White conservatives are raising a generation of snowflakes
OPINION: The war on critical race theory was always about protecting white children from feeling discomfort in the classroom. Now, even posters showing Black and white children holding hands are too triggering and may be banned from classrooms in one Texas school district.
Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
The right always complains about liberal snowflakes, claiming that folks on the left are overly sensitive, easily triggered, entitled and intolerant towards other viewpoints. And yet, the latest news coming from the battlefront in the anti-critical race theory wars proves that folks on the right are the ultimate snowflakes.
Perhaps the most extreme example of the anti-woke mob lives in Montgomery County, Texas, where trustees of the Conroe Independent School District want to ban race-mixing posters that allegedly have left a white child feeling some type of way.
Specifically, the school board is cracking down on all posters that depict racial inclusivity, diversity and Pride in a district whose student body is 60% children of color. A trustee claimed a white child was traumatized and had to switch classrooms after seeing a poster showing children of different colors holding hands. And as the Conroe Independent School District wants you to know, they want to do away with such “symbols of personal ideologies.”
Rather than supplying the schools with smelling salts and fainting couches to help fragile white children cope with the trauma of viewing pictures of interracial hand-holding, Conroe has decided to eliminate the source of the problem altogether. Just get rid of the melanin. Because after all, imagine what could happen if a white child is willing to shake the hand of a Black child. That could lead them down a slippery slope to friendship, empathy, understanding, cooperation, peace, justice, equality, reparations — or worse.
From the outset, all of this anti-CRT hysteria was about banning material that made white children feel uncomfortable about being white. In a country built on settler colonialism, kidnapping, forced labor and genocide, this is a tall order. And the country that once prohibited enslaved Black people from reading and writing now wants to criminalize teaching that history, and for the same reason — white power.
History was never meant to falsely shield children from discomfort. A solid grasp of history provides us with a sense of identity, an understanding of how the world operated then and how it operates now and an appreciation of how the past has shaped the present.
White parents are telling on themselves when they claim their children are made to feel racially uncomfortable, just as their parents and grandparents caused mayhem in the streets to keep Black children from integrating their white schools and creating discomfort by dating their children. We know because we’ve seen the photos, and many who were there are still alive today. We see you, Papaw, Aunt Minnie and Uncle Cooter Lee, and we know what y’all did to Black people back in the day in those photos.
Rather than white children complaining about posters with multicolored hands, at issue is that white parents are not ready, willing or able to prepare their children for the multicultural world in which they live. However, they do want to protect whiteness, in an America where a minority of children are white. In Texas, where white Anglos are a minority and Latinos outnumber white folks, a history of voter suppression and racial gerrymandering allows an extreme and unhinged white minority to run things and pretend Black and brown folks are nowhere to be found.
This is not about protecting the kids. The states who claim to protect the children from the discomfort of learning about white privilege are forcing these children to give birth to their rapist’s baby. Greg Abbott, the sadistic and sociopathic governor of Texas, cares so much about the children that he has erected razor-wire death traps and floating buoys along the Rio Grande to slice up and potentially drown migrant children. And let us not forget Houston public schools, where the state recently announced that school libraries are shutting down in the poorest communities and being repurposed as punishment centers for “disruptive” Black and Latinx kids.
In Arkansas — where white folks acted the fool back in 1957 when the first Black students entered Little Rock’s Central High School — AP African American history courses have been canceled because white folks believe learning about Black people is “indoctrination.” But at least Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders gutted those pesky child labor laws so that kids now have a chance to work at the meat processing plant or the construction site.
And in Florida — “where woke goes to die” and Gov. Ron DeSantis has used his chocolate “pudding fingers” to sign all types of anti-Black, anti-diversity-inclusion-and-equity and anti-LGBTQ laws — the state Department of Education will allow PragerU to provide “curriculum” in the classroom. A right-wing extremist propaganda mill that is not a university, PragerU will supply content to Florida public schools as what they call “a free alternative to the dominant left-wing ideology in culture, media, and education.” In other words, PragerU offers right-wing indoctrination and pure toxic garbage.
‘Woke’ is the opposite of whiteness
Florida children will learn that climate change is a hoax, that there is no such thing as gender-affirming care, that Frederick Douglass wasn’t mad at the Founding Fathers and said slavery was a compromise to make America better, and that the Black Lives Matter movement led to more crime.
One PragerU cartoon depicts the colonizer Christopher Columbus telling two white children that the enslavement of indigenous people was “better than being killed,” and in any case, some of the Indigenous people he encountered were “vicious and warring cannibals.” In other words, white parents — I mean children — don’t you dare feel uncomfortable about the past. Here are some whitewashed, made-up stories to teach your children, guilt-free and white as snow.
White MAGA America, you are raising a bunch of snowflakes. This is ironic given that you love to throw that word around liberals, progressives and left-of-center folks. You are telling on yourselves, and we see you.
David A. Love is a journalist and commentator who writes investigative stories and op-eds on a variety of issues, including politics, social justice, human rights, race, criminal justice and inequality. Love is also an instructor at the Rutgers School of Communication and Information, where he trains students in a social justice journalism lab. In addition to his journalism career, Love has worked as an advocate and leader in the nonprofit sector, served as a legislative aide, and as a law clerk to two federal judges. He holds a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Harvard University and a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He also completed the Joint Programme in International Human Rights Law at the University of Oxford. His portfolio website is davidalove.com.
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