Critical Race Theory: A fuss worth fighting for
Graphics by Vanessa Vergara
After closing the public comment section, a school board meeting In Virginia broke out into a storm of arrests, fights, chants, and bolsters of the national anthem. The meeting had been held by the state’s Loudoun County School Board to discuss the use of transgender students’ pronouns, but sharply turned into a debacle surrounding Critical Race Theory, a topic that has been under great scrutiny across the nation.
Bills have been proposed since February to make teaching Critical Race Theory, or CRT, illegal. As of mid-June 2020, 5 states have passed bills banning critical race theory from K-12 public schools, and 22 states have bills underway to adopt similar legislation. Proponents of the bills argue that teaching critical race theory utilizes reverse racism, attacks our nation’s history, and makes white students feel ashamed of their privilege — privilege which these bills seek to deny.
Critical Race Theory, or CRT, has gained a large spotlight in the news over the past few months. Emerging in the 1970s from the ashes of the Civil Rights Movement, CRT encapsulates any teaching on how racism has shaped public policy, inequity, and, in many ways, overall American life.
CRT does not seek to highlight the problematic nature of certain ideologies, but rather how some legislation is inherently rooted in racial beliefs and how their outcomes have impacted communities of color. By examining these outcomes, we inch students and the public at-large closer and closer to rectification, and hopefully, reparations.
CRT is inherently a catch-all term for the teaching of any history, government, activism, or sociology that exposes how legislation has impacted race. As a country founded on stolen land and the labors of slavery, so many of our history lessons are naturally chained to race. As a consequence, teachings surrounding slavery, the Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement, and nearly every era in our nation’s history are under threat and their erasure is looming over students of color.
Graphics by Vanessa Vergara
Allowing CRT to be taught assists in ensuring that schools will not be able to censor or neglect teachings on how our nation has systematically discriminated against people of color, implementing and upholding institutions that disproportionately uplift white people, and harm BIPOC. It validates the hardships and discrimination thrown unto communities of color, and urges us one step closer to letting students of color know that their iniquity is not only recognized, but that it does not have to be tolerated.
As bills banning the teaching of critical race theory across the nation go into effect, our national hypocrisy becomes increasingly apparent and comical. On June 16th, the Senate unanimously passed a bill establishing June 19th as Juneteenth National Independence Day, a holiday recognizing the abolishment of slavery in the United States. It then passed through the House with a 415-14 vote.
Juneteenth is incredibly significant and must be nationally recognized, but when it is passed by legislators who simultaneously seek to ban any mention of the impacts of slavery, it is nothing more than an empty gesture. It parallels the emptiness of painting “Black Lives Matter” across a main street in Los Angeles, a city wrought with inequity and LAPD’s disproportionate brutality against Black folks.
If we allow such bills banning teachings of race to progress, we are seemingly washing away our own sins, sins which have cost the lives and equality of far too many Americans.
Allowing CRT a space in K-12 curriculum sends a message to students saying that the acts of our government cannot go unrecognized, whether they were two hundred years ago or today.
Exposing the acts of our nation in the classroom is the first step of many and is equally crucial in equipping a generation of thinkers with the tools to call out our representatives and make clear that their actions have deeply rooted, lasting consequences.
Graphics by Vanessa Vergara