Critical Race Theory: What They Don’t Want Your Kids to Know
Why a Forty-Year Old Policy is Under Attack
Depending on who you ask, you’ll get two contrary definitions of what Critical Race Theory (CRT) is. The previously accepted definition is that racism isn’t just individual bias or prejudice but is also embedded in legal systems and policies. The theory says that racism is part of everyday life, so people — white or nonwhite — who don’t intend to be racist can nevertheless make choices that fuel racism. Critics have a different view. They think the theory advocates discriminating against white people to achieve equality. They blame Critical Race Theory for the existence of Black Lives Matter, LGTBQ clubs in high schools, diversity training, and ethnic studies programs. They feel CRT is an excuse to make white people feel bad for being white.
“The woke class wants to teach kids to hate each other, rather than teaching them how to read, but we will not let them bring nonsense ideology into Florida’s schools. As the Governor of Florida, I love this state, and I love my country. I find it unthinkable that there are other people in positions of leadership in the federal government who believe that we should teach kids to hate our country. We will not stand for it here in Florida. I’m proud that we are taking action today to ensure our state continues to have the greatest educational system in the nation.” — Governor Ron DeSantis
In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis banned the teaching of CRT in Florida public schools. In a unanimous vote, the Florida Board of Education pushed through a rule that DeSantis supported that defines what may and may not be taught.
“Instruction on the required topics must be factual and objective and may not suppress or distort significant historical events, such as the Holocaust, and may not define American history as something other than the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.”
Let’s start with the Declaration of Independence, whose principles DeSantis says should be the basis of our history. It was penned in 1776, over two hundred years after the first enslaved people landed in Saint Augustine, Florida, in 1565 and more than one hundred fifty years after enslaved people were brought to Hampton, Virginia, in 1619. That’s a lot of history and principles to ignore, Mr. DeSantis.
The first draft of the Declaration of Independence was written by Thomas Jefferson, who gave us the words “that all men are created equal.” Lofty words, which he never meant, as evidenced in his own life. Jefferson enslaved over six hundred Black men, women, and children in his lifetime. Weren’t they created equal? He wasn’t the benevolent master he was made out to be by historians like Edwin Betts, who covered up the beatings of young boys at his nailery at his Monticello palace, also built by enslaved people.
That isn’t nearly the worst. Jefferson orchestrated a twenty-year plan to end the international slave trade so that he and other Virginia plantation owners could reap higher profits from the domestic slaves they forcibly bred to increase numbers. In case that was unclear, forcibly bred meant rape and matching of “bucks” and “breeders” to get the largest and most valuable children to sell in the slave markets. In the middle of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson unknowingly made a case for a Black revolution should there be no change. The need for change is why education can’t just teach to support the status quo and begin with the truth instead of the myths currently offered.
“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” Thomas Jefferson
At the time of this writing, twenty states have introduced legislation to curtail teaching Critical Race Theory, with four, Florida, Idaho, Oklahoma, and Tennessee, already passing laws to prevent teaching various aspects. They feel that children are being indoctrinated to believe that white people should be ashamed of being white and that teaching about systemic racism is divisive. They have no concern about the existence of systemic racism, just the teaching and talking about it lest someone actually insist on doing something about it. It is no coincidence that the attacks on CRT ramped up after millions of white people joined Black people across the country in protesting the murder of George Floyd. Too many white people have begun to see the systemic racism in policing, and they needed to change the narrative back to the status quo.
What isn’t being said about Critical Race Theory, and how much is being left out? Our education system has never told us, and under these proposed and new laws never will, the worst parts of American history and the residual effects of its laws and policies. Is it a coincidence that Oklahoma is one of the states blocking CRT when information about the Black Wall Street massacre is becoming widespread? They haven’t taught it in Oklahoma public schools, so why let it happen now? It’s divisive.
Tennessee is where the Ku Klux Klan began. Officials would rather you think of Pulaski, Tennessee, as the “Wild Turkey Capital of Tennessee” instead of the site where the Ku Klux Klan was founded. If they taught it, one might learn that the Klan, like one other group, partially evolved from slave patrols. That other group is the police. In fairness to the police, all departments didn’t evolve from slave patrols; some were formed to control immigrants other than enslaved people, which is a distinction without a difference. Once you understand that, and that police forces then and now have been infiltrated with the Klan and other white nationalist organizations. One might see them differently and require change.
When you think of Idaho, potatoes might come to mind before the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacists. Maybe that’s the way they want to keep things and why they’re on the leading edge of banning CRT. However, they have a long history of being a Confederate refuge and of racist behavior. Florida (where I live) led the country in its rate of lynchings during the Jim Crow era. Whole communities like Rosewood and Ocoee saw their Black populations wiped out, one after two Black men tried to vote. Florida was one of the last areas to implement Brown v Board of Education requirements, utilizing more “deliberate speed’ than most. Florida wants you to think of Disney World, beaches, and the Space Coast, rather than its racist past/present.
Let’s delve a little deeper into five aspects of what CRT might teach if fearful politicians didn’t get in the way:
The Justice System
I’ve already mentioned that the police evolved from slave patrols and other parts of the country, the desire to control immigrants. There is another source of private cops who white, rich people employed to protect their assets like warehouses and docks. The first private cops proved to be rather unreliable, whether they be drunkards or no-shows, which caused the white, rich people to support the formation of police forces. In some cases, they pit one set of immigrants (typically the Irish) against the rest to maintain control.
There are other parts of the justice system, including the courts. The first Supreme Court Justice, John Jay, enslaved people, but he was enlightened in comparison to his fellow justices. He advocated gradual manumission of the enslaved. Jay released several of those he enslaved during his lifetime and set the stage for eliminating enslavement in the state of New York. His brethren weren’t nearly as enlightened and gave us rulings like Dred Scott v Sanford and Plessy v Ferguson which combined said even free Black people couldn’t be American citizens, and, Black people have no rights which the court is bound to honor. The selection process by which we get Supreme Court Justices and federal judges, where they must be nominated and then confirmed by a Judiciary committee and the full Senate, which have never been anything other than a majority of rich, white men. The result in the present is decisions like Citizens United, which tilts the election process further toward white people that can flood elections with anonymous money, and the gutting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which allows for all the current voter suppression laws being passed.
The Education System
The first official laws in America regarding Black people and education were to keep them from learning to read and write. Most of the very first Africans to reach American soil were not enslaved but indentured servants. Theoretically, the same as European indentured servants but for those who couldn’t read or write English. They were susceptible to not having their contracts honored or if found guilty of any infraction, having their service extended throughout their lifetime.
In 1676, a thing happened that changed indentured service forever; a man named Nathan Bacon was upset with the Virginia Governor who wasn’t doing enough in his mind to rid the area of the several tribes of Native Americans. Governor Berkeley’s view was that force might unite the tribes and bring about an unwanted war. So Bacon gathered up his white and Black indentured servants and his Black enslaved people (who were becoming an economical alternative to indentured servants). He not only attacked the various tribes and confiscated land, but Bacon burned down Jamestown, which was then the capital of Virginia. The fear that indentured servants (that outnumbered free white landowners throughout the Southern colonies) could revolt caused plantation owners to reject indentured servants and replace the labor almost in full with African enslaved people. By 1776, the percentage of indentured servants in the nation had dropped to 2%.
With the conversion of Black people from indentured service to enslavement came new laws. Fourteen years earlier, Virginia was the first of the colonies to pass Partus Sequitur Ventrum laws that specified that the child’s birth line followed its mother. This meant that children of enslaved people were enslaved and that their fathers bore no responsibility for the children. This was different from traditional British law, where the children followed the father’s bloodline and basically made rape legal and without even financial responsibility. Before Bacon’s Rebellion, even those enslaved children were allowed to be educated, as were the free Black men and women in America who at that time made up between ten to twenty percent of the Black population. However, after Bacon’s Rebellion, the slave codes, born out of fear of rebellion, forbid that Black people be taught to read or write upon penalty of death. The fear of rebellion influenced every policy on Black people for the next two hundred years, well after enslavement and some policies into the present.
After the Civil War, the government realized its responsibility to do more for educating those it had previously denied an education (except in the trades where they learned to do the work that built the nation). White people also didn’t want to be educated alongside Black people, so a separate set of schools was established, some of which started before the war, mostly started by religious institutions. Initially, there wasn’t even the pretense of “separate but equal,” that sham came later in 1896 when Plessy v Ferguson allowed state-sponsored segregation based on the theory of equal education. Of course, nothing of the sort existed.
In a 1934–36 report by the Florida Superintendent of Public Instruction, the value of “white school property” in the state was $70,543,000, while the value of African-American school property was $4,900,000. The report says that “in a few south Florida counties and most north Florida counties, many Negro schools are housed in churches, shacks, and lodges, and have no toilets, water supply, desks, blackboards, etc. Florida counties used Black schools to get funding and then invested little or nothing in them.
Although the Supreme Court in 1954 found in Brown v Board of Education that segregated schools were unconstitutional.They said integration should be implemented “with all deliberate speed,” which translates to “take as long as you like,” which is what they did. Many other lawsuits occurred to force schools to desegregate in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 played a major role, and eventually, the government entered into consent decrees with school districts to force them to desegregate and monitor their progress. Some of those consent decrees are still in effect today. Defacto segregated schools still exist in locales as diverse as Mississippi and New York.
Education in America, particularly the funding of education, has always demonstrated racial bias. Maryland just settled a lawsuit for $577 million with its historically Black colleges to resolve its chronic underfunding and diverting of federal funds to primary white institutions. This underfunding has occurred across the nation and at every grade level. There are ongoing efforts to remove funding from the public school systems and send it to private and charter schools. Systemic racism isn’t a thing of the past but is ever-present. There’s a reason Governors like DeSantis don’t want CRT taught; it might expose current racism in their own states.
Health Care
Among the things those against teaching CRT don’t wish taught is how Black people in America were experimented on in ways reminiscent of Nazi Germany. In Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, NY, there stands a statue of Dr. J. Marion Sims. Sims was known as a pioneer in surgery and often referred to as “the father of modern-day gynecology.” Less known is that he developed his expertise by experimenting on slaves named Lucy, Anarcha, and Betsey. The statue had resided in Central Park in New York for decades, across from the New York Academy of Medicine, until it was removed after complaints in 2018. A portrait of Sims and his colleagues named, Medical Giants of Alabama” hung over a fireplace in the University of Alabama-Birmingham Center for Advanced Medical Studies until its removal in 2006.
Memorials to Sims still exist in Montgomery, Alabama, and South Carolina. Sims performed multiple surgeries on the same patients, mostly without anesthesia, while seeking a surgical cure for vesicovaginal fistula and related disorders. He had the permission of the slave’s owners and himself said, “They were willing and had no better option.” However, their “willingness” is contradicted by his own writing in which he described Lucy in particular as being in so much pain that she “wanted to die!” Sims performed thirty surgeries on Anarcha before declaring her “cured.”
There is general knowledge of the medical experimentation that took place in Nazi Germany on prisoners. Less so of the centuries-long practice of experimenting on Black patients, during and after slavery, without informed consent. Slaves were an investment; the most valued weren’t the strong bucks who could perform the most work but the “breeders” who could produce a good quantity and quality of slaves without dying in the process. President Thomas Jefferson, a Virginia slaveholder who owned over 600 slaves during his lifetime, wrote, “ a child raised every 2 years is of more profit than the crop of the best laboring man. The labor of a breeding woman is of no object; it is not their labor, but then increase which as the first consideration with us.” Like any investments, concern about slave health existed to ensure their continued contribution.
Rarely noted in American history is the existence of slave hospitals, though the term hospital is an exaggeration. Slave hospitals were most likely a small cabin, dirty, and ill-supplied. Their objective equal parts declaring slaves fit to return to work and without serious injury and those who could not return them to labor as soon as possible. Historians had noted the occasional rogue physician that had experimented on enslaved people without consent. It took scouring of the medical journals to realize that the most-respected doctors were using slaves to practice on. The Baltimore Medical and Surgical Journal and Western and Southern Medical Recorder were filled with reports of surgical experiments to treat congenital disabilities, tumors, and injuries, without anesthesia and in non-sterile environments. Needless to say, without consent.
The Tuskegee experiments are the one event in history involving Black healthcare that got widespread coverage. Black patients were injected with syphilis and were observed while they suffered, often went blind, and died of the disease, all without treatment or consent. Less known is a similar treatment of Terra Haute, Indiana prisoners, although it is claimed they consented. Once those activities were discovered, and the public rejected them. Some of the same doctors conducted similar research in Guatemala on a slightly less dark population.
Fast forward to the present; Black people suffer from several after-effects from a healthcare system structured to work against them—less access to doctors, hospitals, medical insurance, and notably vaccines. Black people have a lower life expectancy than white people because of many contributing factors related to education, nutrition, and access to health care, all of which have a basis in systemic racism.
Housing Discrimination and Generational Wealth
The G.I. Bill is often credited with helping form the middle class in America. Veterans were given the ability to get 100% financing via VA Loans, which ultimately allowed families to acquire generational wealth through the increase in the value of their homes. Black people were shut out of the G.I. Bill, which greatly added to the wealth disparity between the races.
Similarly, FHA loans require a minimum of 3.5% down payment, which allows a large percentage of first-time buyers to enter the market. Black people could not use FHA loans to buy into most new subdivisions or existing “white” neighborhoods. This was official government policy; the federal government invented redlining and used maps created by the Home Owners Loan Corp. to decide where it was safe to insure mortgages. If Black people lived in the area or nearby, the neighborhood was deemed unfit to qualify for an FHA mortgage. When the Fair Housing Act of 1968 officially ended redlining and “steering,” which was realtors pointing their Black clients to Black neighborhoods and white clients to white ones, it was the end on paper of federally sponsored segregation.
Don’t look for any of this to be taught in classrooms anymore, not that it ever has been. There have been programs established in many states designed to help first-time homebuyers, including minorities. Unfortunately, every time an individual state, county, or city that offers such programs faces a shortfall, those programs funds are typically the first to be raided or depleted. Homeownership has been one of the traditional paths for families to achieve wealth, and for Black people, it has been systemically limited or denied.
History
Governor DeSantis called for instruction to be “factual and objective.” Truthfully, those opposing CRT have no interest in the truth; they can’t handle the truth. Their goal is to promote the myth of American Exceptionalism (White Exceptionalism), the wisdom of the Founding Fathers, and to reinforce and justify the treatment of minorities throughout American History. They want you to believe George Washington had wooden teeth and never told a lie. His dentures were made of teeth pulled from enslaved people, and he lied all the time, as do most politicians. It’s hard to find schools teaching in-depth about Black Wall Street, the Ocoee Massacre, Rosewood, and the Trail of Tears. CRT opponents don’t want schools to teach anything that would make white people look bad or feel guilty. Leaving out things that might do that would require erasing most of American history.
The truth is that opponents of Critical Race Theory are perpetrating a scam. They are trying to appeal to their base of voters by raising the specter of teaching anti-whiteness and discrimination against white people. Maybe they’ve thought far enough ahead to plant a seed against reparations, or they could have been scared into backing this belief by the millions of white protesters across the country rallying against police violence in a way never before seen. It could be as simple as attempting to make white people feel disrespected and like their only option is to vote for the party of white people. I wish I could take credit for something I heard on the radio today. “There are more laws now against teaching Cultural Race Theory than schools are teaching it.” America has never come close to accurately teaching about its racial past. Some are trying to ensure America never does. Based on history, they didn’t have anything to worry about.
Very informative. There’s always something new to learn about racism in the US. The purpose of anti-racism education is not to make Whites feel shame or guilt. It’s to make them feel empathy, compassion, and a desire to help make things better.
It is history, not taught in elementary, middle and high schools, and rarely taught in college but as an eolective. It became an issue because some people needed something to be against.