Critical Race Theory (CRT) is controversial today largely because no one understands it. It is being used as a stand-in for the wide range of issues surrounding race in America. In a way, CRT is to social and political science as Einstein's Relativity is to Physics. Both are academic and philosophical attempts to understand a reality that lies hidden from normal personal experience. Unless you work with high-energy particle accelerators or with deep-space radio astronomy, you will never meet up with Einstein's weird science. Likewise, unless you are writing a city's zoning laws or managing a mortgage company's lending standards, you will not see under the covers of America's hidden constraints on its non-white citizens.
So what are we to make of the sudden surge of attempted legislation that is aiming to prevent schools from exposing students to CRT? It may be partly due to the perfect storm of the George Floyd murder conviction of Derek Chauvin and the many related cases of police misconduct toward minorities, met with the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre as it displayed evidence of an awful history that has been swept under the rug.
Since the killing of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of George Zimmerman for that, there have been a series of other killings of Blacks that have gone remarkably unpunished. If there is no clear video evidence, there is no accountability. The constant rationalizations (he was selling loose cigarettes, he wasn't following orders, etc) finally fell apart with the Floyd murder.
Then there was Tulsa. As that anniversary came closer, we heard a chorus of shock and confusion from ordinary people in all corners of the US. "Why didn't my high school history teacher ever mention anything like this?" A simple Google search now shows us dozens of similar massacres, wiping out dozens of communities of Black citizens throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Some of those even happened in the NORTH!
The obvious truth of these revelations has made the cynical "fake news" epithet obsolete. Those who benefit from the status quo are now forced to find a way to put the genie of reality back in the lamp. This is where legislation to prevent the "indoctrination of youth" with the Critical Race Theory is coming from. The defenders of the status quo are even summoning the ghost of Joe McCarthy by labeling CRT as "Marxist".
Will the legislated suppression of America's true history and its present racial reality succeed? I'm not sure. This is one potent genie that may resist its return to the lamp. A 9-minute video of a Black man dying under a police officer's knee and the bulldozers in Tulsa exhuming mass graves are pretty compelling to most of us. The eventual court cases where the status quo defenders attempt to enforce their "gag orders" could be the 21st Century equivalent of the "Scopes Monkey Trial", leaving the CRT-banning legislators as a laughing stock in front of the nation.
We can dearly hope.
