went to the University of Mary Washington for two years and everything from English 101 to Urban Geography to Film Studies had elements of CRT in them. One of the big four civil rights figures (Congress of Racial Equality co-founder), James Farmer, had a teaching post at Mary Washington when he died and the James Farmer Multicultural Institute bought over several speakers and so I heard Julian Bond and Roger Wilkins. I gobbled all of these lessons up and enjoyed talking about generational wealth and redlining to my peers.

But times have changed. Somewhere around 2015, pop culture writers and twitter activists felt that the easiest way to see the world and ways to fix it through the narrow dichotomy of racist or not racist. What’s more they thrive off oversimplification and have built a cottage industry around exploiting racial grievance.

Despite all that, I can more reasonably make conclusions on where I feel CRT is used tenuously after having studied it in the first place. I also have the credibility to argue against its overuse having known where the bounds are.

The idea of outlawing it for cheap political points with an ignorant base as the Republican party is doing in Texas and Florida can be just as bad. The problem is that Governors Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott are groveling yes men to Trumpism which discredits any sincerity they have might have in the present and reaffirms the Left’s position that these movements are racist.

But that doesn’t mean that every criticism of Critical Race Theory in schools is invalid. In a Seth Meyers monologue, the late night show host was taking down Senator Ted Cruz’s anti-CRT race theory rant with the defense that CRT was only taught at the college levels so therefore the idea that CRT is invading secondary schools is a classic strawman theory. In other words, Ted Cruz is an imbecile who’s arguing against something that doesn’t exist. I completely agree with the first part that Cruz’s continued presence in Congress is an insult to democracy. However, the latter point fits the (often true) narrative of how the Right often takes up dumb crusades against bogeyman (socialism, the unborn, rock lyrics). But in this case, the left is wrong because if we didn’t teach CRT in secondary schools than there wouldn’t be any battle over these bills in the first place.

This also comes eerily close to the lack of any productive discourse about cancel culture that can be had when someone on the left says “Cancel Culture isn’t real.” Let’s start by acknowledging something exists before we can tackle the questions over whether it’s a good or bad thing.

What’s also interesting to note is that if you look at the Idaho bill, it’s not rallying against CRT at all despite Wonkette’s equally spurrious argument.

Take a look at the text:

That individuals should be adversely treated on the basis of their sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin.

That individuals, by virtue of sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin, are inherently responsible for actions committed in the past by other members of the same sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin

The new Idaho law is simply against people misusing CRT in the wrong ways. Are any of the proponents of CRT wanting to use critical race theory to make white students feel inferior to their classmates or rack them with guilt over their status? In principle, CRT isn’t designed to do these things but there are certainly many advocates of it who do use it in those ways, so I fail to see any red flags here.

Furthermore, the Left is calling bogeymen of their own when they act like the entire history curriculum is a white supremacy vehicle. There is no way to pass the AP US history or history SOLs without being aware of the horrors of slavery, the treaties we broke with the Indians, and Japanese internment camps.

Besides, to add more content about the evils of slavery would probably detract from other chapters in what is already a tight schedule. If proponents of critical race theory want to add more content about inequality to the curriculum, I’m not opposed.

However, it does seem that a lot of the media that has been coming out that focus on the black experience does tell us how we should be emotionally processing our nation’s sins, and I feel like some proponents of CRT feel that the job of infusing content about inequality in our country in lesson plans is only complete if we get kids angry that slavery happened.

In the same manner that I lose respect for films that are too preachy about the historic or modern picture they present, the point of history education (or at least good history education) isn’t to get kids emotionally angry about a tragedy like slavery. To simply present what happened accurately will do the job without embellishment or commentary.