On Independence Day in 2020, a clamoring throng toppled a statue of Christopher Columbus Baltimore neighborhood of Little Italy. When the cheering protesters dragged it down and sunk it beneath the depths of Inner Harbor, the statue became the latest symbol of societal change and a harbinger of a larger reckoning  about the hypocrisy and injustice of positing false narratives and genocidal colonizers as admirable heroes.

It’s interesting that, just over a year later, those who insist on lionizing the past via monuments to a defeated Confederacy and the continued reverence of Columbus Day, are now revolting nationwide about the possibility of white children learning the full truth about the prevalence of (gasp!) institutionalized racism.

At the core of this angst is critical race theory, which surfaced over 40 years ago in graduate school curriculum and demonstrates how deeply racism is entrenched in multiple facets of everyday life, including laws, policies and financial institutions. According to the late Dr. Frances Cress Welsing, researcher Neely Fuller was the first to bring it to her attention in the 1960s, but the modern tenets of CRT were assembled by legal scholars Richard Delgado, Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw.

Currently, despite the fact that critical race theory isn’t taught at less than college level, and there’s proven evidence regarding the once-legal enslavement and dehumanization of our Black ancestors in being considered three fifths of a human being (The U.S. Constitution); rampant discrimination against their present-day descendants regarding civil rights, voting, housing, employment and other crucial aspects of life nationally and globally (redlining, Jim Crow laws and apartheid, anyone?); teaching those truths in a logical, age-appropriate manner, according to its critics, matters less than……managing the emotions of those who’ve never experienced them firsthand? 

Who’s really suffering, the children acquiring a heightened sense of unfairness and social responsibility, or their smug-about-the-status-quo parents? Imagine the arrogance and audacity it takes to assert that your child should avoid learning the truth about their forefathers and the unearned privileges they engineered that placed future generations ahead of non-whites, while the afflicted still struggle around barriers they didn’t create. 

Unfortunately, racism still pervades nearly every aspect of life, established through genocide, spread across stolen lands and built on the backs of the enslaved and profits at the expense of their descendants. Like the sickness that it remains, until it’s cured, Black  children are ‘inoculated’ often by their parents, who teach from love, experience and necessity (‘The Talk’) that they are also worthy capable people deserving of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, just as much as their white peers.

I remember a teenage reader who emailed me once, identified herself as white and declared she ‘felt sorry’ for our children since we were ‘limiting’ them by discussing racism (!). If she were reading today, she might be shocked to learn they feel differently.

During a book signing years back, Darius recounted to Malcolm X’s daughter, author Ilyasah Shabazz, how we taught him of her late parents’ efforts to elevate Blacks around the world, while Layla recently said,  “School sugarcoats history or tells us the wrong things. At home, we learn real facts about what Black people have accomplished.” Nia also shared that her father and I taught her to recognize colorism and internalized racism, to revel in black culture, literature, music and films with differing Black perspectives, and that her features and ancestry are “beautiful and powerful. Mom,” she said, “you were my first example of “black girl magic.””

According to the iconic author James Baldwin, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” If feelings matter more than facts, then why do the painful constant realities of black children, through no fault of their own, actually matter less? What lessons are these oh-so-concerned parents really teaching their kids, the world…..and themselves?