SHERRY CANNON

Recently while watching a podcast that DL Hughley was on as a guest, he made a very interesting statement. Hughley said, “the most dangerous place for Black people to live is in White people’s imagination.” That statement illustrates how successfully being Black in America has been demonized.

In 2019, Nikole Hannah-Jones published the critically acclaimed The 1619 Project in the New York Times Magazine. This extensive journalistic piece is about the arrival of the first Africans to the United States and marked the beginning of chattel slavery in America.

Hannah-Jones’ piece sparked a serious blowback from conservatives, and she became the target of right-wing news outlets. The 1619 Project and Ms. Hannah-Jones were further politicized by then-President Donald Trump, who issued an executive order directing federal agencies to cancel funding to any program that discussed Critical Race Theory (CRT) or to any school that incorporated any of The 1619 Project in their curriculum.

Critical Race Theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The idea is that race is a social construct, and that racism is not just an individual bias or prejudice but also something embedded in legal systems and policies. The CRT concept is not taught in K-12 classes but is a law school class. However, it has successfully been conflated by its critics to mean the same as anti-racism and social justice. And is now cited as the basis of all diversity and inclusion efforts regardless of how much or how little it informs those efforts. Some critics go as far as to say that CRT advocates discriminating against White people in order to achieve equity.

Legislators across the country have proposed laws to ban the teaching of CRT in schools. Some are proposing laws to ban books pertaining to race as well as LGBTQ issues from schools. They are pushing to prohibit teachers from discussing the impact of historic racism in this country.

Suzanne Nossel, the CEO of PEN America, a nonprofit organization that works to protect freedom of expression, said in an interview with The Guardian, “there have been battles and debates that have bubbled up from time to time, but the ferocity of this wave of both education gag order affecting curricular and book bans is unprecedented.”

Nossel goes on to say, “we’re in this pitched moment of historical, unprecedented polarization in our country and there is a very potent and intense struggle under way about what the failure of our society looks like.”

According to a Brookings article, the objective, for some of these Republican led-state legislatures, is a method to contain or to roll back racial progress regarding everything from voting rights to police reform. Laws forbidding teachers from mentioning race/racism, and even gender/sexism, would put a chilling effect on what educators are willing to discuss in the classroom, and they would provide cover for those who are not comfortable hearing or telling the truth about the history and state of race relations in this country.

Race has no scientific basis or biological reality. There is no behavior or personality that is inherent to White, Black, or any other ethnicity. Race cannot tell us anything about a person’s intelligence, behaviors, or moral capacity.

This socially constructed notion of race was and is still used to reinforce white supremacy; it was what Jim Crow legislation used to define who and what was considered legal. The idea of race continues to have a wide range effect on educational outcomes, criminal justice, and human rights.

It is said that a people who forgets their history are doomed to repeat it. As a Black woman, who knows the sting of segregation and racism, I say, we must not white-wash or hide the truth of history.