Date: 8/18/2021
Editor Mike Dobbs’ opinion piece in [the Aug. 5] Reminder creates more confusion than light on the subject of Critical Race Theory (CRT). CRT has become integrally inseparable from the New York Times’ 1619 Project, Black Lives Matter, and Equity vs Equality. All four of these issues have race and racial discrimination as their primary focus, and they encourage racial separation, increase distrust, and divide and polarize Americans based solely on skin color. They all teach that whites are oppressors, which would shock Pennsylvania coal miners and other struggling rural whites. All blacks are oppressed, which should come as a surprise to the millions of professional, educated, successful minority people going back to Justice Thurgood Marshall, Senator Ed Brooke, and Economist Walter Williams. This is why CRT is getting the pushback that Dobbs can’t understand.
CRT itself began innocently as Critical History – an effort by some historians – Howard Zinn comes to mind – to expose long-hidden embarrassing episodes in US history, including corruption, ill treatment of Native Americans, of women, of the mentally ill, of a succession of immigrants, and of Black slavery. It was only when concerns over these other categories of persons was dropped in favor of a singular focus on race, that CH morphed into CRT, and therefore no longer a historical issue, but an activist agenda.
Dobbs describes CRT as exposing that “white supremacy is an intersectional social construction that serves to uphold the interests of white people at the expense of marginalized communities.” If that is accurate, then CRT really is an example of classic Marxist theory of oppressor vs. oppressed, including the tenets of white privilege, white supremacy, and the claim that all white people are irredeemably racist, and all Black people are victims. Most thinking people don’t buy into that, and certainly don’t want to poison the minds of schoolchildren with those divisive concepts.
Pitting one race against another as CRT does, is probably making Doctor King spin in his grave. Is US society perfect? Heck, no. But it is improving all the time, as the thousands of minority mayors, councilors, governors, senators and academicians across the country prove. And as the millions of mostly minority immigrants beat down our doors to get in.
R. Patrick Henry
East Longmeadow
