Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
When the great critical race theory “debate” started a few years ago, most of us saw it for what it really was — white people advocating for the whitewashing of American history.
In fact, I put the word debate in quotes above because it is quite literally a canard; critical race theory is the study of how American politics, public policy, law and many other aspects of American life have been shaped and impacted by racism, but white people turned critical race theory into a bogeyman that is here to divide the country and infect every white person in America with the awful and deadly disease of white guilt.
The anti-CRT campaign was launched in service of whiteness; it is legislated anti-Blackness, and it was done to uphold white supremacy while simultaneously preventing the sins and foibles of white supremacy from being taught or exposed. As the kids on social media say, it was and is very nasty work.
But this is a thing that whiteness does, and there are plenty of white people who willingly participate in it. American history as it is taught in American schools is mostly a white “remembrance” of what happened through the lens of whiteness, and the lens of whiteness is never going to allow white people to look like the bad guy even when they are very much the bad guy from the point of view of those who have experienced enslavement, colonialism, colonization, and imperialism at the hands of white people.
History, they say, is written by the victors. Actually, “they” never said that either, but the way whiteness and the whitewashing of history works, if you tell a lie enough times, it somehow becomes the truth and even turns into a legend about Winston Churchill, crediting him with saying something he never said in the first place.
Women
And if white…
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