America’s Long-Running Conversation About Race and Justice | RealClearPolitics
Krugman, Brazile, and Waxman render the controversy over critical race theory unrecognizable. The trouble is not, as these apologists for politicization of the school curriculum suggest, that conservatives oppose teaching about race. None of them provide a single example of a conservative who believes that the study of slavery and post-Civil War racial discrimination should be excluded from the study of American history.
The problem, rather, is the spirit of indoctrination that informs much of fashionable race pedagogy. Parents on both sides of the aisle should unite in opposition to teachers who present claims about systemic racism as established fact rather than a matter of debatable interpretation. Legislators are right to prohibit teachers from abusing their authority by ascribing guilt to some students and awarding special privileges to others based on the color of their skin. And citizens should stand against the use of classrooms to stigmatize the view shared by Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Rev. King that the key to overcoming racism in America is greater fidelity to the nation s founding principles and constitutional system.
Such fidelity is warranted not least by the extraordinary wrestling with race and justice the rival of the sustained and frank public debate about its fundamental principles undertaken by any nation anywhere and at any time in which the United States has been engaged for many decades.