"What do you think about the argument that teaching critical race theory could help students better understand and challenge systemic racism? Is there a way to implement it without the issues you've mentioned?"
I disagree completely. We have seen a decline in race relations with an increase in the preponderance of critical race theory based courses in schools. The specific issue I have with critical race theory is that it is a theory, not a history. I have no issue with education expanding on the historical issues that minority groups have faced. Viewing these facts through… Read more an objective lens helps students understand how policy or even personal actions will impact the future for our society. My issue is that, at least the way it has been presented to me, the intersectionality aspect of critical race theory specifically holds that certain groups of people are more oppressed than others. This is equally damaging to race relations as the idea, for example, that certain races are more or less intelligent or capable than others. You may personally disagree with that take on intersectionality, but these ideas are definitely taught by some if not most professors on the topic. As far as its impact on society, the proof is in the pudding:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1687/race-relations.aspx
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=intersectionality&hl=en-US
Systemic racism can only be challenged through seeking and pointing out specific examples, and eliminating them. No theory is capable of doing that. The simple belief that humans are owed equal rights is enough to motivate that search, and that should be encouraged through discourse on an individual scale. What you are advocating for, and I know it's not what you think you are advocating for, is for creating propaganda that encourages people to view politics through a lens of race. This isn't productive at all.
"The premise that all humans are biased, and that these courses allow bias to impact children's futures, while partially true, seems to ignore the fact that bias exists in all forms of education and is not exclusive to critical race theory. For instance, traditional history curricula have been criticized for their Eurocentric focus and omission of certain historical events and figures, which is a bias in itself."
Speaking of biases, I am definitely biased here since I grew up in yuppy schools in California, but my education seemed to focus quite a bit on minority issues. Also, it is impossible to escape the fact that the government of the United States of America was founded by Europeans, has a strongly European influenced culture, and has people of European ancestry as it's majority population. Complaining of our Eurocentric focus on history is almost (but not quite) like complaining that Europe has a Eurocentric history. A primary purpose of history is to inform a culture how it came to be so that it can make rational decisions about its future. That means that contributions by minority groups should be included in approximate proportion to evidence of their existence, and I am sure that there are many republican leaning states that do a piss poor job of that. Surely this ought to be rectified, but I don't think that a theoretical approach is as effective as a practical one. Racism, even when covered from a Eurocentric viewpoint, is still wrong. Who contributed mostly to the history of slavery in America? White *** Europeans, and it's hardly wrong to look at it that way even though it might be considered Eurocentric. But yes, you are definitely correct that bias exists in all forms of education. There are definitely subjects that are more prone to it and history is one of them. Addressing that issue is incredibly complex, however a simple thing we can do is avoid tainting history courses with overtly political theories of any kind. That sort of course is definitely more open to abuse than fact based ones.
"A 2018 study by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that only 8% of high school seniors could identify slavery as the central cause of the Civil War, suggesting a gap in the current education system."
That's incredibly depressing. Addressing the stupidity of our country is probably the most important thing to me. Our education system is an absolute dumpster fire. I'm pretty sure less than 8% of high schoolers understand that basic sentence structure involves a subject, verb and object too.
"The argument that teaching critical race theory would alienate a portion of the voter base and drive reactionary trends towards white nationalism could be seen as a slippery slope fallacy."
That's simply incorrect. According to the Wikipedia definition, "A slippery slope fallacy (SSF), in... political rhetoric... is a fallacious argument in which a party asserts that a relatively small first step leads to a chain of related events culminating in some significant (usually negative) effect." I never asserted that the alienation of a voter base or the reactionary trend towards white nationalism would proceed through a chain of related events. I believe that they are direct results of the democratic party considering race through the lens of a racist political theory.
