Let History's Chips Fall Where They May

The column “We can transform current culture war” (Eagle, Dec. 28) offers some important insights and recommendations, although it uncritically repeats right-wing claims “that some K-12 educators are required to teach that all white people ... are irredeemably racist,” but fails to cite any names or places.

In fact, the history of race relations in this country is a typical case of “glass half full/glass half empty.” However, conservatives are not pushing a “glass half full” approach, but rather that of the three monkeys: “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.”

Like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart on pornography, most conservatives can’t define Critical Race Theory, but they claim to know it when they see it.

One nearby example is the attacks on Jerry Craft’s “New Kid,” the first graphic novel ever to receive the Newbery Medal “for the most distinguished American children’s book,” claiming that it deals in “microaggressions.”

In fact, it is a semi-autobiographical account based on the experience of Craft and his two sons attending elite, predominantly white private academies.

But because 444 parents out of some 88,000 in the Katy school district feared their sensitive white children would experience microaggression, or even macroaggression, if they learned about the microaggressions the Crafts experienced in real life, his books were pulled from school libraries and a live event with the author cancelled.

Katy schools subsequently reversed course, restoring the books and rescheduling the author, and rightly so.

Conservative culture warriors blatantly have misrepresented Craft, who stated in an interview: “No ONE character is always right, nor are they always wrong. And I feel like that’s important for both kids AND adults to see.”

Despite what some white whiners might claim, there were and are obvious advantages to being white in this society. That holds true even for someone such as me, a first-generation college student (first generation high school on my mom’s side) who grew up without running water or indoor plumbing and went from a one-room grade school to a flagship university.