School Board in Georgia's Cobb County Bans Critical Race Theory

Another day, another group of Republicans are in their feelings that America was and is racist as fuck. A school board in Georgia’s Cobb County voted on Thursday to ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory in schools.

According to AJC, the resolution was introduced by board Chairman Randy Scamihorn after he saw on social media that some teachers were using aspects of the curriculum in their classrooms. Scamihorn, whose knowledge of CRT I’m going to assume comes entirely from Newsmax posts on Facebook, called the curriculum “a Marxist concept.”

“It’s revisionist history and history should be thorough,” Scamihorn said. Considering that we received an abridged version of Black history in school, the horrors committed by the colonial settlers were whitewashed, and Manifest Destiny was talked about like a good thing, I find this comment deeply, deeply ironic.

The board voted across party lines with the four Republican members voting in favor of the ban, and the three Democratic members abstaining from the vote. Board member Leroy “Tre” Hutchins expressed concern that the board was banning a concept they couldn’t define, and that they may wind up banning essential social and emotional learning programs that critics have called CRT-based.

“We are now very dangerously getting ready to put something in place that will limit the responsiveness of our teachers…to meet the needs of all children here in Cobb County,” he said.

From AJC:

Dozens of parents gathered Thursday outside the school district’s offices to rally against the board’s resolution, calling on the district to include discussions about slavery and racism in classroom lessons. A few people like Pamela Reardon of East Cobb, however, say critical race theory teaches white children that they are racist.

Cobb resident Janet Arnold Savage rejected that argument, adding the board’s approval of the resolution amounts to “suppressing the truth.”

“There’s a segment of this community and the country at large that feels that if you tell the truth about who we are, then you’re anti-American,” she said. “You have family members you don’t agree with, but you have to tell the truth.”

It’s sad that CRT and the 1619 Project have been boiled down to “you’re calling white people racist!” From my understanding, it’s mainly about examining the relationship between race and power, and how racism has been the root of many of America’s systemic inequities. You can’t acknowledge that racism was (and still is) the law of the land, but then get mad when people examine how racism shaped those laws.