Who’s Afraid of Critical Race Theory? Those Who Don’t Know What It Is

Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on May 11, 2021

“Critical Race Theory implies that all people who were born with white skin are racist,” she wrote. “And all whites have power because of their skin color and have used that power to hold back people of color. This is patently false. Tax dollars should not be used to foster lies, division and hatred.”

She also decried, as numerous political conservatives do, The New York Times’ 1619 Project, which recounts the nation’s history as beginning in 1619 when the first slaves were brought to our shores, instead of in 1776.

“The truth is that colonists broke free of England’s restrictive monarchy to form an independent republic that recognized our God-given civil liberties,” she wrote.

Yes, except they also withheld the same rights from slaves, women and Native Americans, among others. Those groups were added later after hard-won campaigns, the Civil War and the Constitution’s amendment process.

We lose a lot if we only want to think about the heroic and joyful side of our nation’s history. Former Sen. Rick Santorum, a Pennsylvania Republican and twice-failed candidate for his party’s presidential nomination, recently demonstrated that when he got carried away while speaking to the Standing Up for Faith and Freedom Conference.

“We came here and created a blank slate,” he said. “We birthed a nation from nothing.”

As for those Indigenous folks who were here first, he said, “There isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.”

That’s a broad and stunningly ignorant narrative about Indigenous Americans, who comprise more than 500 federally recognized tribal nations, with their own languages, history, government and religious traditions. He later acknowledged that he misspoke.

But Donald Trump wasn’t misspeaking when, as president, he instructed federal agencies to end racial sensitivity trainings that address topics such as white privilege and CRT, calling the topics “divisive, anti-American propaganda.” President Joe Biden reversed that order.

He and Vice President Kamala Harris later declared in answering a question that has sprung out of the anti-CRT backlash that, no, they don’t believe we live in a “racist nation.”

Neither do I, compared to, say, apartheid-era South Africa and other countries from which I have reported. But if you ask do we have too many racists still around and too much of the legacy of slavery and other systemic racism, I’d give another answer.

That’s just reality. As I’ve often said, race talk is a lot like sex talk: everybody thinks they’re expert at it but we’re reluctant to talk about it in mixed company or in front of children. Real critical race theory is better suited to graduate students than kids. But we don’t do ourselves any favors by hiding good information about this nation’s diversity that can help all of us to better appreciate the “united” in the United States.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)