THROW OUT THE CRITICAL RACE TRASH AT SCHOOL BOARD MEETINGS

When she was sweet sixteen, my daughter suffered from a severe case of the hormone poisoning which afflicts many American female teenagers.  We had an argument; she was losing it and, knowing that she was losing it, appealed to her right to have her opinion.  I replied that her having a right to an opinion did not mean that her opinion was right.  Squelched, she later admitted that her opinion was wrong.

The same cannot be said of those attending a Las Cruces School Board meeting to protest vigorously against the Public Education Department’s proposed revision of the social studies, or history, curriculum because, so they claim, it incorporates Critical Race Theory.  The fact is that it does not, but they care, not about the fact, only about a racist agenda to impose on schools.  Unlike my daughter, they are not teenagers, but adults, she more mature than they.  She could listen and learn, and admit being wrong; they cannot.  Instead, they bellow, berate, and bully those who have different and better opinions.  Unable to offer facts or make arguments, they call names, shout slogans, and thump Bibles.  They are the metastasized legacy of hillbillies who left their shacks in the hollars to fight for states’ rights, the fig-leaf rationalization of white racial superiority.  Whatever they are, they talk trash.

These protestors have rights to have and express opinions, but those rights do not mean that their opinions are right or, if wrong or unworthy, must be respected.  As a teacher, consultant, and citizen activist, I like to discuss or debate important issues, especially of public policy.  However, I stop participating when I encounter disregard of information and indifference to truth; bigotry in the assumption of superiority on the basis of gender, race, religion, ethnicity, class, or education; or angry outbursts, insults, threats, or violence.  I feel no guilt about losing respect for my opposite because I have no misguided tolerance which often tacitly accepts the otherwise intolerable.

Still, I almost sympathize with these protestors.  Like the rest of us, they suffer from extreme tension and seek relief from a seemingly endless pandemic of a forever mutating covid-19 virus, with personal, societal, and economic effects; a complex, dynamic, and dangerous international order, with growing threats from China and Russia; accelerating post-Vietnam trends of educational decay and moral, social, and political rot; threats or effects of climate change, the nature and rate of technological, economic, and social change, all aggravated by passionate cultural and ideological divisions.  Anyone not anxious, stressed, or frazzled is not paying attention.

The protestors suffer like the rest of us but, like racists elsewhere, feel their sense of white superiority threatened.  To them, inclusiveness, multiculturalism, or the idea that “Black Lives Matters”—more change—is a sharp stick in the eye.  Fearful and angry, they vent, not about remote, large, and complicated issues, but about smaller, simpler ones close at hand, like changes in a curriculum close to personal concerns.  Anyone worried about the future is going to be concerned about the education which children receive.

Their attacks on proposed or approved education policies or course curriculums not only release pent-up tensions which we all feel, but also focus their pre-existing racism on CRT.  However sincerely and strongly they assert their opinions, they should not expect informed, logical, and reasonable people to agree, accept, or acquiesce in them.  Instead, reasonable people should adopt the best antidote to their trash talk: detailed rebuttals of bogus claims, clear and cogent decisions benefitting students’ education, and explicit limits of protestors’ behavior.  If protestors behave outrageously, officials should restore order without regret at having to do so.

In the matter of CRT, the primary rebuttal is the exposure of protestors’ ignorance and their indifference to it.  None of the protestors can define CRT or knows its origins or auspices.  None knows who teaches it to whom or can locate material imported from CRT and inserted into the proposed curriculum.  None can give educational, not partisan or racist, reasons for excluding from that curriculum facts about race as an influence in America long predating and continuing parallel to the specialized academic study of its influence in institutions.  None can prove it makes students “hate America.”  None cares.

None knows or cares that history is an account of selected facts interpreted to approximate the whole truth.  Protestors want a half-truth history which excludes the facts of slavery and the racism which justified it and has permeated America from its origins.  The absurdity of excluding race from American history would resemble the absurdity of excluding radioactivity, x-rays, E=MC², relativity, and quantum mechanics from physics.  Modern physics supplements, not replaces, classical physics because Albert Einstein and Max Plank explain facts which Isaac Newton could not.  Likewise, history which includes the facts of race and racism explains more about America’s past than race-biased history can.  Just as no school board would base its physics curriculum on 17^th-century science, so no school board should sustain a history curriculum based on a history derived from the 19^th century.

None cares.  The protestors do not care about history or education; they care about white racist propaganda to indoctrinate all students into beliefs of white superiority; they want to racially segregate facts about race.  They are not content to teach their children bigotry at home; they want schools to teach bigotry to all students.  They fear that racially different classmates will unteach their children what they have tried to teach and that a revised curriculum will teach them about this country’s ennobling struggles to overcome racism and realize its ideals.  “Uncomfortable,” indeed, for them but not their children.

Still, the proposed revision of the curriculum has technical flaws tantamount to educational failure or worse.  Like many curriculums developed in recent decades, it defines, not subject-matter information and skills, but “performance standards,” which are not standards at all, only tasks to be accomplished.  Though intended to inform the public about content, it does not specify the knowledge and skills teachers must possess and students should acquire.  Moreover, many standards are age-inappropriate and invasive of individual privacy—student, parent, friend, or neighbor.  Students revealing such information on their initiative is one thing; teachers assigning work requiring such revelations is another.  Schools should not evolve into a service of law enforcement.

School boards have many good reasons to reject critical race trash but few good reasons to accept the proposed revision of the history curriculum.  The question is whether their members know enough about curriculums themselves, have reasonable views what a history curriculum should teach, and have the courage to adopt it.