Critical Race Theory is all the rage now and causing outrage amongst many members of the public. In a nutshell, Critical Race Theory postulates that American society is still rife with systemic racism and people of color start at a significant disadvantage in education, employment and opportunity vis-à-vis their white compatriots as a result.
Some point to the spate of police shootings as evidence of the validity of Critical Race Theory. According to Statista; 457 White people, 241 African-Americans, 169 Hispanics, 28 Other (American-Indian, Pacific-Highlander or Asian) and 124 race unknown people were shot to death by the police in the United States in the year 2020. Of course there are police shootings and then there are police killings. People shot to death by the cops as they are committing a crime or in a gun battle with police are one thing. The murder of subdued, handcuffed suspects already in custody is another matter entirely. Still, it’s hard to argue that these police killings are usually racially motivated given the numbers and races of those involved as well as the general circumstances of the vast majority of police involved slayings that frequently include the perpetrator killed initiating and then returning fire in a desperate attempt to shoot their way out of the situation.
America has a racist past. The Declaration of Independence, penned by Thomas Jefferson, originally contained a passage renouncing slavery but the Founding Fathers (namely Benjamin Franklin) talked Jefferson out of it arguing that one revolution was enough. The fear was that the abolition of slavery would split the colonies and lead to the loss of the American Revolution or, alternately, to an American Civil War immediately after independence. Slavery persisted until 1865 and systemic, legal segregation and other forms of discrimination continued in state law codes until the mid 1960’s. Life is still not a bed of roses nevertheless legislatures and the courts have outlawed discrimination, segregation and racism; that’s not to say there aren’t still abuses but there are legal recourses, societal approbation and severe penalties now for those reprehensible actions.
Americans welcomed the Chinese by the thousands when we were building our railroads and once the railroads were completed we wanted to be rid of these Chinese immigrants. Asian women weren’t allowed as a rule to emigrate to the United States because we didn’t want more little Chinese in the country and in the 1880’s the Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act to keep Chinese immigrants out of the country while vigilante committees “encouraged” those already here to consider going back to China. At the turn of the 20th century the Japanese almost went to war with the United States over the abysmal treatment of Asian school students in San Francisco. In the 1940’s we put Japanese Americans in internment camps on the strength of their race alone as we fought World War II.
Native-Americans weren’t even US citizens until the 1920’s and experienced decades of broken promises as well as serious attempts at physical and cultural genocide at the hands of the US government. Clearly, the United States has a racist past and it’s vital that students learn about it so they can understand the residual rage of minorities and to work to make this a more perfect Union as stated in the preamble to the US Constitution.
However, that racist past is only part of the story. We’ve always been a country that’s tried to do the right thing eventually and have worked toward racial justice throughout our history. We’ve done many great things, come up with many wonderful inventions and literally saved the world on more than one occasion. That deserves to be taught as well. As long as people are diverse, there will be racism and discrimination by some. That’s different from suggesting there is a concerted, secretive, systemic attempt to keep one group down or to advantage another group. That doesn’t happen in the United States’ legal and social systems, not any more.
Yes, there are times when life will screw you. Most of the time though you make your own luck by working hard, being respectful, getting an education, obeying the law and being polite. The dark past of America should be taught in every school and known by every American. That is fundamentally different from instructing students that the deck is stacked against them automatically if they are people of color or if they are white teaching them that they are fundamentally racist simply because they were born white. There is no place in education for that kind of indoctrination.