THE FOURTH OF JULY AND CRITICAL RACE THEORY

by Vijaya Chandrasoma

Americans everywhere are celebrating America’s birthday, Independence Day. Americans, especially white Americans, believe that the nation was born on July 4, 1776 of a comparative painless virgin birth, to recently divorced white parents arguing about custody. The realistic fact of an excruciating and bloody natural birth, brought about by centuries of rape and abuse has been largely whitewashed and ignored.

The nation was born on July 4, 1776 for white males in America only. The Founding Fathers did not even consider the existence of slaves when framing the Constitution. As one of the greatest of Americans, Frederick Douglass, who was born a slave, said in the keynote speech of an Independence Day celebration in New York on July 5, 1852:

“What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us?

“I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me.

“This Fourth of July is yours not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn”.

The Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 were followed by 100 years of Reconstruction and Jim Crow laws, more segregationist and cruel than the South African model of Apartheid. African Americans finally achieved legal equality by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Legal equality, but not societal equality.

Frederick Douglass’ sunlight of natural justice may still be a few generations away from shining brightly on all Americans.

The latest Boogeyman invented by the racist Republicans for everything that ails the country is the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in schools and colleges, and at military schools. Also known as the 1619 Project, the teaching of CRT is objected to by Republican lawmakers on the basis that study of the subject is the main reason for the division and hatred among races that exist in the country today. They seek to ban the teaching of CRT in schools and colleges, even after the Trump incited insurrection on January 6, clear evidence of the continued infestation of racism and virulent white supremacy.

The core of the Republican argument is that CRT is racist, it’s abusive, and its theories are not based on fact. In other words, systemic racism does not exist in the USA, and teaching of its history of slavery would only result in the incitement of racial hatred.

Republican Senator Ted Cruz voiced his objections to the teaching of CRT on the basis that “Critical Race Theory is bigoted, it is a lie and it is every bit as racist as the Klansmen in white sheets”.

Critical Race Theory is defined as “an intellectual movement and a legal analysis according to which (1) race is a culturally invented category used to oppress people of color, and (2) the law and the legal institutions in the United States are inherently racist insofar as they function to create and maintain social, political and economic inequalities between white and nonwhite people”. Racism is a pervasive issue steeped in US society and in its legal and economic systems.

If you can’t teach about the history of the Klansmen in the white sheets, if you can’t examine where they came from, what they believe, who they hate and why they even wear those white sheets? If you’re forbidden from learning about the Confederacy that gave rise to the Klan, then how can you prevent modern day white children, high school and university students – future citizens – from thinking and behaving like the Klansmen of the 20th century and the Oathkeepers, Proud Boys and white supremacists of the 21st? Or prevent black kids from understanding where their resentment originates, and teaching them how best to deal with it and to overcome it?

If you are not even allowed to learn what Critical Race Theory is, how can you judge its validity? The refusal to teach systemic racism is systemic racism.

During a recent congressional budget hearing, suspected rapist, sex trafficker and the most shameless of Trump’s brownnosers, Congressman Matt Gaetz from Florida, asked the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, about the “white rage” that is taught by the CRT.

Milley talked about a “summit” on CRT held at Harvard Law School years ago, at which it was proposed that there were laws in the United States, antebellum laws prior to the Civil War, that “led to a power differential with African Americans, who were considered three-fifths of a human being when this country was formed”. Vestiges of these pernicious white supremacist laws exist even today.

The General tore into the white supremacist Congressman, stating, “What is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America? What caused that? I want to maintain an open mind here. And I do want to understand that. It is important that leaders now and in the future understand that”.

General Milley continued, in response to evidence-fee allegations by Gaetz that he had encouraged teaching of Marxist theories among servicemen, “I’ve read Mao Zedong, I’ve read Karl Marx, I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist. So what is wrong with some situational understanding of the country which we are personally here to defend?”

Trump issued Executive Order 13950 in September 2020, ordering the ban on teaching of Critical Race Theory in schools, colleges, military services, corporation and government contractors. Trump’s target was against a theory with the premise that racism pervades government and other American institutions, giving white people an advantage.

The main premise of this Executive Order is that CRT “is rooted in the pernicious and false belief that America is an irredeemably racist and sexist country; that some people, simply on account of their race or sex, are oppressors; and that racial and sexual identities are more important than our common status as human beings and Americans”. Ironically, the Order’s stated aim was to end the perpetuation of “racial stereotypes and division in the workplace” presumably because the United States is a “nation completely free from prejudices against race, color, creed and sex”. Of course it is not.

Recent history has proved that the US cannot as a nation expect to work towards and achieve equality without first acknowledging and addressing the biases that are deeply rooted in the social fabric of the nation. Trump’s executive order affected government agencies, Fortune 500 companies, educational institutions, non-profits, any organization which already have government contracts or plan to apply for them. It had an almost immediate and chilling effect on reinvigorated efforts to address racial profiling and disparities in the workplace after the brutal murder of George Floyd by a white policeman.

US District Judge Beth Freeman granted a preliminary nationwide injunction blocking Trump’s Executive Order in December 2020, on the basis that it was against the First Amendment (Freedom of Speech). President Biden is expected to rescind Order 13950 shortly.

During the first presidential debate in October 2020, Trump said, “They (the CRT) were teaching that our country is a horrible place, it’s a racist place. And they were teaching people to hate our country. And I’m not going to allow that to happen.” It’s happened already.

Trump wants us to believe that America is a country totally devoid of racism. He alone, with his ‘inclusive” policies, has come close to achieving the dream of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr in 1963, that Americans will one day “live in a nation where they will be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”. As Trump has repeatedly said, “I am the least racist person you have ever met”. Of course he is, by his own reckoning.

These are the continuing rants and delusions of a treasonous lunatic who has been solely responsible for the re-emergence of racial hatred and violence during the past four years, culminating in the inciting of an insurrection to overturn the democracy and the Constitution of the United States. Delusions that deny the reality and causes of the racial crisis that has been destroying the social fabric of the country. Lies that prevent educators from even starting to take the necessary steps to mitigate what has been the blight of the nation for centuries.