There's an ad on TV. You've probably seen it. It's been on several different kinds of TV shows, so it must be well-funded. In fact, $176,000 was paid, apparently, to get it on a recent Packers telecast.
It's got some young Black fellow with his daughter. Right up close, nothing else. He says, in essence, that critical race theory has to go because it's divisive. That jumps to a number of conclusions.
It assumes that critical race theory has been absorbed by our educational system. The long version of this ad shows you a teacher in Martin Luther King, Jr. School in Milwaukee, being videoed while declaring that the Pledge of Allegiance be made to the "Afro-American nation." Interviewed later, the teacher said that that was part of a "cultural immersion" in the school.
But the video shows you that and only that. It wants you to believe that that display is somehow linked to critical race theory. It makes no attempt to link it, no explanation as to why the teacher made that statement. It assumes you'll do it for them.
If this group advertises in other large cities, is it gambling that one display in one other city will make people conclude that the teacher is typical of all public school teachers throughout the nation? Or just in big cities, where Black students predominate?
It refers to a website named BeGoodToOurKids.com. So I looked it up.
It's very simple, very unobtrusive. But very misleading, like the TV ad.
It says: "We take positions, but not partisan sides." That is disingenuous. It implies an attempt at unbiased reporting. It is anything but that. Black people speaking against Black issues asks, by implication, Black voters to switch to conservative, read Republican, affinity. These people just aren't announcing that. It's subtle but clear as a cloudless day.
So who's paying for this? Langdon Law, a conservative group from Ohio, led by a fellow named David Langdon. According to the Center for Media and Democracy, a media watchdog for corruption, Langdon Law contributed more than $400,000 to the recall campaign of Mr. F. Gow, Most Recent Former Governor of Wisconsin, in 2011. This, apparently, was done through something called the Coalition to Restore American Values, the funds of which come from a Koch Brothers think tank.
Once again, before I become blue in the face: critical race theory can't be taught to grade school kids. It's much too complicated. It involves concepts understood and developed only at a graduate collegiate level, something that kids of the little girl's age simply can't grasp. All this is about Christopher Rufo, who has managed to scare nearly everybody into thinking that this is being inculcated throughout our educational system, at every level. It never has been, and the only reason it's being mentioned at all is because of people like him, whose intent it is to connect that fear to The 1619 Project, begun before the last presidential election by people with a particular edge toward telling the whole truth about slavery and its effects on all of us, like it or not.
It can't be taught to the overwhelming majority of high school students, either. That's because the right has insisted upon standardized testing, the results of which demand that history teachers, like all other teachers, completely cover the curriculum they've been presented with. With those time constraints, it's simply impossible to introduce something like critical race theory, which would involve sophistication and especially time to develop. It can't be squeezed in.
But it's given an excuse for the governor of Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, to declare that the children of her state stand threatened by "indoctrination," meaning an interpretation of history that makes her, and some other white people, uncomfortable. Rufo's self-proclaimed intent (see his bio on Wikipedia) is to sow distrust in the public education system and to take it apart. He wants people to connect all that is wrong with the system with critical race theory and its apparent absorption by teachers and administration.
That is nonsense, but that is also a very convenient version of non-facts that's easier to put out there because people won't take the opportunity to straighten themselves out. In all my years of teaching, 30 to be exact, I never heard the phrase 'critical race theory' discussed in any faculty discussion, in any discussion in the social studies department, in any writings I ran into. Not once. And I tried hard to teach the civil rights movement in a positive and thorough way. Maybe I would have run into it had I gotten a master's degree in history. But I didn't, and I didn't have to to maintain my teaching license.
This is about an advanced level of race-baiting by utilization of unsuspecting members of the very race it's designed to bait--the ultimate in cynicism. "When the truth comes out, we all win," mutters a background voice at the end of the ad.
Yes, I certainly hope so. And now the "truth" will have to include this enormous attempt at deception, pretending to describe critical race theory by saying that it's divisive. Don't be fooled by this bogus generalization. It's the ad that's divisive. It's based on a lie in an era in which the truth matters less and less.
Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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