Editor’s note: This is the eighth in a multi-part series on How Your School Board Vote Affects Oregon Schools an OAA Voter Education Project

When the New York Times published the 1619 Project, it fueled heated debates on the role of critical race theory (CRT) in classrooms. The study of how racism shapes laws, policies, society and American history only accelerated the conversation of slavery and racial injustice.

The media narrative has defined racism by their victimized class. So much so that if you are of a victimized class - minority, then you can’t be a racist or commit a hate crime, even if you are guilty of doing so. The by-line is that society has driven them to crime by not giving them equal status regardless of having equal opportunity. This is being played out in the Nashville School shooting. The shooter is being portrayed as the victim because of her victimized class.

School boards, superintendents and teachers, even experts, all have their own theory and disagreements on how CRT is defined. The core idea is that race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies. The major argument is its focus on group identity over universal, shared traits that divides people into "oppressed" and "oppressor" groups and urges intolerance. What started as a culturally relevant teaching has morphed into a theory that advocates discrimination against the privileged, mainly white people, in order to achieve equity. This is evident in the Oregon legislature and organizations allowed into schools that refer to "white supremacy."

In 2021, Senator Sara Gelser Blouin (D-Corvallis, Albany) attempted to put the 1619 Project and CRT as a required part of instruction when she sponsored SB 683. That bill may not have passed, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been implemented. CRT is at the core of social and economic justice that takes into consideration race as a nexus of equality.

As the Civil Rights Movement used the First Amendment that spurred protest marches and media reporting on racial discrimination, so is CRT using the First Amendment with the same racial concerns with a broader economic context. It elevates the equality principles of the Fourteenth Amendment above the liberty principles of the First Amendment. CRT was pushed by lawyers and activists that saw the civil rights era had diminished and they sought an alternative legal framework for combating racial inequality. CRT was one of the approaches tried along with critical legal studies, critical theory, feminist theory, postmodernism, and cultural studies.

Today CRT has expanded into the fields of education, political science, American studies, and ethnic studies. It also has produced several offshoots, including critical white studies, Latino critical race studies, Asian American critical race studies, American Indian critical race studies, and critical queer studies.

The rub that CRT scholars proport is instead of helping to achieve healthy and robust debate, the First Amendment is used to preserve the inequities of the status quo. They claim “there can be no such thing as an objective or content neutral interpretation in law in general or of the First Amendment in particular… there is no 'equality' in 'freedom' of speech.”

A D V E R T I S E M E N T

A D V E R T I S E M E N T

CRT used the First Amendment to wage their battlefield for hate speech regulations. There is no legal definition for hate speech, but Oregon has passed extensive laws trying to define it with penalties even when a Supreme Court’s ruling, R.A.V. v. St. Paul (1992), seemingly closed the door on “hate speech” regulation. "The First Amendment does not permit a state to use content discrimination to achieve a compelling interest if it is not necessary to achieve that interest."

However, CRT, as presented in SB 683, is the history of slavery and the disproportionate harm towards Blacks and other inequities in the judicial system compared to whites. It has been adopted into curriculums by piecemeal into social studies standards. That was enabled in 2021 by passing SB 702, replacing social studies disciplines and best practices for curriculum with consultation of any group that supports a theory being pushed making it easier to incorporate CRT, SEL and any other theory.

In 2022 Oregon Department of Education (ODE) adopted standards to integrate ethnic studies in social studies for K-12 adding new "perspectives and histories" to allow students to "feel welcome and recognized in the classroom and a part of our collective narrative, our shared history," an ODE spokesman told Fox News Digital. The new standards address white supremacy by having kindergartners "engage in respectful dialogue with classmates to define diversity by comparing and contrasting visible and invisible similarities and differences."

CRT flows over into other areas. It was the impetus to defunding school resource officers and police. After a number of school shootings, parents are again starting to ask for resource officers to be returned to the schools. However, the majority party in the legislature has blocked attempts to fund resource officers, so it is left to school boards on how to provide a safe environment. School boards are also faced with where to draw the line between First Amendment rights and equality. Critical race studies has become a battlefield for rights, and school boards have become the mediator to make sure one person's rights doesn't turn into "hate speech" for another.

Oregon Abigail Adams Voter Education Project lists the candidates and those responding to the survey on their website.


--Donna Bleiler

Post Date: 2023-05-05 11:31:24

Last Update: 2023-05-03 00:52:23