Thursday, February 03, 2022
Lasken op-ed, "Critical Race Theory is divisive," Los Angeles Daily News, June, 2021
June 30 is the deadline for Los Angeles Unified School District teachers to take an online course called “Implicit/Unconscious Bias Training,” preparatory to the rollout in August of a new “anti-racist” program that will follow the precepts of Critical Race Theory (CRT), an approach that blames American racism not just on white people, but on all white people. I have viewed the training and it is disturbing. I along with many LAUSD teachers consider CRT counterproductive.
In a section called, “Challenging Whiteness,” program director Tyrone Howard, Dean for Equity and Inclusion at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, explains that the days when white teachers can say, as I have for years, that they are “colorblind,” are over. It turns out that we are not colorblind; rather we are full of unknown biases that ruin our ability to be good teachers for non-white students. The solution, per Howard, is to view students first and foremost by their race. Everything else — e.g. math or reading skills — is secondary, because the child’s race, and the mistreatment they have received from whites, is the most important thing there is.
Among the faults of CRT is a failure to define terms. Certainly there has been and still is such a thing as “white privilege,” but how can you realistically approach it without defining “white”?
For years the progressive view has been that racial terms should be specific. Thus, we don’t use many outdated terms because they’re too broad and vague. For instance, instead of referring to someone as “Asian,” we should say, “Pacific Islander,” or “Polynesian,” etc.
In CRT this courtesy is not extended to “whites,” who are assumed to be one homogeneous, guilty group. That shouldn’t be surprising in a program run by LAUSD, which gives “white” teachers one option to check on forms that identify ethnicity: “Anglo,” a term referring to a British tribe that was defeated by the Normans in 1066. It’s a term with virtually no descriptive meaning for me, as I’m a descendent of Ukrainian Jews, as far from being an Anglo as a black American is from being a Lithuanian.
I can already hear Dr. Howard admonishing me: “Whatever the relative guilt or innocence of your ancestry, you got a free ride by appearing white.” Really? Is that why the Klan burned a cross in front of my grandfather’s store in North Dakota? Is that why my dad couldn’t find a pharmacist job in anti-Semitic Los Angeles in the 1950’s? What a crock. Every ethnic group has experienced discrimination and unconscious bias. Every ethnic group has suffered and is suffering.
Howard doesn’t know the relative suffering of any individual. He only knows what race they are.
How has this approach of demonizing people worked in other countries? A close analogy is the Chinese Cultural Revolution. In order to divert attention from calamities caused by his rule, Mao Zedong designed his “revolution” to identify and punish “reactionary capitalist holdouts,” jargon for people who had been able to make money and not starve to death.
Such “criminals” were made to stand in shame before tribunals, just as LAUSD’s white teachers and students will be asked to stand in shame. All sin was identified with this one group.
The result: The near destruction of Chinese society.
I do not agree with CRT dogma, particularly as it is applied to pedagogy. If the district asks me to confess my shame and promise to see only race in my students, I will not do it. I speak for hundreds if not thousands of other LAUSD teachers.
Doug Lasken is a retired LAUSD teacher and current debate coach. Write him at doug.lasken@gmail.com
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