The Roman statesman Cicero said, “To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.” The disagreements that this nation is having regarding history and Critical Race Theory involve fundamental misunderstandings about what CRT is really and what is actually history.
History is history. What happened, happened. There is a difference between our undeniably racist past and Critical Race Theory. Slavery is an irrefutably racist institution. It is predicated on the idea that one race can own another because the race that is owned is inferior. There has been slavery all around the world with whites enslaving whites (the Romans and their subjects for example) and Africans enslaving Africans. African tribes captured other Africans and sold them to white slave traders thereby abetting the slave trade to America. A slave ship skipper who had a Saul on the road to Damascus religious revelation wrote the hymn, Amazing Grace; the captain saw the light, turned his ship around, freed his cargo and devoted the rest of his life to God.
Whites went to war with Native-American tribes over territory and a way of life. First, the dominant culture of the United States waged physical war, bordering on genocide, on Native peoples and later instituted policies that were intended to wipe out Native dress, language, hairstyles, culture and their way of life. One could reasonably argue that this was also racist behavior by many of our ancestor Americans.
Racism was so rampant against Asian-Americans, particularly those of Japanese descent that Japan almost went to war against the United States on behalf of their ethnic brethren early in the 20th Century. In fact present day Asian-Americans, especially women, are subject to random unprovoked assaults on the streets of America’s big cities. Clearly racism is at least a factor in these attacks.
People we would consider as “white” today were considered “less than” and “nonwhite” when they first arrived on these shores back in the day; that would have included those of the Jewish faith and those of Italian heritage as examples. The Irish specifically and Catholics generally were subjects of discrimination as well. When John Kennedy ran for President in 1960 a significant portion of the population had questions over his fitness to serve because of his Catholic faith. To date, only two presidents have been practicing Catholics – John Kennedy and Joe Biden.
America has a racist past, that’s a fact not a theory or an opinion. There should be no question about that and no problem confronting and teaching about that racist past. That is a fundamentally different situation from teaching that the United States is currently an inherently racist nation embedded and embodied in its laws, policies and institutions, as Critical Race Theory would have you believe. Clearly, racism still exists in the United States. It always has and probably always will. However, just because some individuals are prejudiced doesn’t mean that the government generally or our society at large is always automatically and demonstrably racist as the proponents of Critical Race Theory suppose.
Critical Race Theory postulates that American society and institutions are fundamentally and irredeemably racist; for example, the treatment of Rodney King and George Floyd are not exceptions but rather the rule in the United States according to CRT. One certainly could have made a case for CRT in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Laws existed then that were specifically designed to exclude African-Americans from civic life (denial of voting rights, no African-Americans were allowed to serve on juries etc.), denigrating their opportunities (separate schools, seating areas and no ability to access elite institutions and civic “Whites Only” organizations for example) and excluding them from protection of the rule of law (denial of legal counsel, all white juries, lynching etc.). The system, especially in the American South, was stacked against people of color. In addition, realtors and neighborhoods enforced covenants that would not allow Black families to live where they wanted and could afford to live.
It’s not that way today. That’s not to say that racism doesn’t exist or that people of color aren’t facing challenges that white people don’t necessarily share. However, in the debate over CRT we are in danger of whitewashing history and giving the upcoming generations a dangerously distorted view of where we came from and what we used to believe.
Just 34 of the world’s nations are liberal democracies, down from 42 in 2012. “Liberal” democracy means rule of law, free and fair elections, freedom of speech, freedom of the press and of religion etc. Over five billion people, about 70% of the world, lives in a dictatorship of varying degrees of tyranny. Another 17% live in autocracies where they may have free enterprise but their other freedoms are proscribed, places like Hong Kong and Singapore. Only 13% of the world’s people live in a society that approximates what we have in the United States. One of the tools of despotism is the manipulation of history specifically and facts in general.
In Florida, math books are being banned because of Critical Race Theory. That’s ridiculous. Math is math. When is the last time that race entered into an equation in Algebra? Books in general are being banned all over this country. We are on the slippery slope to authoritarianism and perhaps even outright dictatorship. History must be taught as it happened, with all of its warts and foibles of our ancestors. Philosopher George Santanya is famously quoted as saying, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
White people alive today are not responsible for the racism of our ancient past. People can grow and we have changed over the course of the decades of our life as a nation. American history is the continuing story of our country trying to live up to the Creed of the Founders, “ We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”.
Lying about the past is not the answer. Ignoring the past is not the solution. Rewriting the past is wrong and a recipe for disaster. Don’t make the mistake of equating Critical Race Theory with teaching the truth about racism specifically and history generally. They are two different things. The first, CRT, is an academic theory open to discussion while the second, history, is what actually happened and is not subject to debate.