Parents Are Pushing Back Against Critical Race Theory
The backlash has generated its own backlash among educators and sympathetic members of the press. One of the most obvious counter-strategies has been simply to deny that what the school systems are engaging in is really CRT. That has been the strategy in Loudoun County, whose school Superintendent Scott A. Ziegler has described the district s program as mere racial equity work, according to The Washington Post. At a school board meeting, Ziegler said that CRT was a subject for academics that had no bearing on Loudoun s anti-racist measures. Calling them critical race theory is merely a paranoid fantasy of arch-conservatives, in the view of Ziegler and many other commentators and liberal politicians.
The other strategy is to assert that the opponents of CRT are actually trying either to censor the content of what teachers are allowed to say in classrooms or to make them hesitant to discuss historical topics such as slavery or Jim Crow that relate to racism for fear that they might break a law by making their white students feel uncomfortable. One teacher complained to the media that she would hesitate to assign the slave narratives that she typically had her American history classes read.