Books and Other Scary Things
The Real Cost of the War on Critical Race Theory
This week, the Republican gubernatorial candidate from Virginia released an ad in which a mother described her son’s bad reaction to a book he read in English class. She talked about his nightmares and the shame he felt from reading it; she discussed his reaction and the trauma he experienced at length. The interview was juxtaposed with shots of a dark school, and the entire thing had an ominous feel to it. What the audience wasn’t told was that the English class was senior Advanced Placement English and the book was Toni Morrison’s classic, Beloved.
When I was a senior in high school, I also read Beloved. It was such a change from the standard curriculum in my conservative, small-town Texas high school. Over the course of my four years, we had done the standards. Romeo and Juliet. The Scarlet Letter. The Great Gatsby. To Kill a Mockingbird. Books and plays by white men that had been held up as classics that every student needed to read. I enjoyed many of them, and I did not enjoy others (looking at you, Henry James). Then, I got into senior AP English, and my teacher was quite different from the others I had. She had a curriculum that was set by the state, but she wasn’t terribly interested in having her AP students follow that curriculum. Her solution was to assign us the required books for at-home reading; we’d still read and understand them. But she had far more interesting things to cover in her class. That’s how I discovered Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, and, yes, Toni Morrison.
Beloved was assigned near the end of the year; my teacher decided we were mature enough to handle it by then. She warned us that it was graphic and hard to read, but it was also one of the most integral books for understanding the psychological horrors of slavery and what it did to those in bondage. I dove in, excited to read something controversial and challenging. And, whew, was it challenging! Morrison holds nothing back in her novel; her descriptions are visceral. I cringed more than once at the descriptions. I remember feeling despondent that anyone could feel as desperate as Sethe did. I was heartbroken at her decisions; 18-year-old me had never experienced anything even close to her story. By the end, I knew I had read a masterpiece in storytelling. Controversial. Difficult. Painful. A reckoning. But, as an adult, in casual conversations when we discuss books we read in high school, Beloved is the first one I mention. It had a profound effect on me; it was one of the first texts I read that graphically forced me to look at the world and our history differently. I went to school in small town Texas, remember? History had been a bit, well, scrubbed clean for our eyes and ears.
So, that brings me back to the political ad; at first, I laughed a bit thinking about a high school senior being so traumatized by this book. It was just a book! There is nothing less scary than a book. And I felt a little morally smug thinking how much more mature I must have been than him. But then I really thought about it; the reality is that he and I didn’t have profoundly different reactions to this book. I was also distressed by much of what I read. The difference is how we reacted to that distress. I leaned into it; I wanted to know more about not only the horrors of our history but how they impacted our present. I am certain this is one of the reasons I was drawn to sociology as a field. How could I possibly understand our systems without that history?
As battles wage across the country and “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) becomes the new boogeyman to replace the Satanic Panic, we have lost the plot. Everything cannot be CRT, and, yet, everything has been narrowed to become just that. Books about Martin Luther King, Jr? Critical Race Theory. This Book is Anti-Racist? Critical Race Theory. Telling the true stories of Native Americans? Critical Race Theory. Anything that says white people had an advantage in the history of the U.S.? Critical Race Theory. In Wisconsin, a bill was proposed that banned all sorts of phrases. Included in the ban? The words inclusivity education and equity. Apparently, those are also Critical Race Theory. That proposal has virtually no chance of becoming law because Wisconsin has a Democrat for a governor, but what if they didn’t? What happens to teachers that use the word “equity” in their classrooms? It’s chilling to think about the answer to that question.
The war on CRT has so many victims; we shortchange our kids by thinking they can’t handle our history. History is a complicated tapestry of the good, the bad, and the ugly. It’s hard to look at and, yet, impossible to ignore. Its threads fan out all across our country to inform our present and our future. Without it, we are adrift in a sea of ignorance; we have no idea how we got here. That’s dangerous. We have done some ugly things in our past; it’s critical to look at those things with a discerning eye.
History can be a scary thing; it’s hard to look at the past and reconcile some of the actions taken. The books, films, and other art that tell those stories are important, and removing them does so much damage. We may not enjoy that our history is littered with trauma and pain, but the cost of ignoring that is too great to bear. Reckoning with the past is part of becoming a mature adult; allowing ourselves to see our history, warts and all, makes us more well-rounded. If we ban all the things we don’t like, where does it stop? How much scrubbing can we do before we are just wandering around in the dark with no light at all?
