Shooting The Messenger: CRT Doesn't Teach Racism — It Explains It

(This is the second in a three-story series examining critical race theory: What it is, why there's opposition to it, and whether its components pose a danger to students.)

DALLAS, TX — As conservatives continue to draw battle lines between Americans over sharing power in Texas and across the country, it's well to ask: If gerrymandering and unnecessary voter restrictions are so essential (without any substantial evidence to back up those claims), what kind of a United States would they like?

The insurrectionists who supported overturning the election of 2020 seem to want an autocracy. QAnon theorists will tell you that the Democrats they oppose are not patriots who see solutions differently from them — they're pedophile blood-drinkers seeking to undermine what the founders put in motion more than 200 years ago.

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And maybe they're right. Those guiding lights who steered us free from British rule may have talked about all men being created equal, but weren't they really saying, "Do as I say, not as I do"?

Washington, Jefferson, Madison — indeed, most of the early chief executives owned enslaved people. It wasn't until Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation that the practice ended. And what would Lincoln, who remains the single most revered and recognized Republican of all time, think of his image leading a party of people who want to deny basic citizens' rights — to vote and discuss ideas freely in the marketplace?

WWLD? (What Would Lincoln Do?)

When asked how the 16th president might react to see his party today, historian Michael Phillips (the author of a history of race relations in Dallas, "White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001,") says he thinks Lincoln would be ... surprised.

"Lincoln waged war against the Confederacy and defeated it," Phillips says. "So he would be a baffled as to why the party he helped establish was defending Confederate monuments, the Confederate battle flag and seems to have completely enveloped itself in Lost Cause nostalgia."

According to Phillips, "Lincoln favored regional reconciliation, but the full-throated defense of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and others would probably be confusing to him. He’d also wonder how his party lost almost all support from African Americans.

"Lincoln furthermore recognized the importance of the ordinary worker in the economy and would find his party’s complete alliance with Big Business peculiar," says the historian. As a major critic of the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing party, he would have found the present-day GOP’s xenophobia disturbing."

Indiana University professor Lasana Kazembe doesn't think Lincoln would even recognize his party now.

"Moreover, he’d have no place in it," Kazembe maintains. "In fact, in a recent New Yorker interview, Noam Chomsky has suggested that this modern GOP is the most dangerous organization in the history of the world.

We Shall Overcome . . . Maybe

"In the mild sense, (the current political divide) contributes to an unfortunate climate of intolerance, non-listening, and what Hannah Arendt referred to an unthinkingness," says Kazembe. "In the extreme sense, it accelerates this country’s slide into fascism — which has been happening since the 1980s."

As happened during Reconstruction after Lincoln's murder and periodically ever since, believers in white, Christian, heteronormative and conservative control have been trying to put minorities back into Pandora's Box that Lincoln unlatched. The KKK couldn't do it, but did manage to inflict decades of terror. Segregationists like Alabama Gov. George Wallace and Georgia Gov. Lester Maddox tried and failed, and then along came Barack Obama, who had the gall to become president. That seemed to light a fuse.

There was a bumper sticker that floated around Texas in 2008. It said simply, "Keep the White House White."

Putting minorities back in their place, Kazembe points out, is "what really keeps them up at night. This central question: How do we maintain white majority rule in an increasingly multicultural nation even as we [white Americans] are getting older and grayer? The answers to those questions scare the MAGA hats off of the heads of the white ruling elite and therefore they’re in a revolt against the future. If you want the data on this, I urge you to check out the work of Anne Case and Angus Deaton ("Deaths of Despair"), the work of Jonathan M. Metzl ("Dying of Whiteness"), and the sociological work being done at the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey Institute."

Phillips says this could be the end, the last moments of laws intended to keep Americans from sharing in all the bounty the Republic has to offer.

"This strikes me as the last gasps of an old order, an attempt by elites to use censorship, police power, and fear to keep a tottering Gilded Age-style, neo-Robber Baron power structure alive for the foreseeable future."

Phillips sums it up like this: "I am reminded of how Thomas Jefferson said that slavery was like holding a wolf by the ears — you don’t dare hold on to it and you don’t dare let the wolf go."

Or not. The end of slavery didn't end racism. The end of the Holocaust didn't stop what Donald Trump called "the very fine people" who marched on Charlottesville from chanting "Jews will not replace us."

Technology? That moves briskly along in a linear fashion. Scapegoating? Bigotry? Those might be forever linked to the human condition.

"Millions of whites are aware that their demographic majority will disappear in less than two decades," Phillips opines, "and, at least subconsciously, they are aware of how BIPOC [Black, Indigenous and people of color] communities have been oppressed.

"Whites trying to roll back the clock are terrified that it’s their turn to be trampled on. They assume an increasingly Black and brown society will replicate the injustice of the whites —only Jim Crow era, only this time whites will be on the bottom."

Part Three: What happens when you tamp down the truth and try to open the taps wide on disinformation?

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