CRT fear mongering: the red herring for school segregation
Glenn Youngkin is quietly breathing life into the Lost Cause of the Confederacy
“Critical Race Theory” … by now, everybody and their mother has heard the buzzword uttered at least once, but few know what it actually is. In its simplest form, CRT is a proposed interdisciplinary curriculum that analyzes America’s most foundational principles and how they are based on racially-motivated values for social class. The core idea of CRT is that such principles are the root cause for why inequality of various forms exist in modern times, particularly in cases of economics and civil liberties for marginalized communities. And although no evidence exists of CRT being currently or historically taught in Virginia public schools, thanks to a newly elected governor and the horse he rode in on, it exists as a Bogeyman — a nondescript monster.
But Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s nondescript monster is merely a distraction from his quiet attempts to segregate education by virtue of privatizing it. A simultaneous campaign to broaden the influence of charter schools, which receive funding from state and federal programs, is where the real evil lies. Because Youngkin does not want to give all parents more choices, he simply wants to ensure choices exist for some parents.
As a republican, Youngkin has co-opted the classic GOP tenet of one’s personal choice in the matter of education, which is likely why he sends his children to private schools in the D.C. area. Yet these schools proudly advertise their work with equity & inclusion programs. In fact, Youngkin was even on the board of one of these schools when those equity & inclusion policies were passed. This begs the question of why someone like Youngkin wants so desperately to outlaw CRT from public education.
Youngkin has promoted several republican-backed bills in the General Assembly that “seek to expand the number of schools that operate outside the control of local school boards but are funded with public dollars,” according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Furthermore, Youngkin has promoted several bills “that would let any public or private college or university open a charter school, or convert an existing school into a charter school, with approval of the state Board of Education.”
Since the early 2000s, charter and private schools have exploded in popularity. But time and again has privatized education been proven to lead to increased segregation. A 2020 report done in conjunction with Penn State and Virginia Commonwealth University found many racial disparities related to the massive growth in popularity of charter schools. Among other things, the report found that charter schools tend to lack “important civil rights protections like free transportation, extensive outreach and diversity goals,” which leads to “intense segregation.”
“An analysis of metropolitan school segregation in the U.S. between 1993 and 2010 was the latest study to find that segregation is most extreme when families have many charter school or private school options or when they can choose from a variety of school districts due to regional fragmentation,” the report states. “In other words, private, charter and magnet school options all contribute to racial segregation in the district as advantaged families take advantage of these alternatives.”
Both the explosion in charter and private school enrollment and racial segregation is not a trend found only in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, especially not in Southern states. According to the Southern Education Foundation, “white students left public schools in droves to both traditional and newly formed private schools. From 1950 to 1965 private school enrollment grew at unprecedented rates all over the nation, with the South having the largest growth.”
Following the landmark decision of Brown v. Board of Education, many school boards sought to delay desegregation as much as possible, hoping to stave it off entirely with enough resistance. Pushback and the response to it commonly resulted in legal challenges to the ruling, several of which made it to the supreme court. This prompted SCOTUS to allot five cases over how to integrate schools into what became known as Brown v. Board of Education II. The court’s decision in Brown II ultimately fed into many instances of severe pushback from white parents. The best example from Virginia is that of Prince Edward County in 1959, which closed all of its public schools to avoid integration. This left many Black children without a form of education while white students overwhelmingly enjoyed the economic privilege to attend private schools that did not have to desegregate.
“Brown II prioritized the rights and preferences of white parents by enabling delay,” the Equal Justice Initiative states in a report. “State legislatures passed bills to thwart desegregation through ‘freedom of choice’ plans, which allowed parents to choose among several schools; transfer options, which permitted parents to move their children out of integrated schools; and grade-a-year plans, which started desegregation in the first or twelfth grade and then expanded it to one additional grade every year.”
While these private schools acted as safe havens for white parents fearful of integration, they also continued to receive federal funding and tax exemptions for several years after Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. Title VI outlaws “discrimination based on race, color, or national origin in programs or activities receiving federal financial assistance.”
According to the SEF article, during the first half of the 1960s, the IRS temporarily suspended federal tax exemption applications for “segregation academies”. But that changed in 1967 when the IRS announced it would go back on accepting tax deductions for contributions made to any segregated private school.
“This led to a Mississippi-based lawsuit against the IRS in 1969 in which federal courts issued a preliminary injunction denying exemption to private schools that were segregated by race,” the SEF article states. “Following this court order, the IRS adopted a non-discrimination policy applying to private schools in 1970, though it took eight years to be implemented.”
And it should come as no surprise that during this period, not only was racial integration a significant worry for southern racists, but so was the inevitable introduction of more inclusionary curriculums by virtue of integration. As school desegregation and white flight from public schools flourished, so did a sinister and inherently divisive canard that is known as the Lost Cause of the Confederacy.
The Lost Cause refers to an effort of revisionist history that was perpetrated by a consortium of racist sore losers, their widows and Hollywood pioneers, beginning sometime during and immediately following the American Civil War. The Lost Cause helped enshrine barbaric slaveholders as altruistic businessmen, thus preventing greater economic mobility for historically marginalized communities by devaluating cases for reparations for former slaves. It changed the way Americans think about their bloodiest war and why it was fought, and continues to do so to this very day. And its effects can be observed today at pretty much any monument removal or school board meeting nationwide.
In many ways, the Lost Cause and education are inextricably intertwined. While it took various forms, from monuments to movies, the Lost Cause is an essential example of warping a nation’s sense of identity and history, a laborious task no doubt. And what better way to achieve such an ambitious goal than by influencing how children are forever taught to think about a historical narrative?
Textbooks that push Lost Cause fallacies about the Civil War, slavery and structural racism, such as Virginia: history, government, geography, were introduced to curriculums and used in Virginia public schools well into the 1970s. And this would not have been possible without the work of former Confederates manipulating education systems.
Perhaps the best example of how the Lost Cause influenced education systems belongs to former United Daughters of the Confederacy historian Mildred Lewis Rutherford. At its annual reunion in 1919, the United Confederate Veterans formed what became known as the Rutherford Committee. The committee was composed of the three largest Confederate heritage organizations: the UCV, the UDC and the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
According to Facing South, the committee was created “to promulgate the Lost Cause version of history through textbooks.” Rutherford was the one who created the set of standards her namesake committee would abide by. These standards were published in her 1919 pamphlet A Measuring Rod To Test Text Books And Reference Books In Schools, Colleges and Libraries.
This pamphlet acted as the spinal column for Lost Cause narratives in American history curriculums. It would be used to decide which textbooks fit the Lost Cause narrative and which did not. For example, its 11 standards include such requirements for textbooks as “the slaves were not ill-treated in the south and the north was largely responsible for their presence in the south,” and “the war between the states was not fought to hold the slaves.”
Consider how CRT might be the very antithesis — the antidote — of the Lost Cause. CRT helps undermine the harm of the Lost Cause by teaching children that systemic racism is a real thing…that our country would not exist as it does today, if at all, without the exploitation of African slaves and other minority groups throughout its history. CRT enlightens impressionable minds to the idea that the past affects the future, which at its core, is the precise reason we teach history in schools — to ensure future generations do not make the same pitfalls as previous ones.
Inversely, the Lost Cause rewrites American history in more ways than can be counted, but perhaps the most routine effect of it is the still widely-held belief that the Civil War was fought over state’s rights to govern, not protecting slavery from nationwide abolition. The evidence against this fallacy is best demonstrated in the Confederacy’s constitution, which prohibited the passage or proposal of any “law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves.”
By attempting to delegitimize CRT through politicized stigmatization, Youngkin and the Virginia GOP are effectively perpetuating the very same effects of the Lost Cause through an inverted method. Rather than creating new historical fallacies of slavery and secession, they are using ones that already exist in order to undermine truth. They are effectively deriding one’s choice to more easily understand how America’s ruling class has and still does violently exploit middle and lower class individuals for a profit.
And this is exactly why a wealthy, socialite bigot, such as Youngkin, uses the catchphrase “we should teach children how to think, not what to think” ad nauseum. Because CRT is not just a curriculum adjustment to ensure stories are told which have been long ignored. CRT equips those impressionable minds with the cerebral tools necessary for understanding how systemic racism and wealth inequality intersect. Youngkin and the GOP likely understand perfectly well that CRT does teach children how to think… they know the curriculum is not simply shoving information down the throats of children. Youngkin, being the demagogue bigot he is, wants to ban CRT simply because it helps teach children how to think about the horrors people of his ilk have inflicted on America.
Youngkin and the Virginia GOP want to kill CRT before it has a chance to have an effect, and are willing to intentionally destroy Virginia’s public school system to do so. This is because if they can use CRT as a distraction then they can make privatized education seem like the most viable solution to a struggling public school system. For example, on Jan. 28, republicans in the House Finance Committee voted to kill 3 bills that would have given a boost to funding for school construction.
“Nearly 1/2 our schools are overcrowded,” stated Del. Sally Hudson, D-Charlottesville, in a tweet. “Maybe they should listen to parents about that.”
With all this in mind, we can no longer afford to weakly discuss the topic of systemic racism’s effects on modern day America … we must go beyond the obvious notion that slavery was bad. It’s time we take things a few steps further. We must trudge through the mire of centuries-old disinformation and learn exactly why and how systemic racism metastasized in our nation’s bloodstream if we wish to get ourselves out of the problems we see before us today.
The irony here is because CRT (nor anything even closely resembling the curriculum’s central objective) has ever been taught in Virginia, conservatives, many of whom were raised to believe the Lost Cause as gospel truth, are led to believe that slavery and state-sanctioned racism stopped with the passage of the 13th Amendment and Civil Rights Act. If taught CRT, or something similar, perhaps these leaders would opt to lend aid to their non-white constituents with policy decisions rather than with platitudes and culture wars. Perhaps these leaders would be able to lead lives free of racist attitudes had they been taught a curriculum that did not glorify white oppressors while simultaneously whitewashing their atrocities.
Our nation finds itself at a crossroads that could redirect our trajectory down this miserable path we’ve traveled for hundreds of years. CRT is of course not the only thing that will help us to truly judge one another on the contents of each other’s characters, but it could be a good place to start. Simply put, anyone who outright rejects, and furthermore seeks to undermine what CRT can achieve, is attempting to perpetuate the sinister goals of the Lost Cause; to manufacture consent for white supremacy; to remove personal choice by gaslighting and gatekeeping individuals into submissiveness.
