After last summer, this is the way it had to go down.

In recent weeks, conservatives have waged an all-out assault on their rendition of critical race theory via state and local legislation in recent months. There’s the actual critical race theory developed in the 1970’s with two pillars: that white supremacy is baked directly into our country’s laws and that we can and should change the relationship between laws and our racial hierarchies. The low-hanging fruit, which many in the media have picked, is that this is a part of a multi-pronged attack on the Biden administration and those who voted for him. That none of the critiques about President Biden have really moved his approval ratings or his messaging means upending the narratives on a state and local level. There’s also evidence to suggest that the country’s ostensible and temporary support for the Black Lives Matter movement’s aims led to higher voter registration, a clear trigger for a party that sees more voter participation as a serious problem.

Pardon me if I dig deeper, though.

There’s also this second, preposterous catch-all definition of critical race theory as per these newer bills: anything that mentions race is critical race theory. By this definition, anything that even smells like a courageous conversation can be subject to a criminal investigation. We have a plethora of evidence of systemic racism in our schools, from our textbooks and teacher evaluations to budgeting decisions and perceptions of schools. Yes, we get to say that racism exists in our system, but given everything we have on record, simply stating that racism exists is an abysmally low bar. Now, with critical race theory, the plethora of parties that once railed against social justice math, DisruptTexts, and the 1619 Project have formed an anti-anti-racist coalition.

The Venn diagram of these disparate groups is now a perfect circle.

This is potentially noxious for efforts to increase teacher diversity across the country. What people may not know is that teachers of color comprise at least half of all teachers in each of the four largest school districts in the country, but their surrounding communities – yes, suburbs – usually don’t reach even 10%. The benefits of having more teachers of color have been researched and enumerated. If the temptation is to simply discuss outcomes through narrow forms of assessment, then we miss a larger function of schooling in our country: our schools are generally the headquarters for societies’ passing down rituals and traditions it wishes to impart on the future. Humans don’t come to these buildings neutrally by any means. Generally, teachers not only believe they can make a difference in students’ lives, but also that they’d be good at their jobs. Of course, this gets more complicated when society asks teachers to both impart society’s standards while adjusting to an ever-changing world. We layer race, class, gender, and other identities into this and we get even more barriers where there should be more and better pathways into teaching.

Where we lose our way when it comes to the recruitment and retention of teachers of color isn’t in the test scores, but in the way that our society focuses strictly on these narrow measures and “outcomes” to the detriment of students’ individual and collective humanity. How do we propose attracting teachers to a human-driven profession when we refuse to see these teachers? What’s more, how do we ask teachers to both interpret racial uprisings and white supremacy that our students consistently ask about without directly addressing it? What’s more, who’s more likely to diversify their book collections for their students, to help interpret racial dynamics within a text? Who’s more likely to ask their students to introduce concepts of numeracy from Mayans, Incans, Persians, and Africans across the continent side by side with Greco-Roman nomenclature for popular theorems?

Who’s more likely to snicker at “In 1942, Columbus sailed the ocean blue” nonsense? To recognize how many slave-owners used both sides of their mouth to suggest that all men were created equal? To step into the classroom with the idea that Black people made democracy in the United States – and elsewhere – possible?

Ostensibly, we would need a movement greater than last summer’s, one that preferably moved from statements and black squares to one that treated human rights with more precision, courage, and comprehensiveness. Until then, I fear – and know – that there are a plethora of teachers across the board who will have to revert to teaching subversively or will be retroactively and from this point on harassed – if not dismissed – with these laws’ permission. If your first inclination is to say “teacher diversity doesn’t matter anyway because we haven’t seen test scores rise,” then we’ve completely lost the plot when it comes to teaching and learning. In a country where it was illegal for Black people to read and write a century ago, where Black people never received so much as an authentic apology much less reparations, where a global pandemic exacerbated and exposed the multitude of indignities our country stands by, it behooves us to interrogate exactly what we think we’re passing down to our children.

Ultimately, these laws would solidify schooling as a painful and inequitable process. The pain these legislators, politicos, pundits, and writers must be in to suggest that making room to share is equivalent to replacement is innumerate. Our collective lesson plan is the blueprint for creating an education that gets us collectively closer to a compassionate, just, and shared humanity. Pushing our country further away from mending the ever-bleeding wounds won’t sanitize the wounds, y’all. Those of us who teach with justice and equity at the center of our work know this viscerally.

There is nothing these laws won’t touch. That’s how systemic oppression works. The change we seek will hurt, but we’ll be better for it. I welcome a day when we could appreciate our differences and build our society from there. Until then, we try to use our classrooms as microcosms for the governance we’d like to replicate for the rest of the world. That’s the only mechanism for hope I know.

photo c/o