Some Critical Thinking About Race

by Ernie McCray

It never ceases to amaze me how we Americans continue to resist discussing the number one problem in our country ever since it came to be: racism.

That resistance has never been more evident than when San Diego City Schools decided to provide students with ethnic studies and anti-racism education and some parents freaked out and decried having CRT, “critical race theory,” taught to their children.

And what they’re fearing is having students understand the role race has played in making the country the way it is today. But how can our children change our society for the better if they don’t know their history?

Back in my teaching days, my approach to creating a vibrant learning environment for my charges was steeped in our nation’s racial history, as my sixth graders heard directly from me how people of my ethnicity had been and still were treated.

They learned that their teacher had sat in the back of the bus and drank from the “colored only” water fountains and swam in the “colored only” swimming pools; that I had been refused service in cafes and sat in the balcony at the movie show and skated at designated “colored only” times at the rink.

I put a human face on whatever was, up to then, their knowledge of race relations in the United States.

So, when Medgar and Martin and Malcolm were assassinated, my students knew what that was all about, that these actions weren’t anomalies, that they followed a

pattern going back centuries.

They were, through me, developing an understanding of what systemic racism can allow in a society, how a country, through its laws and policies, has valued White people over all others.

I was thinking of how such a form of racism can strongly influence how people view their fellow citizens who are different from them when I heard of another ugly local incident involving race.

This situation occurred after a basketball game at Coronado High, a predominantly White school. It involved tortillas being thrown at the players from Orange Glen High who were mostly Latinos.

What struck me the most about this was how the people involved claimed vehemently that their actions had nothing to do with race.

The truth is it was all about race whether the perpetrators admit to that or not. I mean if it wasn’t their intent to act in a racist way then they’ve made a strong case for why critical race theory has a place in our classrooms because they don’t have a sense of how offensive it is to throw food from a people’s culture at them.

You shouldn’t throw any food at anybody ever anyway, but you should definitely not throw tortillas at Mexican Americans or soul food at African Americans or lumpia at Filipino Americans or ramen noodles at Japanese or Chinese Americans or couscous at Arab Americans…

Find another way to show your “school spirit.”

Would these students, all caught up in winning a divisional championship in an exciting overtime game, have acted differently if they had maybe been exposed to a school environment that highlighted ethnic studies and anti-racism education?

Maybe they would have or maybe they wouldn’t have. But they would have known better.

When I taught my students about race it was all about getting them to be sensitive to issues of inequality and unfairness and we always talked about, and wrote about, and sung about, and staged performances about how we could take what we learned and make our world a little better.

Starting in our classroom, in our school, and in our community.

We were, as they say, thinking globally and acting locally.

We were thinking critically about race and in the process combating, in small ways, systemic racism.

Learning should always be about change.