Critical Race Theory is Republicans’ dangerous boogeyman in the culture war they’re waging | Opinion

In the aftermath of the brutal murder of George Floyd by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in 2020, the nation underwent a racial awakening that forced Americans to recognize our nation’s enduring legacy of racial inequity and injustice. And, it affected almost every aspect of life, including in workplaces, state legislatures and the media.

Now conservatives are seeking to put the blinders back on and hope critical race theory (CRT) will be the mask. This academic school of thought, developed in the 1970s and 1980s, was the brainchild of legal scholars Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado to address how racial biases and inequities are perpetuated through laws, policies and institutions that adversely impact how people of color are treated in such areas as criminal justice, employment, education, housing, and healthcare.

Redlining, for example, is a now-illegal practice that allowed banks and insurance companies to refuse to provide financial services to consumers based on where they lived. The War on Drugs, which disproportionately incarcerated young Black men, is another.

CRT is a complex academic movement studied almost exclusively in law schools and graduate programs, yet its critics, who refuse to acknowledge that racism exists in American society, have worked overtime to spin it into a boogeyman that is haunting our nation’s K-12 classrooms.

They falsely claim that CRT is being used to teach children to hate our nation, indoctrinate white children into thinking they are oppressors and make Black children feel like victims, sparking fears and divisions that could have a chilling effect on how history is taught in public schools.

They need to cease and desist with this big fat lie. It is a strawman cynically deployed to whip conservatives into a culture-war frenzy and win political favor.

Unfortunately, this stream of misinformation is leading to real-world harms, including the politicization of school curriculums and efforts to police, or worse, prevent, the historical teaching of racial injustices such as slavery and Jim Crow-era segregation, as well as their enduring legacies.

As a veteran educator whose previous roles include school principal, deputy superintendent, and school board member, I am outraged by these efforts to whitewash American history by minimizing the generational impact of these injustices that are still very much in play today.

It also is an unambiguous bid to alter the political landscape for the 2022 mid-term elections, when Democrats will have to defend razor-slim majorities in the U.S. House and the Senate, and turnout is generally lower. In 2020, suburban voters around the nation who could not bring themselves to pull the lever for Donald Trump gave their support to Joe Biden, who promised to build America back better and restore its standing on the world stage.

If voters allow themselves to be swayed by the fallacies of critical race theory, the repercussions could be enormous and their regret palpable. Worse, many of the hard-won battles that the Biden administration and congressional Democrats fought in order to provide critical resources and assistance to our constituents to make them whole during the COVID-19 pandemic and level the field for hardworking American families could be reversed. And for what? A big fat lie.

U.S. Rep. Frederica Wilson represents Florida’s 24th Congressional District, which runs north from downtown Miami to Pembroke Pines.