Why CRT should be a central focus in all of education, and why white people need to get over themselves.

What I’m listening to: ENERGY by Beyoncé

In this post: Thoughts on writing fiction based in psychological truths.

Last week: A my-life-as-a-writer update & tales from the white savior crypt.

Next week: Thoughts on writing fiction based in psychological truths.

Hi folks,

Last week, I wrote about a Karen extraordinaire claiming to be “victimized” by CRT in schools. This week, I’d like to go over the sheer lunacy of that claim and to honor Beyonce’s new album which is dedicated to Black ball culture (drag), by saying when Karens say they feel “victimized” by CRT, they are indeed, terrorists. But more on nice white lady terrorists next week, as my drag of this ratchet person continues. 

As promised, here’s my snark-filled take on this whole boogeyman of CRT in the classrooms that Republicans are fond of touting about. 

Jelani Cobb best sums up how ignorant republicans have defined CRT for their mostly lower-socio economic and under-educated as well white base: 

"C.R.T. has been defined as Black-supremacist racism, false history, and the terrible apotheosis of wokeness.”

Even seemingly “non biased” articles about CRT in schools of late have a distinct flavor of white hysterics to them. In this article from last week in EdWeek, a G.W.M. writes of the current educational environment:

“The old reform coalition expired, giving rise to an education landscape dominated by woke teacher trainers, “anti-racist” foundations, and angry right-wing activists—all consumed by contempt for the other side and spoiling for a fight.”

This GWM writes with a nostalgia for the charter school “reform coalition” movement that is as dangerous as it is factually incorrect (again, if only we actually taught CRT in schools: CRT applied to the entire T.F.A. organization sheds some deeply troubling light on the real reasons for its assumed white saviors). 

Also, “spoiling for a fight?” Please. Allow me to turn to the next part of this week’s NSFS: 

What is Critical Race Theory? 

According to this NYT article: “CRT theorists reject the philosophy of “colorblindness.” They acknowledge the stark racial disparities that have persisted in the United States despite decades of civil rights reforms, and they raise structural questions about how racist hierarchies are enforced, even among people with good intentions.”Who would have a problem with that? Well, those who financially benefit from racist hierarchies, for starters. And not least the GWM in laments the rise of “Woke” teachers spoiling everything by egging the alt-Right on. Here’s a tweet posted from @Mocada (museum of the African diaspora in Brooklyn, which so happens to be my favorite NYC museum) about how history keeps repeating itself because we’re not teaching it:

A Fun True Story about Derrick Bell, C.R.T. in Schools:

In the New Yorker article, “The Man Behind Critical Race Theory,” Jelani Cobb profiles the civil rights attorney Derrick Bell. He advocated to end school segregation, but after seeing what the south did in reaction, he would later go on to doubt the efficacy of school integration. After Brown v BOE, white flight happened from the public schools, effectively keeping segregation in-tact in all but name. 

Receipt: Emily Richmond’s Atlantic piece, “Schools are more segregated today than during the late 1960s.” June 11, 2012. As an update: shit’s gotten worse since charter school proliferation took off around the same time as this article was written. Smh.

Derrick Bell would spend the second half of his career as an academic, where he would come to the conclusion that, “racism is so deeply rooted in the makeup of American society that it has been able to reassert itself after each successful wave of reform aimed at eliminating it.” It is his ideas that came to form the discipline now known as CRT, which chronicles the contradictions of antidiscrimination laws and the complexities of legal advocacy for social justice.

And back then as it is now, Derrick Bell’s fight in the court involves a white school board closing a school in the heart of the Black community of Harmony, Mississippi in 1961 as a direct reaction to Brown V BOE in 1955.  The school had been provided the seed money in 1912 by the philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, whose commitment to Judaism led him to provide financial support to the African American community (Unlike today’s white saviors and impact investors, Rosenwald gave the community a check and let them build the school they desired).

At any rate,  our main man of the week, Derrick Bell enters the picture to try to fight what white people did in the aftermath of Roe v BOE, which was to close the “segregated” Black schools under the cry of reverse-racism or whatever the f racists justified their actions with back in 1961 (screams into the void: reverse racism is a logical fallacy). So, white folks invested in education closed all the Black schools, the ones that philosopher and education activist bell hooks talks about as having such revolutionary potential, bused BIPOC students to white schools, and in the meantime, made sure to enroll their own kids in private school. Never get in the way of a white person making sure their child’s education is better than a BIPOC child’s. (See: hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom)

Bell, in many ways, through his efforts to fight for an equitable education for all students, lived through the revolution of the Civil Rights movement, and lived just long enough to understand the limitations of its achievements. Today, public schools are more segregated than they were during Raegan. But worse than that, the quality of education continues to fall (thx charter schools and the public school boards who made them possible).

Receipt: Emily Richmond’s Atlantic piece, “Schools are more segregated today than during the late 1960s.” June 11, 2012. As an update: shit’s gotten worse since charter school proliferation took off around the same time as this article was written. Smh.

“When people fear critical race theory, it stems from this idea that their children will be indoctrinated somehow. But Bell’s class was the least indoctrinated class I took in law school. We got the most freedom in that class to reach our own conclusions without judgment.”

Nevertheless, white people persisted in ruining shit. It’s been a year since Texas passed a bill that restricts teaching about race in the state’s public schools. Shortly after, a bunch of other shitty states did the same: Oklahoma (ugh), Tennessee (they’re the worst anyway), Idaho (potatoes are white right?), Iowa (they have potatoes too??), New Hampshire (holla @ my racists in the North East), South Carolina (duh), and Arizona (that also tracks).

Receipt: “Anti Critical Race Laws Are Working: Teachers are thinking twice about they talk about race” by Olivia B Waxman. June 30, 2022: Time. 

So, in conclusion, the terrorists are winning. May we all follow the simple adage: What Would Beyoncé Do? 

(she’d def share this newsletter with her friends, for starters :P)