- The whole purpose
of Critical Race Theory is to provide Americans
with a way to understand
the legacy of racism, even though those stories
sometimes hurt. - It's anti-American training
that vilifies White people and demands they apologize. - The best learning for students
about social studies and about our democracy
and our country is the learning where students can really
grapple with the issues and really come to
a deeper understanding of how our past
informed our present. - All of this revisionist,
woke curriculum, you are not going to do this
to our children. - Teachers across the country
are caught in the middle of the latest flash point
in America's culture war -- Critical Race Theory. So what exactly is it and why is there a push
to ban it in schools? - Critical Race Theory
is a body of ideas and a set of approaches
to understanding the history and the present
of American society that looks at the ways
in which racial unfairness have been woven into
the fabric of our institutions. - In other words, Critical
Race Theory, or CRT for short, is a legal academic framework
centered on the idea that racism is systemic. It first started to coalesce
in the 1970s when Black, Hispanic,
and Asian legal scholars were researching
the persistence of inequality, despite the landmark
legal victories of the Civil Rights era. - The legal scholars
undertook a set of analyses and investigations
that were aimed at trying to make sense of the puzzling
persistence of racism in our legal system,
in our political system, in our economy. - CRT has been studied in fields
like sociology, economics, and political science. It's been used to examine issues such as housing and educational
segregation, unconscious bias,
and criminal-justice reform. - Contrary to what often
critics portray as sort of judging people
intrinsically as being racist or not or holding people
responsible for, you know,
slavery in the past, it is actually to open up
a conversation of how we all inherit and live in a society sort of
beyond our choosing, right? We didn't choose
where we were born or what racial group
we were part of. And yet, we have this
common history. How do we understand
that history? What does it mean for us? Those are the sorts of questions that Critical Race Theorists
were trying to grapple with. - George Floyd! - The racial reckoning spurred
by the police killing of George Floyd
brought the decades-old framework
back into the spotlight as some schools sought
to implement reforms that better address race
in classrooms. - I think the thing that
Critical Race Theory would add to that conversation
is that we not sort of confine that horrific example
to Derek Chauvin, but to think about how, well, there were other law-enforcement
officers present, including officers of color,
who stood idly by. And so that pushes us to think
about, you know, this phenomenon
as not simply one of, you know, racism by Whites
against Blacks, right? I mean, it makes us think more
critically, more engaged, more seriously around, "Well, why do these
practices happen?" - The push against CRT
gained steam under former President Trump when he directed
federal agencies to end any diversity trainings
related to Critical Race Theory. Though ultimately blocked
on First Amendment grounds and rescinded
by President Biden, the fight over CRT at the state
level is still in full effect. - The focus on CRT is a way
to latch on to a concept that very few people
sort of really understand, which sounds kind of scary
perhaps to someone not, you know, trained
in what it means, and latch on to that
as a kind of football in this ongoing fight over, you know, the future of this
country with regard to racism. - As of mid June 2021,
21 states have introduced bills attempting to restrict the
teaching of Critical Race Theory and/or impose limits
on how race is discussed
inside the classroom. And those limits
are often vague. - And the instructors,
educators, especially at the K-12 level,
will just no go there, will not run the risk
of upsetting parents or, you know,
being misunderstood or drawing the ire of,
you know, lawmakers. - In Texas, for instance,
House Bill 3979 says teachers must explore current
events from multiple positions without giving "deference
to any one perspective." - There's language in this bill,
like, "Teachers need to present
a balanced perspective on current events,"
for instance. You know, they have to do
their due diligence to present multiple viewpoints. But what happens if they're
talking about an issue in the classroom and they try to present
multiple viewpoints, but, you know,
that student comes home and tells their parent
about the lesson that day and the parent thinks,
"They didn't do a good-enough job
of presenting this viewpoint." So who decides when the teacher
has done an adequate job of presenting multiple
perspectives on an issue? It saddens me and disappoints me
that instead of really embracing this opportunity
to confront our nation's past and to tell authentic
and more accurate narratives about experiences, you know,
diverse people in this country, that we're looking to sweep it
under the rug. We're looking to erase it
even further from our memories.
