The Day You Realize Your Own Kids Will See Your Bigotry...
Anti-CRT laws are not about protecting the image of dead people in history. They're about keeping young people from calling out their parents as present-day bigots
A conference has been called here in South Carolina to hammer out the differences between the state Senate and state House versions of a so-called “anti-CRT” law that’s been billed as a way to ensure only the “truth” is taught in public schools, particularly in history class.
By now, you’re hopefully familiar with many of the solid arguments against these measures - that CRT isn’t being taught, that critical thinking doesn’t mean force-feeding conclusions to students, that these laws impose a chilling effect on already-overburdened educators, and on and on.
I’d like to say that this is a contrived outrage. In some ways, indeed, it is. The right essentially whipped itself into its own frenzy.
The other truth is that, as people caught on that the comfortable, familiar, white-centric, white-affirming history was being peppered with additional perspectives and facts that were previously downplayed, if not erased, in the history books used by the Boomer generation, their concern was genuine.
Of all the people who were legitimately concerned about the effects of “CRT” (howsoever one may wish to define it or just hold onto it as a vague notion), it would be the most powerful and most conservative white people who had (and have) cause to be the most alarmed of all. People who have access to media outlets had every reason to want to stop kids from realizing just how indecently and obscenely some people have behaved throughout history.
It’s not so much that these powerful people are concerned that people would think ill of Christopher Columbus. It’s been more of their concern that, as young people get better and better at identifying what evil and bigotry looked like in the olden days, the better they’ll get at identifying evil and bigotry as it’s playing out in real time.
And that is something for powerful conservative folks to be sincerely concerned with.
There’s a bona fide threat posed by “CRT” - which I’ll use here as shorthand for a more robust look back in time, using richer factual accounts, with a view to identifying themes and patterns that bear relevance in the present and for the future.
For anyone who’s behaving horridly today - such as the people who abuse power and privilege in all the ways they’ve been consistently and predictably abused over eras and epochs and eons - having your grandkids calling you out on it before you’ve gone to your grave can put a real cramp in your plans.
South Carolina’s anti-CRT bill will hopefully go nowhere before the current legislative session wraps up next month. I spoke against it when it was before the state Senate’s education committee, which you can either read - or watch and listen - to the end of this post.
One of the great lies in any conversation about history – the big lie that this bill, H.3728, seeks to perpetuate – is the myth that people who lived long ago didn’t know better. We say it’s unfair to judge them against today’s standards – but that’s a crock of bull. There’s always a factual record of people who knew better, who named the moral wrong, who spoke up for the outcasts, the disfranchised, and those who were dehumanized.
I’m here to build that factual record so tomorrow’s children can learn, without a doubt, that those who support this bill knew better. They deserve to learn the facts: that we know this bill intends to gaslight Black children about history; that we know it excuses and removes accountability for historic actions that were unquestionably immoral; and that we know this bill’s supporters wrap themselves in a brand of religion that’s less concerned with the resurrection of Jesus Christ than the resurrection of Jim Crow.
This can’t be a good faith effort to improve public education because if kids sponged up and internalized everything their teachers say, the way this bill assumes kids do, our schools would produce all the best engineers, financiers, and doctors, and the astroturfing for this bill would be fronted by Moms of Rhodes Scholars. Real-world teachers can’t convince kids to turn in permission slips on time, yet this bill would deputize random crackpots to harass teachers for the magical power to brainwash students into being “woke.”
I had to ask myself: “Why do my lawmakers seem so intent on authoring more of the history they don’t want children to be taught?” It’s because this bill isn’t about shielding dead people from accountability. It's about shielding present-day bigots from being judged and despised by their own grandchildren and great-grandchildren who recognize the injustices around them. H.3728 desperately aims to enlist the wider community to blame the messengers – schools and teachers – for the sins of the powerful who punch down on kids.
Thank you for affording me this time to record how the most tragic aspect of H.3728 may be how it is a confession of its supporters that they will be a disgrace in the eyes of their own grandchildren.