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Look, I get it. Fighting racism is uncomfortable and sometimes the bigotry is so loud we wonder if speaking up will accomplish anything. It can feel like sticking your finger in a dam, but it’s better than opening the floodgates. So, you’re not going to throw away your shot, right? Realistically, we aren’t likely to convince the most extreme opponents of Critical Race Theory (CRT) to march alongside us any time soon. But there’s a whole faction of people in the middle who we might reach. At the very least, we might get them thinking, and it’s worth showing those who already agree with us that they aren’t alone. There’s also something to be said for making it clear to the opposition that we aren’t going to just roll over.
Now, before we get to the good stuff, let’s talk about what CRT is. A lot of people—on both sides of the political spectrum—talking about CRT lately have no idea what it actually is. It’s a legal theory from the 1970s—with roots in decades of previous scholarship—that has since been adapted for use in various academic disciplines. At the risk of sounding reductive, CRT is basically a mode for examining how cultural perceptions of race and racism (especially systemic racism) affect people and the ways in which they express themselves. There’s more to it than that, but you get the gist. It’s taught in law schools and graduate programs, occasionally in undergraduate courses, and pretty much never in K-12 education. It is not the same as antiracism, nor is it the same as Culturally Responsive Teaching (the other CRT). Has Critical Race Theory influenced antiracism and Culturally Responsive Teaching? Sure! But each one has a different function and it’s reductive to conflate them. So how did this mainstream discussion of CRT escalate so quickly? Heck, how did it happen at all?
Welp, sadly for our democracy, it’s easier to frighten than it is to educate. In a textbook, white-supremacist maneuver, certain interested parties decided antiracism would sound a lot scarier if they associated it with intellectualism, thereby harnessing the current wave of anti-intellectualism and riding it all the way back to sometime around 1619. So, they latched onto a term: Critical Race Theory. These words are straightforward enough to seem like a good synonym for “antiracism,” but they refer to a set of ideas erudite enough that most wouldn’t immediately recognize their bastardization of it into a straw man. Now, instead of admitting that one is simply anti-antiracism (aka racist), people can get all gussied up in 5-dollar words and pretend they know something about ‘theories and such’ that the rest of us don’t. But there’s the key… this whole scheme depends on us not knowing any better. And, of course, we do know better.
Ok, now that we’ve gotten that over with, here are some go-to retorts:
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1. No one is asking schools to teach white childre
to hate themselves. We’re asking schools to teach accurate information so all children will learn to love one another.
2. Critical Race Theory isn’t about making individuals feel guilty. It’s about empowering them to change systems that hurt people.
3. True patriotism is dedication to solving the problems that plague our nation, not telling ourselves fairy tales and letting injustices remain.
4. The world is becoming increasingly diverse. Do you really want our nation’s children to be unprepared to interact with people who differ from them?
5. How can we avoid repeating mistakes if we don’t learn from our history? You aren’t ok with past injustices recurring in the future, are you?
6. DEI programs and antiracism are not the same as CRT. Because CRT isn’t part of common core curriculum, it seems though what you really have a problem with is DEI and antiracism efforts. If we all agree that racism is bad, why are you opposed to antiracism? Or do you not agree that racism is bad?
7. Many are struggling to understand how racism works because we weren’t taught what we needed to know about our history and society. Now that we have tools and resources to change that, why should our children have to struggle the same way?
8. Including age-appropriate information about our nation’s legacy of racism isn’t revisionist history. The revision occurred when those realities were removed from our education.
9. What are you afraid of? Are you afraid our children might learn to respect people who don’t look like them? Are you afraid our children might learn how to make the world a kinder place?
10. Does antiracism bother you because you realize that, without racism, white children will no longer be able to benefit from systems based on the false notion of white supremacy?
If you want to take a deeper dive into how we can respond when anti-anti-racism “advocates” roll up at school board or PTA meetings, stay tuned for Future First Education’s upcoming Circle Time on how to combat anti-CRT propaganda! Moms Against Racism will also be offering a workshop about understanding CRT and how to defend antiracist efforts.
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