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Having spent the past three decades as a college educator, I’ve long believed that if the objective of a lesson or conversation is to help students to think about the world from a perspective different than their own that’s fine. We all should. Empathy is an important social skill to cultivate.
What I take issue with is deceit, misinformation and hatred being passed off as facts. Instead, our children need to be presented with information and allowed to process it by using critical thinking skills. As I say with regularity, the goal should be education not indoctrination.
In this fallen world racism exists because not all people are serving God. Racism can come from white or black or any race that puts the skin color/physical appearance before the truth that we are all created in God’s image and no soul has more or less value to God. For the Christian, because Jesus’ Life Matters ALL Lives Matter. Therefore, any time we don’t see the individual that God created but assume we know anything about a person by that person’s appearance, we deny the person’s humanity and uniqueness. Doing so is the behavior of the morally and intellectually bankrupt.
As a 57 year old black woman and life-long Iowan, I can attest that the more prevalent subtle racism of paternalism and relegating people of color to victim-status is real and dangerous to our children and our society. This mentality is also referred to as the “racism of low expectations.” Realizing this, I decided about 40 years ago that no one will tell me I can’t do something that I want to do in this free country because of my skin tone.
In my experience, Republicans don’t subscribe to identity politics, so I’m comfortable with my Christian Conservative Republican friends. Frankly, all I want the “woke,” Liberal, “Social Justice Warriors” to do for me is get out of my way. The true racist believes that I need help because I’m not white. (Black and brown people really do have IDs and they know how to use computers and their phones!) BLM, White Privilege, critical race theory, racial identity theory, anti-racist and any other “pseudo-science lies” like that don’t help but actually harm people who buy into it. Our schools need not add to the confusion already going on in society. Who really thinks schools should be telling the students what they must think and how they must feel?
To be sure, I’m not saying that there aren’t problems in our society. Of course there are problems… because we are human. I’m saying that crying racism (when often it’s just ignorance) is a centuries-old, twisted way of keeping us from uniting together as Americans first.
