Suppose the Conservative Right’s dishonest campaign to sanitize America’s racist history by outlawing Critical Race Theory (CRT) expands to the media.
In that case, I assume this column will come under intense scrutiny–and ultimately banished to virtual limbo.
Though no two Rightwing critics of CRT can agree on a specific definition of what it is, they nonetheless want it banned from public (government) educational institutions.
The Republican Roaches are generally in concert that CRT is a curriculum that advocates America is a racist country and that a system of apartheid continues to exist—fueled by White supremacy, capitalistic greed, and systemic racism.
And they obviously fear recent challenges to ‘His-story’ will open a floodgate of questions that could lead to a new historical reality and calls for systemic changes.
The CRT threatens to prove that the plight of the poor and African Americans today is rooted in a paradigm created centuries ago, one that is interwoven in the fabric of America and impacts every aspect of American life.
Thus, the Resistant Right wants to maintain the current paradigm of misinformation and lies taught to our children in government schools and to continue its primary function as a pipeline to prison or poverty.
The best way to take the African American contingency out of the equation is to indoctrinate them early with misinformation and inferior education to limit their success and competitive spirit.
In essence, the Rabid Republicans seek to sanitize history and deflect questions about the cancer of racism that has hampered Black progress for centuries.
For those who don’t know, Critical Race Theory is essentially an examination of history from the perspective of Black America.
It posits that racism in America results from a complex institutional paradigm—apartheid—versus the prejudices of a few.
One internet defines CRT as an “intellectual movement, a loosely organized framework of legal analysis based on the premise that race is not a natural, biologically grounded feature of physically distinct subgroups of human beings, but a socially constructed (culturally invented) category that is used to oppress and exploit people of color.”
Critical race theorists hold that institutions in the United States are inherently racist insofar as they function to create and maintain social, economic, and political inequalities between Whites and Blacks.
The CRT paradigm originated from writings by Black legal scholars in the 1970s who initially studied the judicial system to ascertain how inherent bias and institutional racism impacted excessive sentencing of African Americans.
That research has expanded to include a study of how the cancer of racism has spread throughout the entire American body structure, influencing every aspect of our lives and sustaining a paradigm that has widened the gap between the rich and poor, Black and White, intelligent and dumb.
Still, confused as to why the Redundant Right is fighting to keep CRT away from the public?
My favorite historian and storyteller, Teju, explains:
“The right wants to expunge CRT so “White people can control the flow of the dialogue (the narrative) and avoid taking responsibility for White Supremacy.”
“We don’t need a new name for the same old thing,” Teju continued.
“And for the record, White racism, White skin privilege, and White supremacy are not theories. It is the essence of ‘The American Way,’ designed for–and causing the destruction of–Black people (the only group I have the right to speak for).
“Racism is not a theory. It’s a fact. A theory is an idea that has not yet been proven.”
Teju, as always, hit the nail on the proverbial head. Or should I say hood?
An equally provocative and succinct academic evaluation of the current debate was provided by a friend of the MCJ editor, who shall remain anonymous, but allowed his analysis to be published.
He provided a history of the CRT paradigm that shows a link between the past and the present:
“The vast majority of those decrying Critical Race Theory has not the slightest scintilla of a clue what CRT actually is. More importantly, their efforts are decidedly more malignant than merely the manifestation of demonstrated nescience.
“Like the ‘Lost Cause’ efforts of confederate sympathizers, those attacking CRT attempt to deny the truths of American history and rewrite that history whenever and wherever they can.
“As I saw in an editorial cartoon, those attacking CRT are attempting to put a giant smiley-face sticker on Emmett Till’s coffin.”
There are different theories as to why the GOP and the Rancid Right have only recently engineered attacks on the remote possibility of CRT being introduced in government schools.
Some believe the anti-CRT campaign was orchestrated to deflect attention away from Republican political losses of the last year and the mortification of the January 6 revolt.
Then again, there is the belief that CRT will take the covers off the great American historical lie and could spark a violent rebuttal.
Most feel the GOP’s idiotic assertion that advocates of CRT are Marxists or anarchists is merely a ploy to rally the Trump Troops around a racist theme and to undermine efforts for victims of slavery to gain reparations.
Whatever the reason, the Raggedly Right is going all out in making the CRT the dominant issue of 2021.
Not only is the GOP pushing an idiotic message that CRT will spark a rebellion and an American Mau Mau attack against unassuming White suburbanites, but they also posit that it may open the eyes of brainwashed White youth.
In other words, the truth won’t set you free.
Instead, it will incite a cultural revolution and a new civil war.
It will turn citizens—Black and White–against the God-state, Uncle Sam, and the red, white and blue.
Political correctness has already run amuck, the far-out Right Roaches believe, and the CRT may very well tip the scales even further.
That’s not only asinine in its face and ignores the fact that Black America is already angry, frustrated, and near explosion. Hell, we’ve been mad for 40 years.
It also ignores the reality that while the public/government school system continues to teach irrelevant and dishonest history to our children—as they did us—the truth is available outside the school classroom.
What our parents are not teaching their children about true American history, particularly institutional racism and apartheid, they gain from media, the internet, or peers.
Those millions of Black warriors who paraded and protested last year following the public execution of George Floyd are not as ignorant or naive as the Redundantly Religious Right think they are.
Nor are the White Millennials, who joined them.
In fact, they have rejected much of what they have been taught or told. Many have even abandoned their churches, walked away from their politics, and crossed the street to a different reality.
But the campaign against CRT isn’t aimed at them.
The Ridiculous Right is trying to convince a gullible population–the Trump Troops, and the New Confederates–that any comprehensive study of racism’s impact on society is disingenuous, un-American, and will force the good people so far to the left that they will fall over the edge of this flat earth.
The question is, will they be successful? Can their crusade convince enough naive Americans to join their cause?
I don’t believe they have the power or influence to achieve success by their lonesome.
They need independents, fence warmers, and Democrats to join them or at least hide their heads in the asphalt as the GOP does its thang.
And I fear that might happen.
Why you ask?
Well, even if you haven’t asked, I’ll tell you anyway.
I believe the Democrats are hiding their heads in the sand as this debate wages on because they are complicit in this enterprise.
History will show there is as much dirt on the knees of Democrats as county road clay on the feet of Republicans.
In fact, it was during my lifetime that the Republicans and Democrats supposedly switched political sides, thus substantiating my assertion that they are actually different wings on the same bird.
CRT will reveal Democrats were the Party behind the Confederacy.
Democrats blocked or weakened Civil Rights legislation for the first half of the 20th century.
It was the Democrats who stripped Black citizens of their civil rights through legislation. They then created a system of apartheid to keep the darkies in their place.
Democratic justices on the U.S. Supreme Court all but invalidated the 14th and 15th amendments and instituted paradigms that created a segregated society championed by Uncle Jim Crow.
Granted, the Party miraculously found god (with a small g) in the 1960s and rebranded themselves as the Party of the disenfranchised and the ‘Negroes,’ as we were called then.
They have since advanced policies that destroyed the Black family, imprisoned hundreds of thousands of Black men, and created a poverty industry that has locked many people of color in cold and damp cellars of despair and disinvestment.
They then created a poverty industry to benefit their friends and families, establishing the poor as victims and clients.
It is not a coincidence that the Democrat Party thrives off creating programs to make people comfortable in their misery instead of empowering them to become independent and self-sufficient.
Nor should it be a surprise our ‘overseers’ have blocked the schoolhouse doors to the poor, joining with the teachers union to keep Black and poor children chained to inferior, failing government schools that serve the dual role as a pipeline to prison or poverty while teaching students only enough to sign their names on the welfare check.
Hey, public education is about adults and the money, honey. Not what’s best for children.
Thus the party that supposedly represents the poor and ‘Coloreds’ who see education as a passport have for the last 50 years done all in their power to keep them on the ‘plantation’ (aka, the ‘ghetto’).
Meanwhile, ask how many Democrats send their children to government schools. In fact, how many teachers do?
And if you don’t believe my theory, you need to go back a few months to see through the conspiracy veil and focus on the Democratic Party’s role in the non-partisan race for state superintendent of Public Schools.
The Dems spent over $750,000 to ensure a union-backed candidate with a dubious reputation and little insight into the challenges of urban education was elected.
Responding to a directive by the local and state teachers union, the so-called ‘party of the people’ (we are fools to think that includes us), put its full support behind a robotic candidate who pledged to maintain the failing status quo over a candidate with a successful record in educating urban children.
In fact, the people’s candidate, Deb Kerr, brought to the campaign an extensive resume of working in public and private educational sectors and was previously superintendent of the only district in the state without a racial academic achievement gap.
The end result is that the failing status quo will remain in effect, and we will lose another generation of Black children.
Indeed, under CRT, students will examine the racial implications of that scenario and expose how teacher union actions over the century have adversely impacted the Black community.
Given their historical complicity, I believe the Democrats have much to worry about when it comes to CRT. Its introduction would expose to the world—and their Black constituents—their involvement in the interwoven system of racism that keeps people of color on a plantation governed by rules established in the constitution, which posited that we were ‘subhuman.’
As you ponder my proposition about the Democrats, consider it was only a month ago that President Joe Biden, a former moderate with a questionable record on racial issues, announced contrary to common sense that American is NOT a racist country.
And even as Democrats lambasted Republican Senator Tim Scott for saying the same thing, Vice President Kamala Harris, the ‘sister’ who took Biden to task for his opposition to school ‘desegregation,’ echoed Scott.
I wouldn’t put money on what Barack Obama would say to that question if it was asked of him outside of the political sphere, but I bet a dollar against a dime he would have said America isn’t racist if he were still president.
Also, note that the Democrat’s only successful venture to ‘end racism’ has been their actions to tear down Confederate monuments in Washington.
And they have been joined by so-called liberals in making an issue of similar displays throughout the south.
This raises the question of whether they too are in effect ‘sanitizing history.’
Does taking down a Confederate statute mean that part of history didn’t exist? Does removing a confederate flag in the south mean racism doesn’t exist anymore?
I’m among the few who say keep the racist monuments where they are. Dust off the pictures of Jefferson Davis and shoo away the pigeons on the Robert E. Lee statutes.
Keep them erect, so I can take my grandchildren to see them and explain what happened and why we are in the predicament we’re in today.
I want to explain the unwavering appreciation and love for the confederate flag and talk about the bigots who remain appreciative of traitors and White supremacists.
If nothing else, I want to use the monuments of traitors to arm my children against the possibility of a new civil war. And don’t say it won’t’ happen. It happened on January 6. And those folks are still around.
Thus, I give Democrats no pat on the back for their myopic actions. From my vantage point, they are part of the problem and want to erase from history the fact that the Confederates were Democrats.
Without understanding the ramifications, opponents of CRT have introduced a controversy that will lead to a reexamination of His-story and an unweaving of the bleached fabric that holds this country together.
By attacking CRT, the Racist Republican Roaches have sparked a discussion and debate they are bound to regret
Hotep.