Critical Race Theory and Its Educational Impact

[Music] moving on our main story tonight concerns school it's the only setting in which a child dissecting a frog is not an immediate red flag we teach kids a lot in school from reading to long division to how to play the recorder for some reason but recently there has been a lot of concern over one particular thing that people worry that kids are learning critical race theory is being taught in our schools critical race theory is bunk critical race theory is a lie from the first word to the last from start to finish racist critical race theory critical race theory critical race theory in the schools and the wokeness let me tell you right now critical race theory is bigoted it is a lie and it is every bit as racist as the klansmen in white sheets i do not like that ted cruz man i do not like him shouting clan i do not like him in a room i do not like him in cancun i do not like him playing ball i do not like his face at all i wish he'd lose his cushy job that man ted cruz is a knob but here's the thing it is true you have probably heard people yelling about critical race theory on tv for more than a year now and people have been listening to that noise especially judging by what's been happening at school board meetings across the country [Applause] the western culture and values that brought forth christianity in the founding documents are being called evil and racist i am not co-parenting with the government it is not your job to force these ideas onto my child the narrative in this country is that we're all inherently racist and i'm about sick of it it's a marxist ideology and we all know it all of these lessons have the intent to make our children feel disgust towards our nation this country isn't even a racist country we elected obama for two times wait hold on hold on america can't be racist because of obama i don't know if you remember the 2008 election but things got pretty racist back then people kept saying he was born in kenya people said he was a secret muslim and then a few years later we elected that people president so let's just agree to disagree on that one shall we that first meeting was in loudoun county virginia and it got so out of hand that the meeting was shut down early and one guy passionately railing against crt was arrested for trespassing only to pop up on tugger carlson the very next day so clearly a lot of people are getting very mad about critical race theory right now and instinctively you probably know it's a manufactured panic but the fact is the fear around it is having real effects last year glenn younkin won the governor's race in virginia after repeatedly promising that on his first day in office he'd ban crt from being taught in schools multiple states have passed laws outlawing the teaching of it and republicans are likely to make it a major focus of the midterms when it comes to critical race theory think of it like rihanna's pregnancy even if you think it has nothing to do with you believe me you're going to be hearing a lot about it this year so given that we thought tonight we take a step back and look at what critical race theory is and isn't why the panic around it has spread and what the consequences might be for everyone involved and i realize some of you may already know what crt is after all explainers honest have become one of the most common sites on the internet along with mediocre wordle scores and ugly monkey jpegs sold by and four but but many are still very confused a recent survey found that an overwhelming majority of u.s residents have a hard time articulating exactly what crt is and that even goes for some of those who've been yelling about it the loudest i i've never figured out what a critical race theory is to be totally honest after a year of talking about it they're teaching that some races are morally superior to others that some are inherently sinful and some are inherently saintly and that's immoral to teach that because it's wrong wow i don't know if i've ever seen a person confidently complain about something just seconds after admitting they don't know about it look i've never figured out how a car engine works to be honest but there's a chimpanzee under the hood turning a crank and when you press the accelerator it pokes it with a sharp stick and makes him crank faster and it's immoral to do that because it's wrong but obviously that is not what critical race theory is it's the name given to a body of legal scholarship that began in the 1970s that attempted to understand why racism and inequality persisted after the civil rights movement the core idea is that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice but also something that is embedded in legal systems and policies as for tucker's notion that it teaches that some races are superior to others or that parents claim that it teaches kids to hate america none of that is remotely true as kimberley crenshaw one of crt's leading scholars points out critic cory's theory just says let's pay attention to what has happened in this country and how what has happened in this country is continuing to create differential outcomes so we can become that country that we say we are so critically siri is not anti-patriotic in fact it is more patriotic than those who are opposed to it because we believe in the 13th and the 14th and the 15th amendment we believe in the promises of equality and we know we can't get there if we can't confront and talk honestly about inequality yeah she's right and incidentally if you've just found yourself there wondering what the 13th 14th and 15th amendments are that alone might be a good sign that we don't talk about this stuff in schools enough and to be clear seot is graduate level legal theory so unless your five-year-old is currently pursuing a law degree they're not reading kimberley crenshaw but critics of it argue that the ideas behind crt are being taught in schools and often present a hyperbolically distorted version of what those ideas are and a key person here is this man a conservative activist named christopher ruffo he claims crt is actually a revolutionary program that would overturn the principles of the declaration and destroy the remaining structure of the constitution which it just isn't it isn't that but in the wake of the george floyd protests just as america was beginning to grapple with systemic racism fox news began featuring roofo on air a lot as part of their efforts to swing that pendulum back hard and in one appearance he pointed to diversity trainings in government as evidence of crt's influence and he spoke directly to president trump through the camera about what he wanted to see happen the president at the white house it's within their authority and power to immediately issue an executive order abolishing critical race theory trainings from the federal government and i call on the president to immediately issue this executive order and and stamp out this destructive divisive pseudo-scientific ideology at its root now did trump see that i don't know is the pope a catholic is the reason big died the fact that carrie didn't call 9-1-1 fast enough the answer to all those questions is yes and also she was right not to do it no big loss because mark meadows trump's chief of staff has since revealed president trump saw that interview and when roofo said i call on the president to immediately issue this executive order quote that's what we did which is weird there should be more steps than that it shouldn't just go one yell your wish at the president then two it happens ideally you want an executive branch that's a little more complicated than siri and with that crt or crucially rufo's definition of it was suddenly absolutely everywhere fox news kept pushing it mentioning the term critical race theory nearly 5 000 times last year alone and the network zeroed in on its supposed use in schools with ruffo telling fox's audience that crt has really become the default ideology of the public education system and what rufo has been cleverly doing is cherry picking the worst examples that he can find of lessons in classrooms or training materials for teachers and saying that is crt and he's openly admitted that he's been engaged in a deliberate rebranding exercise tweeting we have successfully frozen their brand critical race theory into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions the goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think critical race theory and the thing is it worked because whenever you hear crt now you are not hearing about the academic discipline you're hearing about a category so broad it encompasses both the craziest thing in the newspaper and also crucially any conversation about race that someone does not want to have and look i am not saying discussing race in a classroom is easy or even always done well experts in this field will readily admit that now have you seen bad implementations of this of course right that's like asking have i seen a bad math lesson right like yes teachers are humans especially as we're trying to figure out how to teach about race and racism exactly teachers are human and can make mistakes frankly i'm surprised they don't make more they wake up insanely early and spend all day getting low-key roasted by teenagers for an amount of money best described as completely harrowing the very fact any student in america knows what a covalent bond is is a miracle and every adult involved deserves the congressional medal of honor and the fact is you can find examples of clumsy shitty lessons one school used a privilege bingo card which sure seems like a glib way to handle a very serious subject another classic lesson over the years has been to teach about prejudice metaphorically by dividing a classroom up by eye color with brown eyed people for instance being the lowest tier and then being treated terribly and if you do that in a diverse classroom and think for even a second about who is more likely to have brown eyes you can probably immediately see just how badly that lesson could go that actually happened in at least one school in the chicago area and the reason i know that is that this kid was in the class that day and she's one of our writers now ali what did you think of that lesson it was pretty up yeah yeah i bet it was but the fact is many educators are working very hard to find age-appropriate ways to talk about race and racism in the classroom and if you do it right you don't stop at the civil rights movement you tell the story all the way to the present day which kids want and need they have questions about what they can see with their own eyes and they deserve good answers and it is frankly far better for them to have these discussions in a supportive educational environment rather than the potential alternative during a screaming match at thanksgiving but the panic over crt threatens to shut those conversations down and that is not all it is likely to do because some pushing this panic the hardest are actually using it to advance a much bigger agenda that they've wanted for a very long time and that is school choice basically letting parents take tax dollars afforded to the public schooling of their kid and use them at any school they like here is chris ruffo again laying out that exact strategy first uh we have to just get it out of schools we have to ban it and abolish it but in the long term what we need to do is give every parent in this country a right to exit failing institutions no child should be trapped in a failing public school that violates his sense of conscience that violates the values of the parents every parent should take those education dollars anywhere that they wish school choice will liberate people it will empower people and it will actually depolarize some of these national fights that we've seen oh so you're doing all of this to tone down part of that fight are you chris very cool of you you've probably noticed that general wave of calm chill vibes sweeping the nation lately if there is one word i would use to describe every image coming out of a school board meeting these days it is depolarized look it is not just rufo conservative organizations that have long pushed for school choice like the heritage foundation and freedom works have poured money into this fight and of course no school choice push would be complete without lifelong rich person and occasional education secretary betsy devos who wrote an op-ed titled let's liberate kids from race indoctrination with school choice and you should know this is just nothing new there is a long history of responding to racial panic with a push for school choice in fact the roots of the school choice movement trace back to the brown versus board of education decision when southern states adopted voucher programs to facilitate the creation of private schools called segregation academies and some of those taking advantage of school choice today sure seem to be doing some heavy indoctrination of their own take florida it is one of the states that allows public money to go to voucher schools and a few years back an investigation into some of them found commonly used textbooks that downplayed the horrors of slavery one of them is this one america land i love which has all the kind of that you would expect the civil war was fought for states rights but it also states that during the antebellum period the slave who knew christ had more freedom than a free person who did not know the savior which is not just offensive it is profoundly stupid any kid reading that absolute trombone slide of a sentence would instantly dropped two full grades it sounds less like something you'd find in a textbook and more like something you'd find crocheted on a throw pillow in paula dean's living room so if you want to talk about racial indoctrination of school kids this might be a better place to start but the thing is even a manufactured panic is a panic those parents at school board meetings are genuinely angry and as any little league coach knows once you reach a critical mass of angry white parents there will be consequences in texas this high school principal was forced out of his job after being accused at a school board meeting of promoting crt by someone who wasn't even a parent at his school and in tennessee this current affairs teacher was fired for not giving varying points of view after he gave students a tanahassee coat article and showed them kyla janae lacy's poem white privilege and he actually had a pretty decent response to that criticism i think to me the varying viewpoint is kyla janet lacey and is tanahasi coates those are perspectives that my students aren't exposed to on a daily basis because you know we live in that white dominant evangelical environment right when you live in a mostly white environment the voices of black people can be the varying point of view and not just on current events either on lots of things that white people might otherwise assume even trivial ones like it's okay to go out in a blizzard in shorts and if i argue with this cop i can probably get out of a ticket and time travel would be a fun and stress-free activity the 1930s i can't wait to look around unfortunately though those situations are now only likely to become more common since january of last year 37 states have introduced bills or taken other steps that would restrict teaching critical race theory or limit how teachers can discuss racism and the justification for these has often been more than a little flimsy here is one tennessee lawmaker explaining why he was pushing for his state's bill listen to the following quotes from an email forwarded to me concerning a seven-year-old girl in williamson county the little girl told her mother i'm ashamed that i'm white the daughter then asked her mother is there something wrong with me why am i hated so much okay i hear that i really do but the thing to do in that situation isn't to pass a law limiting the discussion of race in the classroom is to ask literally one follow-up question like what was happening to make you think the other kids hate you or did any adults step in when you felt this way or do you even exist because you should know when reporters looked into this they found no parent had come forward to that school's principal teachers or district officials with that complaint and administrators there weren't able to pinpoint any students who might be upset or lessons that could have been upsetting and if that is how we are arguing things now i should probably mention that i too just so happen to have an email forward from a different little white girl way cuter than the first one by the way who said that that first girl story is complete and the thing is by tennessee law it seems i simply have to believe her but that that lawmaker actually illustrates the problem facing legislators currently trying to outlaw something that they cannot define because what are you then gonna do pass a law saying kids can't feel bad well it turns out yes because that is exactly what tennessee did they passed a law prohibiting any teaching that would cause discomfort guilt anguish or distress solely because of the individual's race or sex which is very broad and you know what you're not going to believe this but i just received another email this second from a third tennessee white girl who says what idiots are writing these laws and how many fictitious children are they gonna make up to justify them p.s i honestly preferred the new zazu and wow what a nice thing to say from a definitely real child and look the thing is we have talked before on this show about the multiple problems with teaching kids a sanitized version of us history and how as far back as a century ago groups like the united daughters of the confederacy were reshaping textbooks to downplay its horrors and it seems here we go again i guess because lawmakers are trying to micromanage school curriculums sometimes pretty ineptly a bill proposed in virginia contains a section listing some of the founding documents that is okay to teach a list that includes the declaration of independence the constitution and the first debate between abraham lincoln and frederick douglass which i hope you know is not a thing that happened the lincoln douglas debates were of course between senator stephen douglas and his opponent a 2020 lincoln navigator so read your history everyone facts matter here but maybe the most insulting distortion of history is in the quote that every single anti-crt activist seems to love to invoke you think about what mlk uh stood for he said he didn't want people judged on the color of their skin but on the content of their character you know i i believe it was martin luther king said you know when he was talking about his children that he didn't want his children to be judged on the color of their skin but by the content of their character content of their character not by the color of their skin content of our character not the color of our skin and the immortal words of dr martin luther king ring in our ears that we must judge others not by the color of their skin by the content of their character the left wants us to constantly focus on skin color it's destructive martin luther king jr is rolling over in his grave yeah you know what i bet he is actually in fact i'm pretty sure every time someone uses his words that way dr king's illustrious remains spin fast enough to power the eastern seaboards here is the thing though that dream speech was clearly an aspirational goal not a description of things as they stood and in fact king himself later put a pretty major asterisk on it i must confess that that dream that i had that day has many points turned into a nightmare and i've come to see that we have many more difficult days ahead and some of the old optimism was a little superficial and now it must be tempered with a solid realism yeah exactly and in a book published that same year he wrote that while the majority of white americans consider themselves sincerely committed to justice for the negro and they believe that american society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class utopia embodying racial harmony unfortunately this is a fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity so while it is clearly very appealing to create a version of history where mlk was a kind figure who existed solely to help white people win arguments the truth is he later reflected on his own message and challenged white people to look more deeply at themselves and that is something the kids should absolutely be learning about in school but the problem is they won't if these laws continue a white parent could plausibly claim that reading mlk's writing made their child feel discomfort on the basis of their race and some of these laws seem designed to bend schools curriculums to the sensibilities of the most conservative alarmed parents in florida ron desantis is pushing a stop woke act that was him unveiling it just a minute ago with chris ruffo by the way right behind him and that would give parents private right of action to sue if they think their kids are being taught crt and all of these laws are already having chilling effects book bans are on the rise around the country and one oklahoma school district has even told teachers simply to avoid using terms like diversity and white privilege and look here's the thing you can ban all the books you want you can try and legislate it away but as any black woman on the bachelor can tell you talking about race is unavoidable and it is not just unavoidable it's essential especially in the places where people are most panicked about crt and this actually brings us all the way back to where this story began in loudoun county virginia where that school board meeting got so very far out of hand here is one of the leaders of the anti-crt push there explaining just why she is so fiercely opposed to it being taught in loudoun county this is the wealthiest county in the country there's not a lot of racism there are silly people that say stupid things but if you talk about it less you're gonna notice that division less i don't look at the person based on their skin color i look at them based on their character okay so there's a lot of obvious red flags there from confidently asserting there's not a lot of racism here to the i don't see skin color to the you won't notice division so much if you just don't talk about it and hey if the problem with racism in america was only it's bumming patty mendes out then yeah shutting up about it would probably solve the whole issue but guess how long it takes for that conversation to take a real turn i think there are a lot of there are probably plenty of people that would agree with exactly that but just to be fair on the other side there are people especially young black men for example would say i would love to not be judged on the color of my skin do you think it's more on the color of their skin or their actions how they're dressed how they perceive how they respect others if you have a kid that's pulled over by a cop does it really matter what color they are or is it the respect that they give to that police officer wow when you respond to someone mentioning young black men would like to be treated better by automatically envisioning them dressed terribly and acting disrespectfully while being arrested by the police you are telling on yourself patty you are snitching on your very soul and as for her claim there that there is not a lot of racism in loudoun county you probably already assumed that that was but you should know an assessment of public schools there found that it was shocking the extent to which students report the use of the n-word and i think as a society we've now agreed white people should not be using the n-word a shocking number of times unless that is they have a lucrative podcast deal with spotify but that is absolutely it and all of this brings us to the main point here that for all the laws being passed to prevent discomfort or anguish on account of an individual's race whose discomfort exactly are we prioritizing here because kids of color can tell you they don't get a choice do not talk about race and have it go away like this graduate of loudoun county schools i do understand that many parents don't want their children learning about race at such a young age but i beg to differ in that sense we learn about race every day when we're the only colored kid in our classrooms or when we're learning about slavery and all the heads turn to us so one way or another one group of students will learn about race before another so we believe that it would be equitable if all students learned about race in the same context so we can work together on it to improve our future yeah children of color learn about race from a very young age from realizing you celebrate different holidays or get different safety talks or the first time you go to a white friend's house and you served a casserole you realize very quickly in that moment we are different people with different cultures so look by this point it should be pretty clear the debate around critical race theory is both very loud and very very dumb but unfortunately it is important to engage with it because if we don't the end point that we are heading toward is that honest discussions of race will be shut out of public schools even as some parents off to voucher academies where their kids can learn a version of history that's basically antebellum fan fiction and i'm not saying the discussions on race will always be comfortable for everyone in a classroom but think about it like this when was learning and growing as a person ever really comfortable the thing to do here isn't to run from those discussions or past laws banning them it is to learn how to have them better because for generation after generation we've told school kids fairy tales about race in this country and maybe it's time we stop doing that because all it's done so far is get us to the point that we're at right now with full-grown adults insisting america can't be racist because we elected obama twice that racism will go away if we just don't mention it and that martin luther king's i have a dream speech wasn't an aspiration we have yet to fulfill but some kind of magic spell that ended prejudice then and there that is our show thank you so much for watching we'll see you next week good night john john i've got more stories okay in third grade we did an oregon trail unit my teacher put me and the other black kid in the class together and said we were a family of freed slaves heading west to make our fortune like what am i supposed to do with that in sixth grade i told my teacher that reading role of thunder hear my cry made me uncomfortable and she told me it all works out in the end okay in the end one of the characters almost gets lynched howas almost gets lynched a happy ending for ella's island day i said my family didn't immigrate and we don't know where in africa we're from and my teacher said well guess sounds like you guess there were only two black kids in the whole class and we were the freed slaves going west okay [Music] you

[Music] moving on our main story tonight concerns school it's the only setting in which a child dissecting a frog is not an immediate red flag we teach kids a lot in school from reading to long division to how to play the recorder for some reason but recently there has been a lot of concern over one particular thing that people worry that kids are learning critical race theory is being taught in our schools critical race theory is bunk critical race theory is a lie from the first word to the last from start to finish racist critical race theory critical race theory critical race theory in the schools and the wokeness let me tell you right now critical race theory is bigoted it is a lie and it is every bit as racist as the klansmen in white sheets i do not like that ted cruz man i do not like him shouting clan i do not like him in a room i do not like him in cancun i do not like him playing ball i do not like his face at all i wish he'd lose his cushy job that man ted cruz is a  knob but here's the thing it is true you have probably heard people yelling about critical race theory on tv for more than a year now and people have been listening to that noise especially judging by what's been happening at school board meetings across the country [Applause] the western culture and values that brought forth christianity in the founding documents are being called evil and racist i am not co-parenting with the government it is not your job to force these ideas onto my child the narrative in this country is that we're all inherently racist and i'm about sick of it it's a marxist ideology and we all know it all of these lessons have the intent to make our children feel disgust towards our nation this country isn't even a racist country we elected obama for two times wait hold on hold on america can't be racist because of obama i don't know if you remember the 2008 election but things got pretty racist back then people kept saying he was born in kenya people said he was a secret muslim and then a few years later we elected that people president so let's just agree to disagree on that one shall we that first meeting was in loudoun county virginia and it got so out of hand that the meeting was shut down early and one guy passionately railing against crt was arrested for trespassing only to pop up on tugger carlson the very next day so clearly a lot of people are getting very mad about critical race theory right now and instinctively you probably know it's a manufactured panic but the fact is the fear around it is having real effects last year glenn younkin won the governor's race in virginia after repeatedly promising that on his first day in office he'd ban crt from being taught in schools multiple states have passed laws outlawing the teaching of it and republicans are likely to make it a major focus of the midterms when it comes to critical race theory think of it like rihanna's pregnancy even if you think it has nothing to do with you believe me you're going to be hearing a lot about it this year so given that we thought tonight we take a step back and look at what critical race theory is and isn't why the panic around it has spread and what the consequences might be for everyone involved and i realize some of you may already know what crt is after all explainers honest have become one of the most common sites on the internet along with mediocre wordle scores and ugly monkey jpegs sold by and four but but many are still very confused a recent survey found that an overwhelming majority of u.s residents have a hard time articulating exactly what crt is and that even goes for some of those who've been yelling about it the loudest i i've never figured out what a critical race theory is to be totally honest after a year of talking about it they're teaching that some races are morally superior to others that some are inherently sinful and some are inherently saintly and that's immoral to teach that because it's wrong wow i don't know if i've ever seen a person confidently complain about something just seconds after admitting they don't know about it look i've never figured out how a car engine works to be honest but there's a chimpanzee under the hood turning a crank and when you press the accelerator it pokes it with a sharp stick and makes him crank faster and it's immoral to do that because it's wrong but obviously that is not what critical race theory is it's the name given to a body of legal scholarship that began in the 1970s that attempted to understand why racism and inequality persisted after the civil rights movement the core idea is that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice but also something that is embedded in legal systems and policies as for tucker's notion that it teaches that some races are superior to others or that parents claim that it teaches kids to hate america none of that is remotely true as kimberley crenshaw one of crt's leading scholars points out critic cory's theory just says let's pay attention to what has happened in this country and how what has happened in this country is continuing to create differential outcomes so we can become that country that we say we are so critically siri is not anti-patriotic in fact it is more patriotic than those who are opposed to it because we believe in the 13th and the 14th and the 15th amendment we believe in the promises of equality and we know we can't get there if we can't confront and talk honestly about inequality yeah she's right and incidentally if you've just found yourself there wondering what the 13th 14th and 15th amendments are that alone might be a good sign that we don't talk about this stuff in schools enough and to be clear seot is graduate level legal theory so unless your five-year-old is currently pursuing a law degree they're not reading kimberley crenshaw but critics of it argue that the ideas behind crt are being taught in schools and often present a hyperbolically distorted version of what those ideas are and a key person here is this man a conservative activist named christopher ruffo he claims crt is actually a revolutionary program that would overturn the principles of the declaration and destroy the remaining structure of the constitution which it just isn't it isn't that but in the wake of the george floyd protests just as america was beginning to grapple with systemic racism fox news began featuring roofo on air a lot as part of their efforts to swing that pendulum back hard and in one appearance he pointed to diversity trainings in government as evidence of crt's influence and he spoke directly to president trump through the camera about what he wanted to see happen the president at the white house it's within their authority and power to immediately issue an executive order abolishing critical race theory trainings from the federal government and i call on the president to immediately issue this executive order and and stamp out this destructive divisive pseudo-scientific ideology at its root now did trump see that i don't know is the pope a catholic is the reason big died the fact that carrie didn't call 9-1-1 fast enough the answer to all those questions is yes and also she was right not to do it no big loss because mark meadows trump's chief of staff has since revealed president trump saw that interview and when roofo said i call on the president to immediately issue this executive order quote that's what we did which is weird there should be more steps than that it shouldn't just go one yell your wish at the president then two it happens ideally you want an executive branch that's a little more complicated than  siri and with that crt or crucially rufo's definition of it was suddenly absolutely everywhere fox news kept pushing it mentioning the term critical race theory nearly 5 000 times last year alone and the network zeroed in on its supposed use in schools with ruffo telling fox's audience that crt has really become the default ideology of the public education system and what rufo has been cleverly doing is cherry picking the worst examples that he can find of lessons in classrooms or training materials for teachers and saying that is crt and he's openly admitted that he's been engaged in a deliberate rebranding exercise tweeting we have successfully frozen their brand critical race theory into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions the goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think critical race theory and the thing is it worked because whenever you hear crt now you are not hearing about the academic discipline you're hearing about a category so broad it encompasses both the craziest thing in the newspaper and also crucially any conversation about race that someone does not want to have and look i am not saying discussing race in a classroom is easy or even always done well experts in this field will readily admit that now have you seen bad implementations of this of course right that's like asking have i seen a bad math lesson right like yes teachers are humans especially as we're trying to figure out how to teach about race and racism exactly teachers are human and can make mistakes frankly i'm surprised they don't make more they wake up insanely early and spend all day getting low-key roasted by teenagers for an amount of money best described as completely harrowing the very fact any student in america knows what a covalent bond is is a miracle and every adult involved deserves the congressional medal of honor and the fact is you can find examples of clumsy shitty lessons one school used a privilege bingo card which sure seems like a glib way to handle a very serious subject another classic lesson over the years has been to teach about prejudice metaphorically by dividing a classroom up by eye color with brown eyed people for instance being the lowest tier and then being treated terribly and if you do that in a diverse classroom and think for even a second about who is more likely to have brown eyes you can probably immediately see just how badly that lesson could go that actually happened in at least one school in the chicago area and the reason i know that is that this kid was in the class that day and she's one of our writers now ali what did you think of that lesson it was pretty up yeah yeah i bet it was but the fact is many educators are working very hard to find age-appropriate ways to talk about race and racism in the classroom and if you do it right you don't stop at the civil rights movement you tell the story all the way to the present day which kids want and need they have questions about what they can see with their own eyes and they deserve good answers and it is frankly far better for them to have these discussions in a supportive educational environment rather than the potential alternative during a screaming match at thanksgiving but the panic over crt threatens to shut those conversations down and that is not all it is likely to do because some pushing this panic the hardest are actually using it to advance a much bigger agenda that they've wanted for a very long time and that is school choice basically letting parents take tax dollars afforded to the public schooling of their kid and use them at any school they like here is chris ruffo again laying out that exact strategy first uh we have to just get it out of schools we have to ban it and abolish it but in the long term what we need to do is give every parent in this country a right to exit failing institutions no child should be trapped in a failing public school that violates his sense of conscience that violates the values of the parents every parent should take those education dollars anywhere that they wish school choice will liberate people it will empower people and it will actually depolarize some of these national fights that we've seen oh so you're doing all of this to tone down part of that fight are you chris very cool of you you've probably noticed that general wave of calm chill vibes sweeping the nation lately if there is one word i would use to describe every image coming out of a school board meeting these days it is depolarized look it is not just rufo conservative organizations that have long pushed for school choice like the heritage foundation and freedom works have poured money into this fight and of course no school choice push would be complete without lifelong rich person and occasional education secretary betsy devos who wrote an op-ed titled let's liberate kids from race indoctrination with school choice and you should know this is just nothing new there is a long history of responding to racial panic with a push for school choice in fact the roots of the school choice movement trace back to the brown versus board of education decision when southern states adopted voucher programs to facilitate the creation of private schools called segregation academies and some of those taking advantage of school choice today sure seem to be doing some heavy indoctrination of their own take florida it is one of the states that allows public money to go to voucher schools and a few years back an investigation into some of them found commonly used textbooks that downplayed the horrors of slavery one of them is this one america land i love which has all the kind of  that you would expect the civil war was fought for states rights but it also states that during the antebellum period the slave who knew christ had more freedom than a free person who did not know the savior which is not just offensive it is profoundly stupid any kid reading that absolute trombone slide of a sentence would instantly dropped two full grades it sounds less like something you'd find in a textbook and more like something you'd find crocheted on a throw pillow in paula dean's living room so if you want to talk about racial indoctrination of school kids this might be a better place to start but the thing is even a manufactured panic is a panic those parents at school board meetings are genuinely angry and as any little league coach knows once you reach a critical mass of angry white parents there will be consequences in texas this high school principal was forced out of his job after being accused at a school board meeting of promoting crt by someone who wasn't even a parent at his school and in tennessee this current affairs teacher was fired for not giving varying points of view after he gave students a tanahassee coat article and showed them kyla janae lacy's poem white privilege and he actually had a pretty decent response to that criticism i think to me the varying viewpoint is kyla janet lacey and is tanahasi coates those are perspectives that my students aren't exposed to on a daily basis because you know we live in that white dominant evangelical environment right when you live in a mostly white environment the voices of black people can be the varying point of view and not just on current events either on lots of things that white people might otherwise assume even trivial ones like it's okay to go out in a blizzard in shorts and if i argue with this cop i can probably get out of a ticket and time travel would be a fun and stress-free activity the 1930s i can't wait to look around unfortunately though those situations are now only likely to become more common since january of last year 37 states have introduced bills or taken other steps that would restrict teaching critical race theory or limit how teachers can discuss racism and the justification for these has often been more than a little flimsy here is one tennessee lawmaker explaining why he was pushing for his state's bill listen to the following quotes from an email forwarded to me concerning a seven-year-old girl in williamson county the little girl told her mother i'm ashamed that i'm white the daughter then asked her mother is there something wrong with me why am i hated so much okay i hear that i really do but the thing to do in that situation isn't to pass a law limiting the discussion of race in the classroom is to ask literally one follow-up question like what was happening to make you think the other kids hate you or did any adults step in when you felt this way or do you even exist because you should know when reporters looked into this they found no parent had come forward to that school's principal teachers or district officials with that complaint and administrators there weren't able to pinpoint any students who might be upset or lessons that could have been upsetting and if that is how we are arguing things now i should probably mention that i too just so happen to have an email forward from a different little white girl way cuter than the first one by the way who said that that first girl story is complete  and the thing is by tennessee law it seems i simply have to believe her but that that lawmaker actually illustrates the problem facing legislators currently trying to outlaw something that they cannot define because what are you then gonna do pass a law saying kids can't feel bad well it turns out yes because that is exactly what tennessee did they passed a law prohibiting any teaching that would cause discomfort guilt anguish or distress solely because of the individual's race or sex which is very broad and you know what you're not going to believe this but i just received another email this second from a third tennessee white girl who says what idiots are writing these laws and how many fictitious children are they gonna make up to justify them p.s i honestly preferred the new zazu and wow what a nice thing to say from a definitely real child and look the thing is we have talked before on this show about the multiple problems with teaching kids a sanitized version of us history and how as far back as a century ago groups like the united daughters of the confederacy were reshaping textbooks to downplay its horrors and it seems here we go again i guess because lawmakers are trying to micromanage school curriculums sometimes pretty ineptly a bill proposed in virginia contains a section listing some of the founding documents that is okay to teach a list that includes the declaration of independence the constitution and the first debate between abraham lincoln and frederick douglass which i hope you know is not a thing that happened the lincoln douglas debates were of course between senator stephen douglas and his opponent a 2020 lincoln navigator so read your history everyone facts matter here but maybe the most insulting distortion of history is in the quote that every single anti-crt activist seems to love to invoke you think about what mlk uh stood for he said he didn't want people judged on the color of their skin but on the content of their character you know i i believe it was martin luther king said you know when he was talking about his children that he didn't want his children to be judged on the color of their skin but by the content of their character content of their character not by the color of their skin content of our character not the color of our skin and the immortal words of dr martin luther king ring in our ears that we must judge others not by the color of their skin by the content of their character the left wants us to constantly focus on skin color it's destructive martin luther king jr is rolling over in his grave yeah you know what i bet he is actually in fact i'm pretty sure every time someone uses his words that way dr king's illustrious remains spin fast enough to power the eastern seaboards here is the thing though that dream speech was clearly an aspirational goal not a description of things as they stood and in fact king himself later put a pretty major asterisk on it i must confess that that dream that i had that day has many points turned into a nightmare and i've come to see that we have many more difficult days ahead and some of the old optimism was a little superficial and now it must be tempered with a solid realism yeah exactly and in a book published that same year he wrote that while the majority of white americans consider themselves sincerely committed to justice for the negro and they believe that american society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class utopia embodying racial harmony unfortunately this is a fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity so while it is clearly very appealing to create a version of history where mlk was a kind figure who existed solely to help white people win arguments the truth is he later reflected on his own message and challenged white people to look more deeply at themselves and that is something the kids should absolutely be learning about in school but the problem is they won't if these laws continue a white parent could plausibly claim that reading mlk's writing made their child feel discomfort on the basis of their race and some of these laws seem designed to bend schools curriculums to the sensibilities of the most conservative alarmed parents in florida ron desantis is pushing a stop woke act that was him unveiling it just a minute ago with chris ruffo by the way right behind him and that would give parents private right of action to sue if they think their kids are being taught crt and all of these laws are already having chilling effects book bans are on the rise around the country and one oklahoma school district has even told teachers simply to avoid using terms like diversity and white privilege and look here's the thing you can ban all the books you want you can try and legislate it away but as any black woman on the bachelor can tell you talking about race is unavoidable and it is not just unavoidable it's essential especially in the places where people are most panicked about crt and this actually brings us all the way back to where this story began in loudoun county virginia where that school board meeting got so very far out of hand here is one of the leaders of the anti-crt push there explaining just why she is so fiercely opposed to it being taught in loudoun county this is the wealthiest county in the country there's not a lot of racism there are silly people that say stupid things but if you talk about it less you're gonna notice that division less i don't look at the person based on their skin color i look at them based on their character okay so there's a lot of obvious red flags there from confidently asserting there's not a lot of racism here to the i don't see skin color to the you won't notice division so much if you just don't talk about it and hey if the problem with racism in america was only it's bumming patty mendes out then yeah shutting up about it would probably solve the whole issue but guess how long it takes for that conversation to take a real turn i think there are a lot of there are probably plenty of people that would agree with exactly that but just to be fair on the other side there are people especially young black men for example would say i would love to not be judged on the color of my skin do you think it's more on the color of their skin or their actions how they're dressed how they perceive how they respect others if you have a kid that's pulled over by a cop does it really matter what color they are or is it the respect that they give to that police officer wow when you respond to someone mentioning young black men would like to be treated better by automatically envisioning them dressed terribly and acting disrespectfully while being arrested by the police you are telling on yourself patty you are snitching on your very soul and as for her claim there that there is not a lot of racism in loudoun county you probably already assumed that that was but you should know an assessment of public schools there found that it was shocking the extent to which students report the use of the n-word and i think as a society we've now agreed white people should not be using the n-word a shocking number of times unless that is they have a lucrative podcast deal with spotify but that is absolutely it and all of this brings us to the main point here that for all the laws being passed to prevent discomfort or anguish on account of an individual's race whose discomfort exactly are we prioritizing here because kids of color can tell you they don't get a choice do not talk about race and have it go away like this graduate of loudoun county schools i do understand that many parents don't want their children learning about race at such a young age but i beg to differ in that sense we learn about race every day when we're the only colored kid in our classrooms or when we're learning about slavery and all the heads turn to us so one way or another one group of students will learn about race before another so we believe that it would be equitable if all students learned about race in the same context so we can work together on it to improve our future yeah children of color learn about race from a very young age from realizing you celebrate different holidays or get different safety talks or the first time you go to a white friend's house and you served a casserole you realize very quickly in that moment we are different people with different cultures so look by this point it should be pretty clear the debate around critical race theory is both very loud and very very dumb but unfortunately it is important to engage with it because if we don't the end point that we are heading toward is that honest discussions of race will be shut out of public schools even as some parents off to voucher academies where their kids can learn a version of history that's basically antebellum fan fiction and i'm not saying the discussions on race will always be comfortable for everyone in a classroom but think about it like this when was learning and growing as a person ever really comfortable the thing to do here isn't to run from those discussions or past laws banning them it is to learn how to have them better because for generation after generation we've told school kids fairy tales about race in this country and maybe it's time we stop doing that because all it's done so far is get us to the point that we're at right now with full-grown adults insisting america can't be racist because we elected obama twice that racism will go away if we just don't mention it and that martin luther king's i have a dream speech wasn't an aspiration we have yet to fulfill but some kind of magic spell that ended prejudice then and there that is our show thank you so much for watching we'll see you next week good night john john i've got more stories okay in third grade we did an oregon trail unit my teacher put me and the other black kid in the class together and said we were a family of freed slaves heading west to make our fortune like what am i supposed to do with that in sixth grade i told my teacher that reading role of thunder hear my cry made me uncomfortable and she told me it all works out in the end okay in the end one of the characters almost gets lynched howas almost gets lynched a happy ending for ella's island day i said my family didn't immigrate and we don't know where in africa we're from and my teacher said well guess sounds like you guess there were only two black kids in the whole class and we were the freed slaves going west okay [Music] you

Transcript for:Critical Race Theory and Its Educational Impact

Transcript for:
Critical Race Theory and Its Educational Impact