A few years ago, I excitedly took our teen-aged grandsons from Texas to the Idaho Capitol Building. At pioneer memorials, I heard muttering about “racist settlers.” I wasn’t blind to conflicts between Native Americans and pioneers who moved onto their land, but I lectured the boys that my grandparents, children of immigrants from England and Sweden, made a good life for us by homesteading Idaho land.
While acknowledging the goodness of our forebears, my daughter said I didn’t understand how Native Americans and other people of color have been treated in our beautiful country and state.
I bristled but decided to study the issue. My grandparents and parents weren't perfect but they were the kind of people who, if they unknowingly made mistakes, would try to correct them.
I grew up in 1960s Eastern Idaho, in racial bubble wrap as a member of the majority white population. I heard racial epithets but tried not to use them, feeling that I was enlightened and unbiased because my sister had married a Hispanic man. My family was civil to everyone, but we never probed our racist roots. We learned that slaves were freed after the Civil War, but we never learned that many, many laws and policies harmed people of color after 1865. We voted mostly Republican, comfortable with the party platform. (That is no longer true for me.)
In 2020 I joined the Interfaith Circle: Virtual Book Club, a diverse group, in both race and age, that studies and discusses these issues and then helps groups who are seeking racial justice in the Treasure Valley. We discussed Trouble I’ve Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism, by Drew G.I. Hart, which suggests that American Christians could better follow the loving example of Jesus Christ by understanding the frustrations of people of color.
Hart wrote that the Homestead Act of 1862 “gave millions of acres to white settlers . . . Overall, 1.5 million families got ownership of 246 million acres of land.” The law denied public land grants to people of color and Native Americans. Poor as they were, my grandfathers obtained free land because their skin was white. Learning that put my white privilege [the societal privilege that benefits white people over non-white people in some societies] into perspective. I hope that my grandparents would understand how unfair that was.
Hart used critical race theory—CRT—to explain his position. I’d never heard of it, but soon, the Idaho Legislature passed laws against it.
CRT was conceived in the 1970s by legal scholars trying to understand why civil rights legislation of the past twenty years hadn’t eliminated racial inequality in America, according to historian Heather Cox Richardson. They argued that racial biases were so woven into American law that efforts to protect individuals from discrimination didn’t reach the heart of the issue, arguments that historians have made since the 1940s: our economy, education, housing, medical care, and so on, have developed with racial biases. Scholars agree that this is not controversial and is easily proven.
“While CRT focuses on systems, not individuals, and is largely limited to legal theory classes rather than public schools, Republicans have turned this theory into the ideas that it attacks white Americans, and that teachers who teach the effects of these laws are indoctrinating schoolchildren to hate America,” Richardson writes.
If CRT teaches history—like facts about the Homestead Act—then it cannot be called “indoctrination.” We should have an educational system where learners are: exposed to facts from all sides of events; taught that people aren't perfect; and reminded that it isn't our job to judge others-- it's our job to try to fix inequities in our own society.
Many Americans want to understand CRT. Recently at a House Armed Services Committee hearing Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) suggested that CRT was weakening the U.S. military. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, said, “. . . It’s important for those of us in uniform to be open minded and be widely read. . . I want to understand white rage. I'm white, and I want to understand it. What caused thousands of people to assault this building [the U.S. Capitol] and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America? What caused that?
“Our military comes from the American people so it is important [we] . . . do understand it. I've read Mao Zedong, Karl Marx, Lenin. That doesn't make me a communist. What is wrong with having some situational understanding about the country which we are here to defend? I find it offensive that we are accusing the United States military [and its] officers of being, quote, ‘woke’ or something else, because we're studying some theories."
I’m grateful for my ancestors who were ethical people I think they would want me to recognize that it was grossly unfair that the white dominant group received significant social, political and economic benefits because of their skin color. If more of us, children and adults, studied differing viewpoints about our history, perhaps we could begin to heal the wounds of the past and find a harmony that is lacking in society. Jesus Christ, who championed the poor and meek of every color, would want us to try.
(If you’d like to join the next session of Interfaith Circle: Virtual Book Club, comment or send me a personal text or FB message.)
Here is more information about the wonderful interfaith book club group:
ReplyDeleteBook club members are diverse in race, nationality, and religion (or lack of religion.) Many are students who became acquainted through the Interfaith Council of the College of Idaho. I will share quotes from our zoom chats that spanned five months.
Aurora, co-leader, who kept our discussions productive, suggested, “These are emotional issues. Lean into your discomfort; feel and analyze it. It may help to write your conflicted feelings in a journal.”
“I found I needed to ‘interrogate all of my experience,’ and that’s uncomfortable. Sometimes you have to ‘sit with it’ for a long time, and feel it,” said Molly.
Heidi said, “It hurts to realize you can harm people without thinking about it. There’s nothing inherently wrong with being white, black or any race—it’s how we relate to it, and how we treat people.”
In a discussion about how racially charged remarks are often passed off as “just a joke,” Kirtan said, “That is humor that isn’t funny, and racism that isn’t physically violent.”
Lebogang, co-leader, described her difficulty after explaining a complex racial issue to a white person, who then replied, “I know a black man who got out of the ‘hood and became a doctor.” She adds, “Whatever I say, his response is that positive things are happening. But society isn’t really changing, deep down. It gets very exhausting to try to share why black people are still angry.”
Talking about missionary work and colonialism, Santosh said, “It’s nice that the words of Jesus Christ are spreading, but missionary work has been used to take over entire societies. The work of missionaries can be condescending to existing cultures.”
Mungo said, “When Christianity came to Malawi, it seemed like the ‘missionaries’ were the same as the ‘discoverers,’ and that’s a problem to me. Did they hold themselves to such high regard that they thought they had the right to take over? There were good intentions but there was also an ‘inferred superiority and inferiority.’ ”
Nour said, “As a refugee, it’s disheartening that as soon as there’s a cease fire and the fighting [in the Middle East] isn’t in the news cycle, the discussion ends. People forget that what happened in the past affects how people are doing now.”
Roy asked, “Who wrote the history books? Rome seems like a great civilization because the Romans wrote the history. It’s the same with white people in the United States.”