South Carolina’s white children are strong enough to learn the truth about racism
White South Carolina legislators think white children are too fragile to learn anything that might discomfort them.
They are convinced white children are incapable of developing coherent thoughts about race and racism, and believe they’ll crumble at the first sight of the word “slavery” in a history book. They think so little of South Carolina’s white children they are trying to implement laws that treat them like snowflakes rather than fully-complex human beings.
There’s no other rational explanation for why they are deciding to push forward with laws that prioritize the comfort of white children over the need of teachers to help those children develop invaluable critical thinking skills in a rapidly-diversifying country.
White Republicans here are leading the charge to coddle white children into irrelevance, a pattern being repeated in numerous other red states. That’s why they are proposing legislation that might ban what they refer to as “critical race theory,” The 1619 Project, a New York Times project that explores slavery’s long reach, and anything else think might discomfort all-too-dainty white kids, even those in our colleges and universities.
Don’t buy their superficially-misleading explanations about doing it for reasons of equality or the advancement of civil rights or to fight bigotry. We all know none of that is true. They know that’s not true. That’s why they are contemplating things such as a hotline that members of the public can use to report professors who don’t teach the way those legislators demand.
The proposed anti-CRT and anti-1619 laws are dumb in the extreme, the latest infliction of harm upon an already-struggling education system. State leaders trying to get them implemented think so little of the educational dexterity of white kids that they feel the need to create perpetual safe spaces for them.
According to these potential laws, white kids can’t handle a real education about this state’s, or this country’s, actual history. They can know that Martin Luther King Jr. preached “I have a dream” and wanting to not be judged by the color of our skin but by the content of our character.
According to these fearless leaders of ours, though, white children can’t handle that King also said the biggest threat to racial progress was the white moderate. Too inflammatory. Might make those white kids think their white parents and white grandparents were evil.
Don’t be fooled just because they don’t explicitly say “white” children. That would be akin to believing the grandfather clause wasn’t racist because it didn’t explicitly say “we don’t want black people to vote.” For make no mistake, legislators are using the image of white children to establish a Lost Cause 2.0.
They don’t care that they will be handicapping their own children.
When large corporations and others seek employees who can navigate what might become a majority-minority nation in a few decades, they won’t be looking to white kids who grew up in South Carolina. Because they would know those kids weren’t equipped to handle such complexity, can’t deal with the discomfort that sometimes arises alongside diversity.
Opportunistic legislators in the General Assembly and angry white parents at school board meetings will deserve the blame. They would have raised kids embarrassingly uneducated about some of the most important and vexing issues facing their generation.
They’ve convinced themselves all they are doing is protecting their children’s racial innocence without realizing they are simply ensuring their children’s racial ignorance.
But this wouldn’t be the first time white parents in South Carolina would have harmed their own kids while trying to hide uncomfortable truths about how we came to be.
Issac Bailey is a columnist for The Sun News.