(ThyBlackMan.com) It was not very long ago that White parents would storm local public school board meetings demanding that schools ban Critical Race Theory (CRT), a graduate-level academic concept developed more than 40 years ago.
By changing the narrative surrounding CRT, the topic became another means of tapping into underlying racism while promoting specific political goals. Although CRT was never previously taught in K-12 education, parents still promoted the idea that CRT was a threat to their children because it challenges racism by tracing America’s modern-day systemic discrimination and oppression back to the enslavement of Black people. The ensuing white rage was simply an effective tactic to push emotions and uphold white supremacy.
State legislatures went as far as to introduce bills to prohibit the teaching of CRT and anti-racism training in public schools. This rage centered around concern that white children would be shamed for their racial identity and made to feel guilty for the legacy of white supremacy. Truthfully, the driving motivation was to protect the shame and guilt experienced by the parents. Every home is a child’s training ground in positive and negative ways. Children often learn racism and intolerance at home. The opposition to CRT as a perceived threat further deepens racial division because it ignores the Black child and the Black parent. On the one hand, they want to hide racism from the past, but each day, their efforts to end diversity, equity, and inclusion only intensify racial tensions. The current events we are seeing are a continuation of the history they are trying hard to bury.
The cruelty of those within the U.S. government and the Trump administration is not new, nor is the political betrayal. Therefore, understanding the plight of Native Americans and the symbolism of what it means to us today should be another wake-up call to all of us. Including those MAGA parents living in the Appalachian regions of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, West Virginia, New York, and Mississippi who are clueless about how the dismantling of our current government will negatively impact their lives as well.
There is no getting around that America’s history is not a pretty story, but it is a true story. There are those who would like to see the displaced and forgotten fate of Native Americans also become the fate of people of color, women, the poor, the middle class, and the disabled. Before the existence of European immigrants, before the slave trade brought Africans to the Southern colonies, before Chinese and Japanese immigrants populated the West Coast, and before Hispanic immigrants migrated from Central America to North America, the Native Americans were already here. This was their land. Throughout generations, the Choctaw, Seminole, Creek, Chickasaw, and Cherokee nations occupied hundreds of thousands of acres throughout North America long before the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants arrived.
Recognizing that the Indian nations were here first, the U.S. policy was to respect the rights of Native Americans. That respect did not last very long due to the growing resentment toward the Native Americans along with the European settlers’ pursuit to take over their valuable land. This became especially true after the discovery of gold in Indian territory in parts of northern Georgia.
In short, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, authorizing the removal of the Native American nations from their homelands throughout the Deep South. Federal soldiers forcibly removed the tribes from their homes, incarcerated them in stockades, and then made them walk more than one thousand miles under brutal conditions to an Indian reservation set aside for them in the area now known as Oklahoma. The U.S. government’s decision to relocate over 60,000 Native Americans resulted in thousands of deaths from starvation, exposure, and disease. The brutal journey, known as the Trail of Tears,” was particularly hard on infants, children, and the elderly. When referencing the harshness of this Native American removal policy, one soldier once wrote in his journal, “I fought in many wars between the states and have seen many men killed, some by my own hands, but the Cherokee Removal was the cruelest work I ever knew.” In the end, the Native American culture was devastated.
The “Trail of Tears” is an example of how policies and treaties were rightfully acknowledged and set in place but later taken away in a resentful and cruel power grab driven by control, greed, and hate. The diversity, equity, and inclusion under attack today is not just racial. It is class diversity, age diversity, gender diversity, and religious diversity that is under assault.
Any policy safeguards and protection extending from the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), Disabilities Education Act, Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, Medicare, the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA), and Obamacare were rightfully extended to the American people, but are now systemically being taken away, including life-saving research programs. The long-standing resentment held against Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s anti-poverty and anti-discrimination policies were motivating factors in dismantling the federal government. Yet, many Trump supporters and white parents who opposed CRT are unaware that they, too, will be hurt, and the betrayal is unfolding. The history those parents are trying to erase will remind them that there was a time when the only people who could vote were wealthy white men. Historically, whites who are poor and politically conservative have always benefited from the anti-poverty advocacy and safety net set up by liberal presidents. Their day of awakening is soon coming.
Written by David W. Marshall
Official website; https://davidwmarshallauthor.com/
