To be clear, everyone should know by now that there are no separate "races," biologically, and this is part of the problem.

 

Critical Race Theory detractors are among groups who have held or hold power by legalizing constructs that rely on ideas of color-based "races" to conjure up hierarchies between and within ethnic groups. 

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Oops, now nearly everyone realizes ideas about separate races are bogus.

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Ironically, this is almost the illogic that led to you knowing the acronym "CRT".

 

No separate races, no racism.

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Not so fast.  Slaveholders knew there were no separate races.

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White supremacy and race separatism are not about "race" being real, they are about preferences and preserving a way of life that has been taught. 

Critical Race Theory proves invalid the assumption that these ideas must be overtly taught.

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The culprit in Critical Race Theory is not the myth of race, but, "racism," the result of believing the myth that people are inherently-in a permanent, essential, or characteristic way-different from one another because of skin color.

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Racism is as real as any sword doing real harm.

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Critical Race Theory can be explained as documenting some of the means and harm done as a result of making people believe the myths. (Why all the forms requiring you to declare your "race" or "ethnicity?")

 

No more race, no more racism might have been gaining traction,

but for Christopher Rufo, who rightly took issue with a "diversity training" which he identified as misusing stats and research from Critical Race Theory to bully and embarrass employees. His diversion, however, misdirects conversation away from the growing number of solutions for stamping out racism in the US that continue to be tracked through Critical Race Theory scholarship.

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Rufo's growing army of anti-Critical Race Theory proponents complain Critical Race Theory's overwhelming confirmation that for centuries Whites in America have legally been considered in a permanent and characteristic way better than Blacks is too harmful...to Whites. 

 

Under the guise of colorblindness, several states, including Oklahoma, have passed CRT laws reinforcing the concept of race while making it illegal to eradicate racism and the accompanying stigmas that effect the lives of Blacks every day.

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States have passed laws banning research and data extracted from Critical Race Theory from being taught in public schools and universities, when the crux of the work is evidence that no matter how non-racist individuals may try to be, laws and lawmakers control our relations with our fellow citizens.

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It always backfires.

Controlling, in fact, what we are allowed to learn about ourselves and our country has, instead, opened doors for everyone to examine the ways in which personal, political/economic and social power have been and continue to be used to disadvantage Americans.

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All Americans.

 

Critical Race Theory critics know Critical Race Theory isn't Dr. Kendi's why can't we all just get along anti-racism; it's about naming the names and places and dates where the conscious brutal treatment of Blacks occured and occurs in which a civilized society, beginning over 200 years before the existence of the nation, relegated Blacks to living as property, next, legalized a path for a majority of Americans to treat Blacks as non-citizens, then, finally elevated Black Americans to 2nd class citizens responsible almost always for providing labor and wealth for Whites who were and are, conversely, protected by local, state and federal institutions and policies. 

 

Policies like anti-Critical Race Theory legislation.

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Blacks are treated badly because policies show us it's OK to do so.

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Critical Race Theory shows us why we don't all just get along.

 

Christopher Rufo seems obsessed with the work of Dr. Ibram X.Kendi.

Dr. Kendi, a historian, tells us all to be anti-racists, protecting women's rights, Gay rights, religious rights.  He has, in many ways, taken the writing on Critical Race Theory walls to shout out warnings to everyone not to let what Blacks in America have endured happen to you.

 

Critical Race Theory scholars, on the other hand, are legal scholars concerned, specifically, with laws that have shaped the Black experience in the United States. Their work is on specific documents that reveal the laws and social norms that override effort, merit, fate and good intentions on everyone's part to assure, for example, the average 21st century wealth of Black Bostonians is $6 and White Bostonians, $100,000.

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One young man at one of the hundreds of community meetings I've covered had great advice to the crowd...if you want to find the answer to any problem in America, follow the money.

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MONEY DOESN'T GROW ON TREES

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You are The Government of the United States of America.

At the bottom of the silencing of anyone in America is the effort to silence this one fact. We are a democracy.  One person, one vote. There are no minorities in a democracy. Everyone pitches in for everyone to benefit. The first trillionaire in America would not be able to pay for all the federal highways, or even, just the streets in your city if you are a major city...only the combined effort of millions of people over hundreds of years can sustain a nation. Think of everything, as a citizen of the United States of America, that you own in this country in common with our fellow citizens-like the streets in your local, county, state and federal government that are provided by you and your family. And don't cut it down to one word...like schools. Think of the costs of all the infrastructure...the staffing, equipment-every single item of equipment, insurance, utitlities, plus...for any one asset you own as a citizen of the United States of America, for all the trillions of assets you own as a citizen of the United States of America. Who could pay for just the number of pencils a nationwide school system has to supply on the first day of school in every classroom in tens of thousands of districts in 50 states?  Oklahoma, where I live, one state, has over 500 public school systems. Systems. 

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Left on their own, what trillionaire would pay?

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But, in reality, we act, as though we do believe money grows on trees. No, the money that the United States runs on everyday is money you worked to provide...money we all work to provide.  Who does the work that puts the money in the banks for corporations?  Millions of Americans. And, the truth is, that if your family is labelled poor, minority or middle-class, proportionate to income, you are paying more than anyone else.

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Money doesn't grow on trees.

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Back to the Jon Gruden reference.

Critical Race Theory uncovers the vast amount of federal, state and local policies and social norms that make it absolutely possible for Gruden and all Americans to be racist and be unaware of it.​

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It turns out, all across the nation, everyday you might have the intent of living your best democratic life totally devoted to fair elections, civil rights for every US citizen, free of white supremacy and all other racist ideals 

while unaware that the fast-food chain, or clothing or home goods store you just bought your burger, kids winter coats and toaster from supports a political party creating policies in direct opposition to democracy.

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As you'll deduce later, after the passing of the civil rights amendments and laws beginning toward the end of the last century, African American parents who sent their kids, by the droves, to the public universities that they'd been denied entry into only a generation before, were, surely, unaware that those universities had their own quotas against the number of African American students they would allow to graduate.

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In 2022, several Ivy League and other top universities are being sued for policies that, under the guise of opening opportunities for poor and minority students, created mechanisms to allow students from wealthy families to benefit from financial aid set aside for the poor, using formulas that inflated school fees, overcharging all students. 

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The lawsuit focuses not on the potential racial and class issues that might have been brought up, but, on the overcharging of all students. Why is the education that might have cost their parents the equivalent of a year of mortgage payments costing a generation later the equivalent an entire 30-year loan? 

 

It's a lesson for every American.  The plaintiffs followed the money.

They were being vigilant about how their money was being spent.

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Most of these universities are not public universities, but, in 2022, they are alledged to have been overinflating prices for years to allow students from wealthy families to receive federal aid. And, that should not be the shocking part of the scheme to a citizen of the USA...the shocking part should be the ability of private schools, private corporations and even private individuals to use your money to obtain private fortunes...your money that you could not access in comparable ways.

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All US citizens are the government of the United States of America...

all together. Not remembering this has led us to where we are today.

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Said differently, whether inflation is proven to be true or not in the case of the colleges, do we ever ask ourselves, when the majority of Americans believe we cannot afford college (likely, including you), how could it  possibly be we are paying tuition for others, even at private universities?

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A political party knows when it can get us focused on non-issues, of which CRT is only one in a long line, it has confirmation that it has us convinced that it is not we, the American people, who run the country, but, political parties. That we have seceded all our decisions, our power, our money to them to build (or not build) the country. 

 

Politicians can be certain that we have forgotten that just a century and a half ago, overnight, nearly a third of all the men, women and children in the United States of America gave up their American citizenship, turning their loyalty to the Confederate States of America, fighting against us. 

 

No women were allowed to vote in that decision, no Blacks...though they were nearly half the population of the South...were allowed to vote in that decision, nearly every White man in the South was not allowed to vote to transfer his allegiance to a new nation. But, they were allowed to fight and die. 99 men, wealthy southern Plantation owners, voted to take the slaveholding South into a war against the United States of America.

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IT ALWAYS BACKFIRES

That's what happens when nearly a third of the country forgets that the entire United States of America belongs to everyone...what made millions of Americans forget their country, that in a democracy, their country should have belonged to them just as much as to 99 men?

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The math is simple.

 

Of the just over 9 million Americans in the South in 1860, 4 million people were Black and enslaved, of the remaining 5 million, if only half were women and children...that's at least another 2 million void of anywhere near the level of rights enjoyed by 99 men. Even for the final 2 million or more, for the remaining White male population citizenship was marginal.  Our homework for today is to explain how this enormous group of people living under the autocratic thumbs of southern planter/politicians could have been convinced to become a separate nation from the United States of America, the nation from which many (including many who were recent immigrants) had just received free land?

In Oklahoma, we particularly understand this history. 

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We are the irrevocable forever home that the United States of America traded to the Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Muskogee, Seminole, Caddo and other nations in exchange for those southern states where, within the next 30 years, those same 99 men used the settlers to whom the US government had given the bulk of these nations' lands, in over 8,000 engagements against it in the largest loss of life in war in the history of the nation.

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It's a tradition...our most dangerous and evil hours have always come when we separate Americans from Americans. 

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This, more likely, is the history governors in several states don't want you to trip into accidentally while studying Critical Race Theory.

 

When We, the People begin to think there are some They, The People, who deserve better than some other Americans things get bad.

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When We totally forget the pact we've made that each and every one of us governs the United States of America, when we forget that we pay politicians to work for each and every one of us, equally, it probably can't get any worse.

 

Silencing us from our own history is critical to ending government by and for The People.

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