With so much said about teaching race in New Hampshire, Critical Race Theory (CRT) and “divisive concepts” already, I wasn’t sure I was going to write this. But, like an annoying childhood friend, the impetus to write about teaching race and CRT wouldn’t let me go. It was after reading my colleagues’ article that I realized why.
One reason I feel I must contribute to this discussion is the fact that I have yet to hear the minority view addressed. Another is that no one has addressed the “divisive concepts” we teach that are already in practice. The unclear implications of this legislation only compound questions that make even more rare certain quality education. And so, I must play it out.
First, I am Black. I teach history and AP English courses. Up until this year, I had never heard of CRT in the news and had only learned the term during my master’s course work. Without watering it down too much, CRT is a useful tool during literary analysis or historical primary source work to examine race and ethnicity and its ability to act, to speak, to create, and most importantly, to define itself. I teach CRT to high school students. During this time, I’ve never had a student write a paper or express feelings about “divisive concepts” that have left them feeling “inherently” anything.
Two months ago, I got a text from an unknown number. It asked if I wanted to “help fight CRT” using the Founding Fathers and MLK Jr. as evidence against teaching it. For those who forgot or were never told, Martin Luther King Jr. acted and was killed advocating against systemic poverty. He was surveilled, wiretapped and told to “kill himself,” by our government. Aaron Blais’ column “How do we teach race in New Hampshire,” (Monitor, 7/18) outlines some of the hypocrisies of our Founding Fathers on race. Martin Luther King Jr. was a radical revolutionary that was hated by half of America when he was killed. I replied to the out-of-state number with some choice words, finding the irony of MLK and the Founding Fathers in one sentence enough!
“The unexamined life is not worth living.” — Socrates
“There are few things in the world as dangerous as a sleepwalker.” — Ellison
“History moves, not like an arrow but like a boomerang. Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history, they are preparing a boomerang. I know I have been boomeranged so many times I can see the darkness in light.” — Ellison
As we teach U.S. history now, many have never sat like me or my parents or my children during an elementary lesson on slavery and had to be excused to weep. Many of us have been so divorced from our past, our ancestors, our history that the middle school lessons we were taught on the Trail of Tears never trailed tears of our own, imagining the unendurable loss of home, language, belonging.
Few, if any, in high school have soft spots left to grieve, to rejoice, to find promise in the stories of immigration, to find sorrow in assimilation. It’s a rare student today who can see any of the many sins of a global market and still prefer the benefits of the latest technological innovation. Already our classrooms have become prepared to tell a time-honored tale so that most students don’t have to inherently feel anything.
As a teacher who teaches CRT, as a teacher who won’t pass students who just don’t care, I believe this legislation only protects the ignorant from realizing their ignorance. This legislation only seeks to keep the majority from discovering what history has already taught to minority students and how the minority students know that history to be true. This legislation cements racial and ethnic divisions and makes apparent to me and teachers like me that our state prefers un-feeling educational byproducts, students, the “unexamined,” the “sleepwalkers,” waiting to be “boomeranged” by the movement of history.
(Benjamin Bacote teaches at Waterville Valley Academy.)