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Students Deserve the Truth, and Schools Should Teach It
If Black and brown children are old enough to experience injustice, white children are old enough to learn about it
Conservatives have elevated bad faith argumentation to a new art form.
On the one hand, they ridicule “safe spaces” and trigger warnings and rail against “cancel culture.” But on the other, they look to ban anti-racist curriculum in schools (dare we say, cancel it) because they feel such materials are “divisive” and involve subject matter too heavy for children to handle.
They say it might trigger white guilt or shame, making schools less emotionally safe for them.
The hypocrisy would be humorous were it not so enraging.
Their purposes are transparent. The right wishes to paper over injustice in the nation’s past or present, thereby helping to rationalize whatever inequities continue to face us.
By downplaying racism as an ongoing force, they hope students will shrug at disproportionate police violence against unarmed Black people, unequal housing access, or disparities in income and occupational status, concluding that such things are somehow the fault of those victimized by them.
