Reparations Daily (ish) Vol. 5
The Case for "Critical Race Theory"
Happy Friday my people! We (almost) did it Joe! We had a goal of reaching 100 subscribers in our first two weeks and we came pretty close. I appreciate each and every one of you because our open rate is over 60 percent, and that means a lot to me.
Today’s hot take will focus on the conservative attack on ‘critical race theory,’ which is really just an extension of " “fake news,” and their war on the truth. It’s beyond disappointing to see state after state take aim at any education involving topics of race. It is no mistake that this spike in the attention of critical race theory comes at the same time that the creator of the 1619 project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, was denied tenure after being awarded a position at the University of North Carolina that typically provides it.
Conservatives leveraged this opportunity to further denounce the 1619 Project and posit “critical race theory,” as a danger to white children. I know you signed up for a newsletter about reparations and the racial wealth gap so I’ll explain critical race theory’s relation to reparations in the Hot Takes section.
The big reparations news today is in the Citizen-Times which reported that the Asheville city council allocated $2.1 million for reparations, out of their city budget and recognized June 19th as an official city holiday. This small amount of money is a perfect example of why a reparations effort must be led at the federal level.
With that,
Here’s volume 5 of Reparations Daily (ish)
National News
The Hill: Slavery makes a weak case for California's modern-day reparations
Center for American Progress: Biden’s Tax Enforcement Overhaul Would Be A Positive Step Toward Racial Equity
ACLU: Canceling Student Debt Can Help Build Black Women’s Futures
TIME: The Letter in Which Lincoln Debated the Morality of Slavery With Himself
WNYC: Biden Rolls Out Plans for Closing Racial Wealth Gap, Advocates See More Work to Be Done
CNBC: How Trump ignited the fight over critical race theory in schools
Washington Post: What is critical race theory, and why do Republicans want to ban it in schools?
New Yorker: What Do Conservatives Fear About Critical Race Theory?
Vox: Is there an uncontroversial way to teach America’s racist history?
USA Today: ‘Children deserve to be taught’: Teachers plan protests over laws restricting racism lessons in schools
Slate: A Word … With Jason Johnson
Regional News
Citizen-Times: Asheville recognizes Juneteenth, commits $2.1M for reparations
Pix 11: New York moves closer to slavery reparations
Boston Herald: Boston City Council to mull reparations for slavery
Jezebel: Connecticut Has Found a Novel Method to Close the Racial Wealth Gap
East Bay Times: California’s first-in-the-nation reparations committee confronts harms of slavery, debates direct payments
Mass Live: Massachusetts set to recognize Juneteenth as official state holiday
WBTW: Legislation introduced to ban critical race theory in South Carolina
Courier-Journal: Republicans want to criminalize teaching students about racism. Here's why
Hot Takes
New Yorker: What Do Conservatives Fear About Critical Race Theory?
Where to even start? If you google search ‘critical race theory,’ you’ll be met with an overwhelming number of articles on the multiple states trying to ban the topic from being taught in schools. If you type in critical race theory in the search bar on Twitter you’ll be met with a host of tweets from conservative profiles saying that CRT “teaches kids to hate our country and to hate each other,” or that CRT is “communist derived,” or that it’s part of the attempt of the left to “inject socialism into every part of our lives.” I can’t help but look in awe at how good conservatives are at controlling a narrative, something that progressives just can’t seem to do.
This New Yorker piece does a great job of outlining where this controversy all started. A bill in Texas, HB 3979, has become the model for state legislatures across the country as it proposes to teach the “founding documents,” in Texas public schools and ban teachers from teaching the “1619 project, which emphasizes the role of structural racism in American history.” But as the New Yorker article points out, the term “critical race theory,” does not appear in the text of the bill at all.
What is critical race theory? It is an idea that was coined and popularized by legal scholars like Derrick Bell and Kimberle Crenshaw which sought to examine how white supremacy as a legal, cultural, and political condition is reproduced and maintained within the laws and policies in the United States. It is an extraordinarily complex school of thought that is not taught in public schools and barely taught outside of prestigious law schools. Bell believed that any attempt to achieve racial equality through the legal system was destined to fail because the legal system was the primary mechanism used for maintaining a white supremacist social order. There are a few tenets to critical race theory:
Race is a central component of our laws and policies
The perspectives of people of color have had little influence on our laws and policies
The incrementalist approach has not worked
The importance of intersectionality
Kids are not being taught critical race theory. They are barely being taught an accurate history of the United States. Tom Hanks just wrote an op-ed about how he was never taught about the Tulsa massacre, so this idea that children are being taught complex ideas about race and racism is a falsehood.
The reason for the uproar is not because critical race theory is being taught in schools but because the 1619 project frames the history of America accurately, which is something that we have never done in this country.
In a recent interview with Vox, Author Jarvis Givens states that “any approach to framing history is going to have some political commitments baked into the narrative. The choices we make about what to highlight or omit, all of that reflect certain values and biases.”
Looking at some stats, it’s clear what the dominant narrative about race and racism has been in the United States. A Southern Poverty Law Center report found that what students are taught about slavery is “fragmentary, without context, and worst of all, sentimentalized or sanitized.” The report found:
Only 8 percent of high school seniors surveyed could identify slavery as the central issue of the Civil War
68 percent of those surveyed did not know it took a constitutional amendment to formally end slavery
58 percent of teachers found the textbooks they used were inadequate to teach the topic of slavery to their students
There was an overemphasis on figures such as Frederick Douglass and the Emancipation Proclamation and little understanding of how slave labor built the nation
Slavery is taught as an exclusively Southern institution and rarely acknowledged alongside white supremacy
The Idaho legislature passed a bill that would “bar institutions of public education from compelling students to personally affirm, adopt, or adhere, to specific beliefs about race, sex, or religion.” The texts of these bills are intentionally ambiguous and seek to shield white students from any topic related to race (and in Idaho’s case sex or religion).
The GOP has really outdone themselves this time. They have managed to rally support around banning anything concerning race while demonizing cancel culture at the same time. It’s both applaudable and laughable.
How is this fight related to reparations and closing the racial wealth gap? Well, the GOP is launching yet another battle in the cultural wars to shift the narrative around race in this country. Because this country is so steeped in anti-Blackness, for a federal reparations package to pass, the social and cultural atmosphere regarding race will have to be pushed to a point we’ve never encountered in the United States. The GOP’s attack aims to keep the status quo intact making reparations at the federal level impossible. Over the next year, we’ll continue to see these attacks on CRT, and the sentiment that “America is not a racist country,” as Senator Tim Scott stated after President Biden’s first joint address to Congress.
The question now is how will the left push back?
With radical love,
Trevor