Derek Schmidt and Eric Schmitt want to cancel ‘critical race theory,’ aka ‘history’
Last week, Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt and Missouri AG Eric Schmitt, both of whom are running for bigger jobs, signed a letter blasting the Biden administration’s attempt to “subsidize the teaching of critical race theory in the nation’s classrooms.”
Aspects of critical race theory, which has been around for 40-plus years, have been taught for decades. So what is it, anyway?
It’s an umbrella term for the study of American history and institutions though a lens that does not see slavery as a contained episode that ended a long time ago, but as a system with tentacles that influence law, the economy and culture to this day.
It looks at outcomes, rather than hearts and minds, and sees racism not only as the result of the bias of any individual or group, but also as something embedded in our legal and other systems.
You don’t have to have ever heard of critical race theory to know that slavery was a cancer that did metastasize. Or that we’re still trying to blast it into remission, or ought to be. Can you look at our criminal justice system and honestly say it works the same way no matter who you are?
Last fall, then-President Donald Trump issued an executive order that barred federal contracts from funding any diversity and inclusion training containing “divisive concepts,” “race or sex stereotyping” and “race or sex scapegoating.” And one of the “divisive concepts” Trump banned — canceled, to use one of his favorite words — was critical race theory.
Only, it’s not a curriculum designed to make white people feel guilty or to negate all positive aspects of U.S. history. Instead, it’s based on the premise that correcting the mistakes of past and the present involves acknowledging and learning from them.
Can you really look at our enduring racial inequities and tensions and not see that we could all benefit from that?
Derek Schmidt, a Republican running for governor in Kansas, and Eric Schmitt, a GOP candidate for the U.S. Senate seat that will be left open by retiring Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt, were among the 20 Republican attorneys general from across the country who signed the letter.
It decries Biden’s “thinly veiled attempt at bringing into our states’ classrooms the deeply flawed and controversial teachings of Critical Race Theory. … Critical Race Theory (“CRT”) is an ideological construct that analyzes and interprets American history and government primarily through the narrow prism of race.”
The letter said that the Department of Education should make it clear that it will not fund projects that promote critical race theory or any projects that “characterize the United States as irredeemably racist or founded on principles of racism (as opposed to principles of equality) or that purport to ascribe character traits, values, privileges, status, or beliefs, or that assign fault, blame, or bias, to a particular race or to an individual because of his or her race.”
But again, this mischaracterizes what critical race theory is and does. If the concept held that the country was irredeemably racist, there would be no point in working to eradicate the racial problems passed down from generation to generation.
It’s “not un-American,” said Yin Lam Lee-Johnson, associate professor of Webster University’s Department of Education. “It does not dehumanize white people, nor does it say all white people are racists.”
To ban the teaching of how slavery led to Jim Crow laws and inequitable outcomes in the criminal justice system and limited educational and vocational opportunities in this country to this day is to ban not only history itself, but common sense.
This letter is pure political theater, like so much else that Schmidt and Schmitt do. It’s also an affront to free speech and academic inquiry.
These officials insist on making critical race theory into the boogeyman that it isn’t. But because they refuse to learn from history doesn’t mean students should be denied that chance.