CRT defenders say its opponents don’t have anything better to offer. They’re mistaken.
CRT defenders say its opponents don’t have anything better to offer. They’re mistaken.
I f the media are to be believed, CRT is just teaching the “history of racism.” If Twitter shock jocks are to be believed, opposition to CRT is tantamount to white nationalism, white-washing history, and depriving our children of learning about the true depravity of America.
Well, I’m against CRT, and I’m a teacher. I’ve written about the ubiquity and radicalism of CRT elsewhere. My intent here is not to discredit CRT directly. Reading CRT scholarship discredits itself. Rather, I present here what I teach to my class to show that accepting CRT and rejecting accurate history is a silly false dichotomy, as so much of this debate is.
I open my classroom to you, dear reader, and I will let you decide. Is this a whitewashing of history?
Right now, my students are reading Frederick Douglass’s autobiography. It’s graphic. It presents to the reader an unfiltered view of slavery. I’ve seen the textbooks with the smiling slaves before; they’re offensive. Douglass’s autobiography is no such euphonious textbook. A brilliant writer, Douglass paints in every graphic detail the torn-skin and broken-body reality of American slavery.
I also have a unit on the Harlem Renaissance. We read a number of poems and short stories; some are comparatively lightly hearted, but others are less so. We listen to Strange Fruit performed by Billie Holiday, a poetic description of a lynching, before reading Claude McKay’s poem If We Must Die. Let me tell you: The silence that follows this pairing seems to last an hour.
My students learn about chattel slavery. They research specific Jim Crow laws. Alongside these lessons, they also read the specific words and rhetoric of Martin Luther King Jr. — not pulled quotes but the entire text of Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Through these authors, they learn about race and history. But they also analyze the rhetoric, repetition, and allusions from King. We revel in individual lines of brilliance from Douglass. We enjoy the imagery and lyricism of Langston Hughes.
A few students tell me every year that they didn’t know some moment in American history was as bad as they say. They didn’t realize how violent slavery or Jim Crow was. But I do not leave it there.
Alongside these poems, stories, and narratives, we also read the Constitution, the Declaration, and excerpts from Federalist No. 10. We read the words of Martin Luther King Jr: “The Emancipation Proclamation was the offspring of the Declaration of Independence.”
They learn that slavery was an abhorrent system that continued in spite of, not in line with, the ideals in our founding documents. They learn from Lincoln that Confederate leaders repudiated these founding ideas as “glittering ideals” and “self-evident lies.” They learn that America allowed a system of injustice for years but did so hypocritically, and that our continued realization of equality is a fulfillment of our Founding, not a rejection of it.
Finally, it’s worth noting that my students also read Shakespeare, the poetry of the romantics, Edgar Allan Poe, and countless classic novels. They discuss the multiple Greek words for love, what to do when they disagree with parents, what causes fights among adolescents, and so many other things. Racism and oppression are themes worth discussing, but so too are love, adolescence, nature, and free will.
There is no one who is against teaching about racism. Rather, people oppose telling our children that America is irreparably broken. People oppose using race as the only means to understand, interrogate, and, in some cases, condemn American history. People oppose rejecting enlightenment ideals such as objectivity and equality before the law. My students learn of America’s sins, yes, and they also learn about their country’s truly exceptional cultural, literary, and philosophical contributions to world history.
These are the things my students learn. That America is imperfect, surely, but a good country, nonetheless. I would also dare to say that it’s simply what my opponents claim they want: an accurate portrayal of America.