by Sara Pequeño
The Republican Party has been railing against CRT, or Critical Race Theory, being taught in schools across North Carolina and the United States. Until now, the Democratic response has been a technical correction: CRT can’t be taught in schools, because it’s a theory of law taught in college and graduate school.
Instead of cowering behind a technicality, maybe we should change our tone, and wholeheartedly respond with a desire to be anti-racist and teach this to our children.
That’s what the folks at we are, or “Working to Expand Anti-Racist Education,” are trying to do. It’s why they offer grants to schools who want to ensure all students are treated fairly.
“We, as an organization, have the capacity to financially support the effort of educators, because oftentimes they do this work anyway and there’s no compensation for it,” says Ronda Taylor Bullock, the executive director of WE ARE.
Officials at one school, Millbrook High School, are looking for this financial support, so that they can send six staff members to a UNC-Charlotte conference on disrupting the school-to-prison pipeline. But instead of celebrating this work toward racial justice, comments from parents have focused on WE ARE’s support of Critical Race Theory and Bullock’s self-identification as a “critical race theorist.”
This detail caught the attention of North Carolina House Speaker Tim Moore, who tweeted Monday that “no North Carolina school should be teaching anti-American Critical Race Theory in our classrooms, much less competing for a grant from an organization focused on promoting CRT.”
It would be easy to state the obvious: Critical Race Theory, the actual practice, isn’t being taught to your children, and that isn’t what the money is going toward. The money is going toward educating a small percentage of Millbrook staff on a trend across the country and in our state: Black students in Raleigh and Cary are five times more likely to be suspended than their white classmates, according to an ABC11 investigation. In the 2018-19 school year, Black students in Wake County Schools represented more than 70% of referrals to the criminal justice system.
But what is easy to say shouldn’t be the only thing said. The attack on Critical Race Theory boils down to hardline conservatives not wanting children to know the realities of our country’s history, in which Black people were treated more like farm animals than people, indigenous people had their land taken from them, scars are constantly reopened because we have, to this point, failed to call out racism for what it is, and that “CRT debates” have made Black and brown people vulnerable for doing civil rights work. In the Tuesday school board meeting, public speaker Letha Muhammad was called a “pervert” during her comments by a member of the crowd, because she said she’s glad her children have access to books that address gender, sexuality and race.
In the face of all that, it’s important that we celebrate the people doing anti-racist work: the teachers and staff at Millbrook, and the staff of WE ARE. Thankfully, the Wake County school board voted this week to let Millbrook apply for WE ARE’s grant. Hopefully, the school follows through on that application and keeps trying to better serve its student body.
As for we are, Bullock says that she and the other activists have not been deterred by the hateful and at times threatening comments they’ve received because of this grant opportunity.
“If anything, this type of reaction fires us up,” Bullock tells me. “It lets us know that we’re getting into good trouble, and that we’re doing what we’re supposed to do.”
When the late civil rights leader John Lewis called on people to make good trouble, he also said that they must “help redeem the soul of America.” To redeem that soul, we must be honest about its history, and remember that white children aren’t the only ones in our classrooms.
