Editor,
I’m happy to be Oak Harbor’s defender of critical race theory, or CRT, in this forum. I feel a sense of civic duty, and I think there’s value in showing how weak the conservative arguments actually are.
In his June 18 letter to the editor, Jimmy Sloan starts off with a falsehood, “What Mr. King is doing is asserting a point and presenting no evidence for his claims.”
My letter from June 15 had three numbered points. The first ended with: “For anyone interested in the truth, the book “When Affirmative Action Was White,” would be a good place to start.”
Sloan is angry that I said white people who deny their privilege are liars. So why is he lying about me in the newspaper? If he’s not lying, that means he became over-emotional and stopped reading at paragraph six, when the evidence he’s demanding was in paragraph eight. That would illustrate the CRT concept of “white fragility.”
Either way, it doesn’t help his credibility.
Nobody denies systemic racism except racists and people who don’t know any better. The reason is that racism was socially acceptable until recently, so policymakers simply wrote down their reasons in documents we can all read. It’s not actually controversial that the New Deal was designed specifically to create a white middle class.
That’s what the book Sloan ignored is about. Think: how could any bill get past Southern Democrats in Congress back then?
Sloan’s next point is also wrong: “This goes to the core of the problem with Critical Race Theory; it puts people into groups of color, which is divisive.”
CRT is actually about how the concept of “Black people” didn’t exist before the slave trade. There was never a reason to group everyone from Africa together before. The “biology” of race was a later invention. The boundaries of “white people” have also shifted over time.
The book “The History of White People” documents all this.
Sloan is basically saying that CRT invented race, which is absurd. Racists invented race and organized society around it. CRT merely acknowledges that fact.
I think it’s funny that Sloan finds my letter threatening. Guilty conscience, maybe? My mom is white, and racism was obvious to her after marrying my dad. She finds it very un-Christian.
Christianity was probably more important to the abolition of slavery than liberalism. Did you know that Black people were considered a separate species and Christians were the ones arguing for common descent from Adam and Eve?
Those are the kinds of things you learn by reading CRT. Angry white men would rather teach our children fairy tales.
Michael King
Oak Harbor
