Outrage over critical race theory only serves to justify it | Opinion – Commercial Appeal

J. Lawrence Turner| Guest Columnist

It says a lot about recent virulent objections to critical race theory (CRT) that Ruby Bridges is now part of the mix.

Bridges, who is Black, was a 6-year-old child when she walked a gauntlet of white rage in 1960 to enter a New Orleans school and become the first student to integrate the citys school system. During her entire first-grade year, she sat in a classroom alone, separated from her white classmates. Her image was memorialized in Norman Rockwells famous painting from the civil rights era, The Problem We All Face, rendering her a poignant symbol of racial injustice in the person of an innocent little girl wearing her Sunday-School best.

Today, Bridges is again walking a gauntlet of rage. White parents of children in the public school system of Williamson County, Tennessee, are up in arms about Bridges childrens book, "Ruby Bridges Goes to School," which she wrote expressly to teach elementary school students about overcoming racism. They claim the book, published in 2009 with a smiling 6-year-old Ruby on the cover, is one among several that is dangerous to their children.

COUNTERPOINT: Why we must stop critical race theory from entering American classrooms | Marsha Blackburn

They argue it describes too harshly the white mob that threatened her. They believe teachers should not introduce young students to words like "injustice," "unequal," "inequality," "protest," "marching" and "segregation." They are part of the national hysteria charging that books like "Ruby Bridges Goes to School" are a slippery slope at the bottom of which is the takeover of school curriculums by the dreaded critical race theory, a radical-left plot to demoralize white children and make them ashamed of the color of their skin.

In Memphis: City Council asks Lee to veto bill banning teaching of critical race theory

This preposterous logic not only accounts for critical race theorys existence, it completely validates the need for critical race theory.

Politicians and other opportunists who have made a bogeyman of CRT are acting on the same self-serving impulses that drove them during the civil rights era to fuel (or refuse to temper) white fear that race-mixing was dangerous to white women and children. Back then, Black and brown bodies were the threat. Today, Black and brown ideas are the threat. Those whose outrage is running amok arent affronted by a theory. They are affronted by the idea that the experiences and perspectives of those in the minority especially if they have endured oppression due to their minority status belong in the same curriculum and classrooms as the experiences and perspectives of those in the majority.

Marsha Blackburn: Why we must stop critical race theory from entering American classrooms | Opinion

Tonyaa Weathersbee: Bans on teaching racism's impact means Juneteenth is now about resistance and revelry

Instead, they demand a segregated and sanitized curriculum. They may have to put up with Black and brown bodies in their schools, as the law requires, but they will not put up with their stories, they will not tolerate their historical perspectives, and they will not acknowledge their experiences.

Back when Bridges and other Black children on the vanguard of integration were forced to walk to school under armed guard, white parents took to the streets. Today, they successfully lobby school boards and statehouses. The net result is that 22 state legislatures have introduced laws banning critical race theory; five, including Tennessees, have passed them. The net impact is that parents, such as those in Williamson County, feel free to define critical race theory as anything that makes them uncomfortable and demand the law squelch the source of their discomfort. Meanwhile, modern-day George Wallaces in public office and other positions of leadership cravenly stoke their fear, effectively bleating, Segregation of ideas now, tomorrow, and forever!

Critical race theory is the decades-old academic premise that racism still permeates much of American life and American systems legal, criminal justice, health, and education among them. Sadly, todays uninformed furor is proving the premise true. CRT also posits the name it, claim it, dump it approach to resolving the problem. If we acknowledge it exists, so the theory goes, we can do something about it. We can heal and more closely hue to the great truth we hold to be self-evident: that all of us are created equal and, by extension, that the perspectives of those who have not historically received a hearing are equal, too.

CRT controversy: Memphis lawmaker tells CNN that Tennessee legislature is trying to 'whitewash' history

Tennessee schools chief: State committed to keeping 'propaganda like critical race theory' from classroom

Ironically, few have done more over the years to further the process of healing and hearing than Bridges. She established the Ruby Bridges Foundation in 1999 to promote respect and equal treatment to all races or all differences. She has spent decades speaking to school children about her experiences as a child. In the process, she has taught them that we can learn from the mistakes of the past to do better in the present. She has educated, not by shaming any one group, but by showing all groups that mutual respect and love is preferable and possible.

That her lived experience, adapted specifically for young ears and imaginations, is being twisted into propaganda is a travesty. Again, she has become a symbol of the bulk of the current critique being leveled at a theory most of its detractors have no interest in understanding only vilifying. This is the real shame. The Problem We All Face is still alive and festering. We can all solve it. But first, we have to acknowledge its as real as the gauntlet Bridges walked as a child and that her story walks today.

The Rev. J. Lawrence Turner is senior pastor of Mississippi Blvd. Christian Church in Memphis.

Read the original post:

Outrage over critical race theory only serves to justify it | Opinion - Commercial Appeal