Thread by @drchanequa

Remember in the 2016 campaign when many Black people were telling our White friends/students/colleagues to “get your cousins?” I’m pretty sure the far right attack on #CriticalRaceTheory is happening because a significant number of young White people have been doing just that.

Many of us have seen the videos of White teens and young adults taking their racist and FauxNews-obsessed families to task. I have many current & former students who’ve shared with me the frustration & heartbreak they experience when they challenge their families.

Many no longer feel welcome, not just in their families, but in their communities and churches. That’s because somewhere along the line, they learned that what their families had taught them about race/racism was a lie. They challenged the family ideology.

Keep in mind that their parents had probably carefully cultivated their lives to prevent their exposure to Black people. The rise of Christian private schools was because White Christians didn’t want their kids in integrated settings.

In some areas, the fear of integration is so high that poor/working class Whites opted to just let their kids drop out rather than risk contact with Black students.

Many White people - including “moderates” - deliberately ensconce their kids in all-White neighborhoods, schools, and churches. They don’t put it that way. They say they choose neighborhoods with “good” schools. But we know that “good” is a highly biased metric.

I realized years ago that many of my White students had never had a Black professor before grad school (in both my psychology & theology careers). They’d also not had significant relationships with other Black students either.

In seminary, grad schools, and increasingly undergraduate settings, these students are suddenly exposed to a different racial worldview. Sometimes it’s explicitly CRT, not always. But it’s enough to get some of them to start questioning what they were taught.

They’re products of systems that taught them that slavery wasn’t that bad (and even that it was unavoidable) and that racism is overblown. Then they confront the reality and it changes them. And they confront their families.

The people who created a whole religious school system just to prevent their kids from having contact with Black children aren’t too happy about Black professors actually shaping their kids’ worldview. They’re trying to prevent it by poisoning the well.

They want to indoctrinate their kids against CRT at an early age, to teach them that it’s contrary to the gospel and US morality, so that if/when their kids encounter it in college classrooms, they will be inoculated against it. Once again, they’re playing the long game.

We’re winning and they’re terrified of it. They see the tide changing with the younger generations. They’re trying to fight it.

But we can fight too. And we will.