Want to teach Missouri kids patriotism? Then quit lying about ‘critical race theory’ | Opinion

This week, GOP legislators in Jefferson City will make their latest transparent attempt to erase the ugly history and legacy of slavery from public school textbooks. It will ultimately fail — but it’s a needless, energy-sapping exercise that distracts elected officials from the real work of government.

Senate Bill 4, from GOP state Sen. Andrew Koenig of District 15, would forbid public schools from saying that individuals “bear collective guilt and are inherently responsible for actions committed in the past by others.” It would also ban courses on so-called “critical race theory” in K-12 schools.

Wonder why you never heard about “critical race theory” before late in the 2020 national election cycle? That’s because the noise was ginned up almost out of thin air to fight back against the popularity of that year’s Black Lives Matter demonstrations.

After the unjust deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and other Black Americans prompted hundreds of thousands to take to the streets demanding justice, conservative activist Christoper Rufo decided to start a movement to counter that public sympathy — and make a name for himself at the same time.

On Sept. 1, 2020, Rufo secured himself a guest spot on Tucker Carlson’s influential Fox News show to lodge “critical race theory” in the public mind. Before then, the LexisNexis database showed the phrase had appeared a grand total of 119 times that year — many of them duplicates — among the hundreds of U.S. newspapers it catalogs. In 2021 and again in 2022, “critical race theory” appeared so many times that the service can’t even display them all — more than 10,000 stories per year.

The bad faith of those intentionally twisting the concept is difficult to overstate. Actual critical race theory is an arcane academic premise that wasn’t taught in K-12 public schools in 2020, and isn’t taught there today. But the term sounds pretentious and disdainful, so it’s convenient for opponents to tie it to a basic reality that’s unpleasant for many to accept: African Americans suffer from a social and economic system historically stacked against them.

Rufo is brutally cynical about his intentions of “steadily driving up negative perceptions” of the term. “We will eventually turn it toxic,” he bragged on Twitter, “as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.”

It worked, and he profited from it. He’s now a constant on the talking head circuit, and was named senior fellow and director of the newly-created Initiative on Critical Race Theory at the Manhattan Institute, a deep-pocketed conservative New York think tank.

And today so-called CRT has become anti-BLM, simple as that. Sens. Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt, among scores of other Republicans, have made it central to their political messaging.

We in the news media have been complicit by letting intentional bad actors and the uninformed alike toss the term about as if it’s real. Journalists should remind audiences it’s a fabrication every time it’s misused against someone “woke” (a term itself tinged with racism when hurled as an insult).

How can we pretend that chattel slavery is some forgotten remnant of a distant past? The last known child of an American slave — a man named Daniel Smith — died just three months ago, on Oct. 19, 2022. Unknown and uncountable numbers of grandchildren of human beings born as property live in this nation. The Federal Housing Administration made sure Black people were denied mortgages and insurance in white neighborhoods well into the 20th century. Millions of today’s African Americans endured Jim Crow laws firsthand for decades.

Another section of Koenig’s bill would ominously direct the state’s education department to “develop a patriotic and civics training program,” and pay teachers to take it. The line echoes Hawley’s 2021 stunt “Love America Act,” which also tied love of country to suppressing its sins.

For a lesson in patriotism, let’s listen to that paragon of truth, justice and the American way: Superman, who told schoolkids in posters all the way back in the 1950s:

“If you hear anybody talk against a schoolmate or anyone else because of his religion, race or national origin — don’t wait: Tell him that kind of talk is un-American. Help keep your school all-American!”

So no, don’t divide students. Start by not straitjacketing our teachers’ lessons about our complicated past and the differences among us. Let’s be realistic about the Missouri Compromise that made this a slave state — and also about how we’ve learned and grown since then.

That’s real, honest history, and it’s our only path forward.