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‘We Don’t Want to Make White Kids Feel Bad for Being White’
History (and life) can give Black children an inferiority complex, but you won’t find conservative parents protesting over that.
You can tell a lot about people by their priorities. Guns and climate change are two of the biggest threats children of today will face in their lifetime, yet some parents never lose a minute of sleep over such trivialities. Why worry about that when trans girls competing in school sports against cisgender girls, mask mandates, and Critical Race Theory are literally the end of the world?
In recent months, CRT seems to have become the scourge most likely to cause sleeplessness in conservative households. It’s like they’ve conveniently forgotten what “theory” even means. When I was a kid, we were taught about the once-popular theory that the world was flat. To my knowledge, none of my classmates went looking for the edge of the earth in hopes of finding a good place to jump. I don’t know how much theorizing second-graders can handle — or how many second-grade teachers are actually interrupting reading, writing, and spelling lessons to introduce the intricacies of CRT. However, if conservative parents were the awesome role models they like to tell us they are, there wouldn’t be any theory an inept teacher could throw at their children that would have them seeing the world in such a drastically different light that they’d be looking for an exit.
Yet, if I were to believe those parents, Critical Race Theory threatens to ruin the next generation of White Americans, regardless of the quality of parenting they receive. I’m not here to debate its merits or flaws. Like many theories, from creationism to conspiracies, one can poke holes in CRT — especially if one doesn’t fully understand it. But if it weren’t grounded in an inconvenient truth (systemic racism is real, people; it’s not a figment of anyone’s imagination), it probably would be easier to look the other way.
My issue with the objection to CRT isn’t that people disagree but that when they do, they tend to focus on the mental wellbeing of White kids. It’s always about White kids, isn’t it? As any Black kid who has ever stepped foot into a US classroom knows, White kids benefit most from…
