It's inconceivable that a white teacher would be teaching white children that they are evil because they're white. But that's what people think, even though it's blatantly false. I don't know if some of you guys have seen this critical race theory.
It's basically teaching kids to hate our country and to hate each other based on race. Critical race theory is an intellectual sort of field that emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s among legal scholars and lawyers who were recognizing racial disparity was persisting despite the public pronouncements that all these laws on the books were race neutral. And so these scholars Recognize that something was wrong here and that they had to take a new critical approach to examining the law, to examining policies, to examining structures which they recognize were the source of these continuing disparities and not what's wrong with people.
And what are some misconceptions around critical race theory? Oh, there are many. That critical race theorists argue that White people are inherently evil.
That's not true. That critical race theorists argue that everything and everyone is racist. That's not true.
Critical race theorists would be the first to say there are people battling and challenging racism. And then those are the people we should learn from. That people imagine that critical race theory is widely taught in schools.
It's not even widely necessarily taught in law schools where it originated, where people want it to be taught, let alone in elementary schools. Another misnomer about critical race theory or even anti-racism is that it's anti-white or racist. And I don't think people realize that that is one of the oldest and most vile white supremacist talking points. Teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other is not worth one red cent of taxpayer money. Critical race theory is not appropriate for our kids to learn and to have in our school systems.
I think critical race theory is wrong and I don't think it should be taught in schools at all and I don't think we should fund any money to allow that to happen. When we think of racial inequality in this country, I think it's important for us to recognize that historically, we've been arguing over why that inequality exists. And the racist position has stated the inequality exists because there's something inferior or superior about different racial groups, whether culturally, behaviorally, genetically. And the anti-racist physician has largely stated that inequality is the result of policy and racist policy. So therefore, the problem isn't bad people.
The problem is, is bad policy. And it's important if we want to eliminate inequality to identify those bad policies and replace them with the types of policies that can create equity and justice for all. Part of the challenge. What's interesting with discussing race and racism is people who argue racism no longer exists have one definition of racism that I've been trying to pin down for a while. They refuse to actually define it.
And those of us who are documenting its persistence have a different definition. So fundamentally, in many ways, we're arguing over definitions. And so when I ever engage with people, you know, in a constructive sense to really Get them to understand race and racism. The first and most important step is definitions. That's why how to be an anti-racist is based and built and grounded in definitions, in defining terms.
And these aren't defining terms out of sort of thin air. We should be defining terms based on the evidence, based on scholarship, based on history, based on material reality.