There’s a reason I write so damn much about the Republican war on Critical Race Theory—it’s just such a shining example of how whiteness works.
CRT has existed as an academic study since 1989, and the volumes of research and data that CRT was developed from date back to the late ‘60s-early ‘70s. White people discovered it like a year ago while Trump was still in office and his fundamentally illiterate ass started railing against it. But since white people’s greatest talent is Columbus-ing shit, taking ownership of it and forming their own warped narrative around it, GOPropagandists have basically denounced CRT, not just with their words, but through official resolutions and legislation—and they’ve done it without bothering to learn literally anything about what CRT actually entails.
Last month, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp tweeted a letter he wrote to the Georgia State Board of Education, calling CRT a “divisive” and “anti-American agenda.” On Thursday, the board voted 11-2 to pass a resolution that denounces CRT and declares among other things that “the United States of America is not a racist country, and that the state of Georgia is not a racist state,” 11 Alive reports.
Listen: I’m not even about to sit here and argue with the hueless and clueless notion that America isn’t a racist country—we’ve compiled the data that proves it is.
Instead, let’s focus on white hypocrisy and how it infects everything it touches.
From 11 Alive:
The resolution focuses in on notions of racial guilt, rejecting the teaching of concepts such as “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously,” and “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex,” and “an individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex.”
It also frames slavery as a “deviation” from American founding principles, though policies such as the three-fifths compromise were written into the Constitution as a means for incorporating slavery into the country’s founding system.
It states that “with respect to their relationship to American values, slavery and racism are anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United States, which include liberty and equality.”
First of all, the conservative narrative that CRT teaches that “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously,” is false. CRT is a study of laws and systems and how race affects them; it has nothing to do with white people at the individual level. But, again, conservatives haven’t read anything about it because it’s easier to just make these fragile-ass claims and watch whiteness work in accepting it at face value.
Of course, the biggest whopper of white nonsense lies in the claim that slavery is a “deviation” from America’s founding principles—in a country that existed as an independent nation that allowed slavery for nearly a century before it finally (kind of) abolished it, and one where roughly 49 percent of the 55 delegates to the constitutional convention owned slaves.
I mean, come on—the board is basically doing this because Kemp declared that CRT has no place in the classroom, as if Kemp doesn’t also essentially believe that the Black vote doesn’t belong at the ballot box.
All of this anti-CRT shit is made up of white lies on top of more white lies—and caucasity frames it as truth in the interest of unity.
That’s how whiteness—and by extension, systemic racism—works.