One Karen’s Perspective on Our Whitewashed History
The attacks on critical race theory are only the latest chapter in the American fight against equality and justice
By Karen Gaffney
Photo credit: Nadia Snopek / Shutterstock.com
Not so very long ago, when we were children, my fellow white Gen Xers and I learned a whitewashed American history. That recent history can not only help explain white parents’ defensiveness about the teaching of race today, but also reveal the need for today’s children to learn basic concepts of critical race theory (CRT) in school.
Make no mistake: the uproar about CRT, complete with parents protesting at school board meetings, is the most recent manifestation of the decades-long backlash to the Civil Rights Movement. If it weren’t critical race theory, it would have been something else, because the anti-CRT movement is not really about CRT, which is a form of scholarship mostly taught in law and graduate school.
But complex legal scholarship is not being taught to children, just like scholarship from any advanced field of study is not taught to children. So why the hostility and panic about CRT?
Because of the idea, entrenched in conservatism for decades, that even talking about race is both racist and unfair to white people.
We are now more than five decades past the civil rights era, yet we still cannot confront our country’s history of racism and the persistence of racism today because many white people find such ideas to be a threat, in and of themselves. However, just the opposite could be true: learning about race can be liberating, and help white people take positive steps towards a stronger and more just society.
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