It looks like the Republican party will try to turn critical race theory into the next Benghazi with nine oversight investigations, if and when they get control of the House. They expect white supremacist voters to believe that blacks are racists for wanting unedited history to be taught.
It appears to me the talk about critical race theory started when it became known that many black people who live in Tulsa never heard of the massacre that occurred there in 1920, and most Americans in general never heard of it either. Tulsa was the black Wall Street with a much higher standard of living for blacks than other black communities; jealous whites became enraged when a young white elevator operator accused a black boy of rape, and WWI black veterans came to his aid. Whites chased them back to their homes and went so far as to drop gasoline bombs on buildings from bi-planes, destroying their once prosperous community and killing hundreds. There are other black massacres. Rosewood in Florida and two of them in and near New Orleans during Reconstruction. We never hear about them either.
Republican dirty tricksters have tried to call blacks racists before. Andrew Breitbart claimed Shirley Sherrod gave a racist speech to poor white voters in the South. Obama fired her from her federal position for the speech, which wasn't racist at all. She was trying to convince poor white votes to join with poor blacks to demand equal treatment, especially economic treatment.
When he discovered Breitbart was lying about the speech, Obama tried to give her job back. She wouldn't take it. After 400 years of racist treatment you would think the Republican party would know better than to call a black person racist. But they never learn.
A few days ago General Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
was cross-examined on the rampant teaching of critical race theory in the military by Matt Gaetz, of all people, who should have been sent home by minority leader McCarthy while he is being investigated for having sex with an underaged girl. Milley said he'd read Marx and Lenin but that didn't mean he was a communist. America shouldn't be afraid to face how poorly we've treated blacks and other minorities during our long history. It would seem that Gaetz and other mouth breathers would like to ignore slavery. In reality slavery has been around since the early years of American history even before we were a country. In 1620 colonists tried to enslave the Indians. They died. Then they tried indentured servants. They ran away. The plantation economy began early with a need for labor. They finally hit the Jackpot with black slaves from Africa. These were Christian people, but they justified their behavior by saying the blacks were the White Man's burden and that we were saving them from savagery in Africa. Capitalism even tried to parlay a good feeling with some of their products such as Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben's rice. The movies joined in with Gone With the Wind and Hattie McDaniel winning a best supporting actress Oscar for her portrayal of a black Mammy who was a member of the family. During the early nineteenth century scientists tried to prove that whites were intellectually superior to blacks. We know that's not true from the recent revelation that many of the mathematicians who plotted a course for the Moon shot were black women.
Of course the big black mark is slavery and white attempts in the South to revive it after the Civil War in a different form under the Jim Crow laws. They lasted up until the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964. Do the math. Our kids need to know this stuff. We can't have the Texas Board of Education deciding to keep it out of their text books. That's George Orwell's 1984 coming to reality. And blacks aren't the only ones who have a suppressed history. Do we teach assimilation of Native Americans and how children were taken from their parents and sent to boarding schools where they were reeducated, lost their languages and their cultures? We did it to the Chinese with the Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese Americans during WWII when these American citizens were sent to camps and lost their homes and property. We're now doing it to undocumented Mexican immigrants who were born here and Central American refugees who need our help.
We can't have the Statue of Liberty as one of our greatest symbols if we don't admit that we sometimes don't live up to that ideal. On the whole America is still the City on the Hill for the rest of the world, but we can't allow a political party to demean our efforts to tell the whole story.