Critical Race Theory

 

"When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school,

It's a wonder I can think at all."

--Paul Simon, "Kodacrome"

Mad Dog has been slogging through "Caste" lately and so his ears perked up when the President of the Hampton, New Hampshire Democrats decried a bill in the New Hampshire legislature which would ban the mention of race and "critical race theory" in public schools.

There are really two issues here: 

1. Are public schools really viable any more?

2. What the hell is "critical race theory"?

Mad Dog presumes "A Colony in a Nation" and "Caste" are part of a literature which depicts the actual experience of race in America as does the 1619 project.

But anyone who has read Howard Zinn or James Baldwin or Heather Cox Richardson or Ralph Ellison or Eldridge Cleaver or Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, Jr. knows what any boy who ever grew up south of the Mason Dixon line knows or, for that matter, what a boy who grew up near Southie in Boston knows or Detroit or Watts. Or if you read "The Hemmings of Monticello."

Mad Dog says he was slogging through "Caste" because he finds nothing new and no new insights there. The best parts so far have been about India, where the caste system has such tight connections to religion and origin myths. But the parts about the subjugation of American Blacks falls into that category of "Tell me something I don't already know."

For Mad Dog's money, all he needs to know about race in America can be seen in those photos, many of which were sent as post cards, of lynchings in the South, where girls who look to be somewhere between 8 and 12 years old and boys of the same age look over their shoulders at the camera, grinning as if they are at a carnival, and behind them, hanging from a tree is a black man. Perfectly normal entertainment in Alabama or Mississippi: "Oh, let's go see them hang a nigger."

The offenses of many of these Black men often came down to some intimation from a White woman that these men had somehow been "fresh" toward them; the old and deep fear that Black men lust after White women, who are sexual magnets to these not really men, animals really, to be treated like animals and butchered for sport.

Mad Dog remembers locker room comments growing up. He remembers a high school wrestling match with a Black opponent and how one of the big tough guys in an upper weight class was disgusted Mad Dog had to wrestle a Negro.

"Well, I beat him," Mad Dog said, not understanding what the problem was.

Later, Mad Dog saw his vanquished opponent in the shower and asked how he was. "I got a headache," he replied.

And Mad Dog recalls feeling sorry for him. Mad Dog hoped he hadn't injured him. But Mad Dog did not know and could not imagine that kid's real injuries then or thereafter.

Mad Dog has plenty of regrets about failing to do the right thing now and then when he was growing up, but he never did fail to defend Negroes, then Blacks then African Americans from insult. Being White, Mad Dog could rise to defense without being accused of self interest. 

But somehow, even as a kid, Mad Dog knew the essential truth he later heard Martin Luther King speak, "Injustice anywhere injures justice everywhere,"

How do you teach that in a public school?

Probably you cannot. And you cannot teach about sex or abortion or any of a variety other "hot topics" in public schools.

Mad Dog went to public schools until he went to college. When he arrived at college, classmates from private schools or from public schools in New York had read "The Sun Also Rises" and "Native Son" and "To Kill A Mockingbird" and "Catcher in the Rye."

When a middle school teacher wanted to read "Catcher" with his class he had to lead them off campus to the public library to do it.

In Montgomery County, Maryland schools, sex, adolescent angst, pre marital sex, rape, racism were things which simply did not exist.

Mad Dog read "Billy Budd" and "A Tale of Two Cities" in high school. Safe stuff. He knew there was another world, a secret world you weren't allowed to talk about in public out there. A friend, a girl, had read "Naked Lunch" and "Peyton Place" and other forbidden texts. But she could never speak of that in school.

Eventually, Mad Dog caught up with the real world, but he had been blindfolded by public education, protected from exposure to dangerous ideas.

Which raises the question: Had he been educated at all?

The greatest nightmare for the principal of a public school is that telephone from a parent who is outraged that her child has come home distraught because an emotionally disturbing discussion occurred in class. We do not want children exposed to controversy or deeply held contrary opinions.

But if we do not want to teach our children how to respond to opposing points of view, if we want them to not know about things, what is it we are calling "education"?