An article on Critical Race Theory posted by taxpayer-funded National Public Radio heavily quotes American schoolteachers who paint opposition to the controversial teaching material as an attempt by the “thought police” to “go after teachers” to thwart the “overwhelming demand for racial equality and social justice in the United States.”
[bookpromo align=”right”] The May 28 article was posted as news – not opinion – in the “Race” section of NPR’s website. Its author, Adrian Florido, is described as “a national correspondent for NPR covering race and identity in America” whose “beat takes him around the country to report on major flashpoints over race and racism, but also on the quieter nuances and complexities of how race is lived and experienced in the United States.”
‘We Need to Do It’
“Teachers Say Laws Banning Critical Race Theory Are Putting a Chill on Their Lessons,” the headline read. Things don’t get any less one-sided from there. “[E]ducators say” Republican-led efforts to ban the teaching of CRT in public schools “are already forcing teachers to second-guess whether they can lead students in conversations about race and structural racism that many feel are critical at a time the nation is navigating an important reckoning on those issues,” Florido “reports.”
The NPR racial beat writer described the anguish felt by one teacher:
“In Oklahoma City, teacher Telannia Norfar said she and her colleagues at Northwest Classen High School had planned to discuss a schoolwide approach to help students understand current events – including the murder of George Floyd, family separation at the Mexico border and the use of racist terms such as the ‘China virus.’
‘We need to do it, because our students desire it,’ she said. ‘But how do we do that without opening Oklahoma City public schools up to a lawsuit?’”
NPR notes that Paula Lewis, chair of the Oklahoma City School Board, worries that her dedicated educators will be handcuffed by a new Oklahoma state law. “While the new law does not ban its teaching, Lewis said it is likely to limit how much teachers feel they can dive into conversations about topics such as structural racism and white supremacy before and since the [1921 Tulsa] massacre,” Florido writes.
Vida Robertson “directs the Center for Critical Race Studies at the University of Houston-Downtown,” Florido relates. Robertson labeled a Texas anti-CRT schools bill “a concerted attempt by Republicans to stifle a widespread and overwhelming demand for racial equality and social justice in the United States by mischaracterizing critical race theory as some abhorrent plot to undermine America.”
The Curse of Parents Who Pay Attention
These teacher comments reflect the central theme of the article: CRT is as necessary as math or spelling in educating America’s youth today. Robertson fears the GOP bill “will give parents who are uncomfortable with the nation’s ongoing racial reckoning a tool to go after teachers.”
Amazingly, opposing a highly divisive program that seems to have the sole purpose of instilling guilt in white American schoolchildren’s minds over the history of their country is described as Orwellian-styled authoritarianism by these teachers.
Meghan Dougherty, “who helps public school teachers in Round Rock, Texas, develop social studies lessons plans,” detailed the horrific experience a “colleague” was subjected to when a parent took an interest in the CRT lessons being fed to his child.
“[D]uring the [coronavirus] pandemic, [the teacher] gave students a virtual lesson on race and prejudice in U.S. society. She said a father at home overheard a portion of it,” Florido writes.
“Then he wrote an email to the administration complaining that the teacher was accusing his child of being a racist when they were having a conversation about implicit bias and what implicit bias is and how it affects us,” a wounded Dougherty exclaimed.
“She said [a] proposed [state legislature] bill makes it feel like the thought police are descending on Texas,” the intrepid NPR race reporter added.
Good luck with that line of defense. It’s not easy to play the “we’re the ones being bullied” card when your fellow credentialed advocates are saying things like this:
“They have no idea what critical race theory is, what it does, who the founders are. They’ve never read a book, much less a paragraph on it,” Georgina Perez, who serves on the Texas State Board of Education, said of CRT critics, the progressive Texas Tribune reported on May 22 . “I understand that maybe some white people are uncomfortable. Well, dammit, when Black people were being lynched, they sure as hell weren’t comfortable. Native Americans being removed from their land and Mexican Americans being shot to death in the middle of the night, that sh-t wasn’t comfortable either.”
Is it really such a mystery why parents don’t want Georgina Perez or anyone who shares her ideology near their young children’s classrooms?
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Read more from Joe Schaeffer.
