What I Wasn’t Taught: The danger of ‘critical race theory’ hysteria

I am a proud Georgia public-school kid. My family moved to northwest Georgia just in time for me to start sixth grade. In Puerto Rico, my history classes could not have been more different.

I was used to learning about Caribbean and Latin American history, and in very basic terms, the consequential effect of U.S. hegemony on almost everything that had happened to the United States and its territories.

When I started sixth grade, I found myself catching up and learning the history of the American Revolution, the Confederacy, Jim Crow and the civil rights movement, among other things.

These were now the subjects deemed most consequential to my understanding of the world, but as someone who was in some ways learning about these things for the first time, I always felt there were some gaps in the lessons I learned.

For instance, it did not seem like an accident that I only learned of one major, and exceptionally bloody, slave revolt, Nat Turner’s rebellion. I always found it strange that I was asked to map out only the Confederate victories on a map of the U.S. as part of the American Civil War curriculum.

It was uncomfortable, to say the least, to listen to our football coach, who happened to be the history teacher, talk about the “economic” reasons for the American Civil War. Not surprisingly, he never really explained the “economics” of slave labor once.

From my classes, the civil rights movement appeared to be a stand-alone moment in history led by courageous men — almost only men — who helped us pass critical pieces of legislation, and this chapter meant that racism as we knew it was now over.

Unfortunately, I would come to learn later that there were a lot of revolutionaries, heroes and heroines missing from my history lessons, and no matter how much my teachers insisted that this country’s racist past was behind us, I would continue to experience racism in my own life.

Now, as the artificial outrage about “critical race theory” or “CRT” continues to grow and states pass reactionary “bans” on teaching inclusive history or implementing diversity, equity and inclusion programs, I have started to reflect on my own education, and especially on what I was not taught between middle and high school.

I was never taught, nor is any K-12 student in Georgia currently being taught, any part of critical race theory. That is simply because CRT is a body of legal scholarship taught in law school and upper-level college or graduate studies that critically examines American history, society, our government and our legal system through the lens of race.

Despite the right’s temper tantrum, CRT isn’t a “diversity, equity or inclusion” program disguising some hateful ideology, and it’s not the study of who is to blame for the moral failures of our nation. It’s an acknowledgment and critique of how race and racism have shaped our institutions of power. It is an important philosophy that continues to be distilled into a fearmongering headline.

Honestly, I wonder how my understanding of this country’s history would have changed if I had learned earlier about Black and white abolitionists who fought fiercely against slavery, or about the Black women who, to this day, sustain the fight for racial justice in this country. How would it have shaped me to understand the plight of farmworkers in the Deep South and the parallels to the Chicano movement out West?

I think about how differently I would feel, how much more hopeful I could have been, when horrible things happen in this country, having the knowledge that there is always someone here fighting for justice and liberation. I wonder how my peers would have fared if we had a real and comprehensive sex education program that included information and the simple acknowledgement of my peers who were LGBTQIA+.

Perhaps our school district would not have been infamous in the area for the high number of young mothers in our ranks or for the bullying of students who were different. Unfortunately, that’s not what happened, but I’m one of the lucky public school kids who ended up in a public university, where I started to fill in the gaps in my K-12 education.

Here in Georgia, politicians are capitalizing on this false rhetoric about their distorted version of CRT, and they are doubling down on harmful public policy and censorship. In May, Gov. Brian Kemp sent a letter to the Georgia State Board of Education recommending “immediate steps to ensure that critical race theory and its dangerous ideology do not take root in our state standards or curriculum.”

By June, the board had followed Kemp’s orders, adopting an outrageous resolution banning the teaching of CRT. More specifically, the board banned lessons that “promote one race or sex above another” – which no one in this state is teaching. It also bans students from receiving school credit for working with advocacy groups who defend teachers and students from anti-CRT bans.

Luckily, these restrictions have not been codified into rules, but Georgia is set to have a special legislative session this fall, and the regular legislative session come January. We expect to see these attacks manifest into very real and very harmful public policy.

The GOP sees this issue as a political lightning rod that can help Republicans in the 2022 midterms. Luckily, advocates have created toolkits and resources for us to fight back against this harmful rhetoric and hold the line on inclusive education. We cannot allow extremists to continue to permeate the mainstream and scare parents into a frenzy.

Inclusive education allows students to create a better world, and SPLC Action will be there with you to defend their right to a full and truthful education.

Isabel Otero is policy director in the Atlanta office of the SPLC Action Fund.

Photo by Isaac Groves via Imagn Content Services, LLC