Want to Know More About Critical Race Theory? Look at Virginia's Schools--For More Than 75 Years

[Nevilledog]

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Sherrilyn Ifill
@Sifill_LDF
I insist - INSIST - that you take a moment and read this superb truth-telling piece by ⁦@Profepps⁩ about the racism that was standard in Va school texts for decades & what Glenn Youngkin is really trying to protect by stoking “anti-CRT” activists.
Glenn Youngkin
Want to Know More About Critical Race Theory? Look at Virginia’s Schools—For More Than 75 Years
Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin was raised on official, state-taught racism. I should know. So was I.
washingtonmonthly.com
5:42 PM · Oct 25, 2021

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/10/25/want-to-know-more-about-critical-race-theory-look-at-virginias-schools-for-more-than-75-years/

Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin has decided that next month’s off-year election is a referendum on something called critical race theory. CRT, he says, is a sinister force working to divide Americans by injecting race issues into education. “To judge one another based on the content of our character, not the color of our skin,” he told a rally in Ashburn, Virginia, last month, “means we’re going to ban critical race theory.”

It is fashionable these days for progressives like myself to sneer at the hue and cry against critical race theory in the schools. But let’s get real: Some textbooks taught to Virginia children have contained virulent antiwhite propaganda.

Consider this passage from a Virginia public school textbook: “From the first recorded landing of Negroes at Jamestown in 1619 until the end of the colonial period, Virginia opposed a mixed population of the two races,” it says. “Above all the Colony was determined to preserve the racial purity of the whites. This determination is the foundation upon which Virginia’s handling of the racial issue rests, and has always rested.”

Can we at least agree that such divisive rhetoric should not be allowed in schools? It can have bad effects. I know, because the passage above, along with a lot of other racist bilge, was taught to me in 1961 in a state-mandated elementary school course in “Virginia History”; the textbook from which that quote comes, A Hornbook of Virginia History, edited by J. R. V. Daniel, was published in 1949 by the Virginia State Library for use in schools.

*snip*

[Walleye]

1. And it's not just in the south. I went to school in Delaware in the 50s and 60s

Racism was so common in school that most people didn’t even notice it. There was a Jewish girl in my first grade class who went on to be one of my best friends through school. I remember she covered her ears during the lords prayer and the Bible reading. I’ve been against religion ever since.

[Pantagruel]

2. "Virginia opposed a mixed population of the two races,"

Not sure how all that got into a textbook?
Such absolute truths rarely show up there.