Posted by Union Leader
Gislaine N. Ngounou: In our classrooms, let’s teach the truth
IN STATE legislatures across the country, including here in New Hampshire, legislation introduced seeking to ban the teaching of “divisive concepts” poses a threat to our young people, our communities, and our collective futures. With language taken directly from Trump’s 2020 Equity Gag order, which sought to ban such teachings and trainings in federal agencies, these bills seek to dismiss the notion that our country was founded on a bedrock of White supremacy.
Such bills have emboldened a conservative attack on concepts such as critical race theory, a framework that uses race as a lens to examine power structures. In turn, critical race theory has become a catch-all term used by the right to demonize any conversation about race, Whiteness, or equity in our schools. No, most K-12 schools are not teaching “critical race theory” as it exists; as a matter of fact, most law schools aren’t even using it.
The other week, I had the privilege of leading a conversation with renowned scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, who led foundational work on intersectionality and critical race theory. “The control of the frame; the control of the ability to communicate — the control of knowledge about racial oppression has always been one of the go-to features of those who want to sustain and maintain an inequitable status quo” she rightly noted. Not only is this dangerous, it’s straight out of the playbook of power and control: take a term the general public doesn’t know about [critical race theory], demonize it, and turn it into a tactic to suppress the teaching of race and racism in our schools.
What Professor Crenshaw describes is what we are seeing in our current context, or as stated in a recent statement by the African American Policy Forum, an organization that she co-founded: “underneath a barrage of alarmist distortions, misdirection, and outright lies is an aggressive agenda that undermines our commitment to a robust multiracial democracy in which everyone is part of ‘we the people.”