Opinion: The cold truth about Republicans’ hot air over critical race theory
The Republican state legislators falling over themselves to decide how history can and cannot be taught in schools — and blowhards such as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who warn that children are being taught “every White person is a racist” — know exactly what they’re doing. They seek to create a crisis where none exists in hopes of driving up GOP turnout in next year’s midterm elections.
It’s a cynical ploy. But a party willing to pretend — even now — that Donald Trump might somehow have won an election he lost clearly embraces cynicism as its core identity.
It is unclear whether the GOP’s focus on denying the reality of our racial history will have any impact at the ballot box. Schoolchildren will suffer, however, because teachers will be forced to keep them ignorant of relevant facts and perspectives. And all Americans will suffer if Republicans succeed in squelching the long-overdue reckoning with race that many of us believe the nation sorely needs.
GOP politicians have especially taken aim at the New York Times’s 1619 Project, which provocatively explored the relationship of slavery to the nation’s founding. Perhaps this is because many Republicans already see the Times as a nest of villainous “elites.” Perhaps it’s because the 1619 Project was led by a Black woman, Nikole Hannah-Jones, whom Republican strategists believe they can demonize. Or perhaps it’s because the project tells so much truth.
Was slavery key to the colonial economy at the time of the Declaration of Independence? Clearly it was, and one of the many charges the declaration leveled against King George III is that he “has excited domestic insurrections amongst us” — seen by historians as referring to a proclamation in Virginia offering freedom to slaves who joined the British army. The declaration also slams the king for his passive support of the “merciless Indian Savages” who resisted the White settlers’ efforts to move westward and take more of the Indians’ land.
Was slavery written into the Constitution? The word itself does not appear, but the Constitution never would have been ratified without the famous compromise that allowed states to count only three-fifths of their enslaved populations for the purposes of apportioning seats in the House of Representatives. The charter specifies that “free Persons” and indentured servants be counted in full, leaving only slaves to constitute the “all other Persons” who are subject to the three-fifths limitation.
Was slavery just a Southern phenomenon? Not at all. Slavery wasn’t outlawed in New York until 1827, and the last 16 enslaved Black men and women in New Jersey didn’t obtain their freedom until 1865. Moreover, the entire young nation benefited economically from the plantation-style slavery practiced in the South, which gave the mills of New England raw material to work with and the nascent banking center of Wall Street a thriving enterprise to finance.
Didn’t the Civil War and the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments deal once and for all with the problem of racial oppression in this country? Of course not. Reconstruction was cut short, and the states were allowed to establish a system of Jim Crow segregation that endured for nearly a century. Black Americans were systematically robbed of land and wages, denied access to capital, confined to substandard housing, and denied educational opportunities. When some Black communities overcame these obstacles — as in Tulsa, Atlanta and a host of other cities — White mobs burned and smashed those communities out of existence.
These are all undisputed facts. This is the history that has, until now, been ignored or played down. Teachers who expose their students to such truths are not being “woke” or convincing impressionable young minds that the nation is “irredeemably racist,” as Cruz has alleged. They are performing an essential task of education: contextually explaining where we’ve been so that we can understand where we are and where we need to go.
This nation can be redeemed — but not without first acknowledging the need for redemption. The Republican Party is trying to prohibit that acknowledgment, and is doing so for short-term political gain. The flap over critical race theory is just another scam from a party that believes in nothing except the unprincipled pursuit of power.
