THE CRITICALITY OF CRITICAL RACE THEORY

I want to challenge oppositional assertions that CRT education in schools is harmful because it paints White people as oppressors, and further subjugates Black people by classifying them as hopeless victims. These narratives about CRT are grossly exaggerated. The harm here is the use of a broad-brush prompting fears, and subsequent curriculum bans in schools from those who hold political and social power. The losers –if this continues will be those who lack the political and social power to have their stories told.

We know that traditional historians are concerned with finding out what happened at a given time and place. They worked to establish the factual accuracy of the stories that make up the record of the humans past so that they could establish, with as much certainty as possible, that the account they rendered was a valid delineation of what had happened. CRT matters because many historians have done a disservice in recounting the record of the past, leaving important voices out of their story telling.

The problem is, regardless of his or her commitment to produce objective readings, historians are never able to transcend their own values. Experience and knowledge are inevitably caught up in a social and cultural context, leaving interpretation open to one’s own worldview, reinforcing the subjectivity of any account of history.

It is from those who have suffered the sentence of history—

subjugation, domination, diaspora, displacement—that we learn

our most enduring lessons for living and thinking.

HOMI BHABHA, ‘‘THE POSTCOLONIAL AND THE POSTMODERN’’

Culture is made up of many competing strands, there is not one truth. To claim to have found the one perspective that would explain, beliefs, behaviors, and products of a time and place is an over simplification. To hear only the narratives of the dominant group while ignoring others provides an incomplete picture.

CRT extracts power from suppression ideologies and allows students to share discourse about previously silenced voices. Discourse that differ from the norm and digress from what is acceptable should not be rejected, rather embraced for different ways to see and think about the past to heal and move forward.

We must recognize all the voices in society and liberate them from story tales in which they are absent.