It seemed only a matter of time that the hottest political potato making the rounds on social media and 24-hour cable news channels would find its way into the hallowed halls of Fort Worth’s schools.
So prickly is the matter at hand that even the school board president apparently doesn’t want to talk about it specifically.
Tobi Jackson has her reasons, but there was no denying the hundreds who showed up at a June school board meeting wanted to discuss it with her and her colleagues on the Fort Worth School Board.
To critics, critical race theory (CRT) will doom the nation-state to the dividing lines of Balkanization — of Black versus White — and a gross violation of Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream to live in a country in which his children would be judged by their character, not the color of their skin.
To proponents, CRT is a framework to research and analyze the continued inequity of political and social systems in this country and how people of color, and Blacks in particular, have been treated in this system and the barriers that exist because of it — as well as an instrument to remedy it.
Both groups were in attendance for the board meeting in June.
“We all want the same thing. We all want good things for our kids,” says Missie Carra of both groups, pro and con. Carra, director of the Texas chapter of Parents’ Rights in Education, along with Carlos Turcios, organized those with concerns of CRT in the district. “It’s just the manner in which it’s done that we don’t agree. Their ultimate concern is kids. We’re all on the same page with that. How can we best do that is the question.”
The objective of Carra’s group, she says, is not to deny history or the reality of racism in America.
The evidence, after all, is overwhelming.
So, too, is the evidence that children of color are being disproportionately left behind in the educational experience, says Shawn Lassiter, the chief of Equity and Innovation of the Texas-based Leadership ISD, a nonprofit advocacy organization serving Dallas, Tarrant, and Harris counties. The group has been working with the school district for five years, she says.
“The richest Black students are underperforming the poorest White students,” Lassiter says. “Black girls are being overly suspended. They are achieving at the lowest rate than White girls or even brown girls. You see this along every single category. You pick one, I’ll show you an inequity based on the students with the darkest skin. Those are facts. That is fact, those are numbers, and we can’t dispute that.”
CRT is not curriculum in the Fort Worth school district. It is complicated and not suited to K – 12 syllabi. However, its framework is part of the foundation of programs conducted by the district’s Division of Equity and Excellence to help minority children improve their experiences in schools and advance their lives.
The controversy surrounds programs for teachers and administrators designed to “provide opportunities to build racial consciousness by … providing opportunities for participants to build their racial equity lens and interrogate their personal biases,” according to a memo from Sherry Breed, chief of the Division of Equity and Excellence, which acts as a forward to the department’s handbook.
The programs have been difficult for some teachers and administrators. Lassiter acknowledged that some teachers have expressed discomfort.
“People have expressed the fact that it is uncomfortable,” she says. “It challenges them to look at history differently. It acknowledges our history books do not reflect the true story of our country and leaves out people of color.
“I think overall they pushed through it. Though not everyone is on board, most really leaned into it. There is evidence that kids feel like they belong more in schools because teachers are not afraid to talk about current events and address racial inequities.”
One teacher described something more than discomfort.
In an email provided by Carra’s group, a teacher’s feedback was more alarming.
“You should be aware of the damage two days of constant verbal and moral attack had on me so that you can possibly better prepare to meet FWISD’s employee needs,” the teacher wrote. The program pushed its “employees to the farthest points of psychological limits” in equity training that included belittling groups.
Parents and community members are concerned teachers could introduce that type of stuff, as well as personal biases to students who to that point had no idea they had biases. Secondly, there is the distress that the school district’s priority is political ideology while the three R’s take a back seat.
“Some of my concerns are about how it’s categorizing people based on skin color,” Carra says.
They are also concerned that finite resources set aside for the advancement of minority students will come at the expense of White students.
The school district’s department of Equity and Excellence was part of the equity policies adopted by the school board over the past eight years, beginning with an equity audit, which identified the chief culprit of student underachievement: race. From that moment, the board has ratified public policies designed to eradicate the inequities that have left children of color behind.
Even the term equity — as compared with “equality” — has generated controversy.
Equality, Lassiter says, is giving everyone the same thing without consideration for the fact “we live in a country where people have been put in a human hierarchy based on race. If you take into account that Black and brown people have not been given equal treatment, not everyone starts in the same place.” Equity instructs that you give each person what they need to be successful.
Critical race theory in society has become the bogeyman. It is one of those wedge issues and terms politicos of every stripe, party, and creed use to, for the most part, raise awareness to their candidates and, most importantly, money.
It is, in short, one of those political issues politicians can demagogue.
Those issues are designed by crafty political consultants to divide people into motivated voters who are more likely to show up for voting season (“season,” because “Election Day” is so 20th century). Critical race theory was custom made for such an endeavor.
Republican Gov. Greg Abbott included the issue in the current special legislative session, hoping to beef up a bill originally designed to ban teaching CRT in Texas. That original bill on the regular session, opponents to CRT said, was watered down through the legislative process. Abbott signed it anyway. The special session has been interrupted by Democratic members who have left town in protest over an election integrity bill.
Many don’t even know what CRT is. This writer downloaded Critical Race Theory: An Introduction by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefanic to educate himself for this story.
CRT, which actually has life going on 50 years after the concept originated in the 1970s, is based on, but not limited to, the following constructs:
Race is not a biological but social construction — that is, that individuals are “constructed” through social processes (such as political and economic circumstances) created by a dominant White society rather than innate characteristics of the person. That is in contrast to “essentialism,” which is the belief that people have a set of inherent characteristics that make them what they are.
Racism is an ordinary part of society. “Racism is deeply ingrained, not merely in certain aspects of our legal system but in our collective unconscious and our everyday attitudes toward people of color. And because racism is typically unconscious, it is notoriously difficult to bring into a light in which people can see it; everyday acts of racism are subtle and very difficult to regulate by law.”
Racial hierarchy is the product of systems, not individual prejudice.
The progress made in race relations over the years has only been made to the extent it converges with the interests of White people. This is a product of “psychological egoism,” which is the view that humans are always motivated by self-interest. Critical race theorists, for example, contend that America’s strides in the Civil Rights Era were made only to stave off the criticism from communist and totalitarian regimes.
Lived experience and storytelling are relevant evidence to scholarship. “Critical race theorists embrace subjectivity of perspective and are avowedly political. ... We use personal histories, parables, chronicles, dreams, stories, poetry, fiction, and revisionist histories to convey our message” and bring about a psychological shift in how to view the world.
The liberalism of the 20th century, which gave America critical advances in Civil Rights, were not enough, critical race theorists contend.
Jackson, the school board president, didn’t respond to inquiries for this story. One colleague on the dais did. C.J. Evans explained: “Our current board agreements state that only the president will speak to the media, so I will direct you to president Jackson,” who was copied on the email.
Jackson gave a hint, however, as to why in the Fort Worth Report, which tried to ask her about it.
“National and state politics will not supersede student achievement, and this board will stay focused on student achievement and serving every one of our kids,” Jackson said. “That’s our focus.”
It’s hoped that message is enough to assuage concerns. Yet, in the highly charged political environment of the times, it’s highly doubtful.
