The "CRT backlash" isn't inevitable

We don't have to lose school boards to bad-faith actors, but only if we're willing to put in the work

Paradise Valley School (photo credit: Library of Congress)

You know what’s a compelling way to start an essay? Caveats! Don’t worry, I’ll be brief!

Caveat one: I wish I wasn’t writing again about CRT in schools. I literally write about white people, like, quasi-professionally, and I’m tired of it! I bet you don’t want to read anything about it either.

Caveat two: I don’t believe that Virginia proves that the anti-CRT “movement” is a guaranteed electoral winner for the right (more on that in a second), but I do believe that there is a very well-oiled and well-funded political apparatus that really wants to make it happen, and that last night’s results give them enough grist for the mill to keep pumping this project nationally. That is to say, CRT, like Benghazi, ain’t goin’ away!

Caveat three: Here is a tricky thing about organizing for justice in majority White communities: White people make a ton of individual and political choices that are both implicitly or explicitly racist and have terrible implications for the common good! That’s very bad! It’s created a LOT of pain and suffering and made all of our lives worse! It is literally why, politically, we can’t have nice things (like paid family leave or universal health care or a livable planet sixty years from now). And often, if you say anything other than “shame on those White people for doing that bad thing” you run the risk of sounding like you’re excusing or endorsing all the problems we cause. So, if all you’re up for today is a paragraph in which I say “shame on us White people for doing a bad thing!” Here it is! I mean it sincerely! You don’t need to keep reading!

Anti-CRT yard sign, Mequon, WI

Ok, now that those are out of the way, here’s some good news: it is not inevitable that the next two years will be just a cascading avalanche of anti-CRT electoral victories. Now, it is true that the deep-pocketed, bad-faith machinery that is promoting these controversies is going to keep on chugging, and that they will try to build these individual fights into a broader national reactionary moment. That’s the bad news. The good news is that it’s actually not that hard to prevent them from doing so.

There were, to be sure, a fair number of “anti-CRT” victories across the country. The big one, of course, was profoundly uninspiring Republican man, Glenn Youngkin, defeating profoundly uninspiring Democratic man, Terry Mcauliffe, for that state’s governorship. But that wasn’t all— slates of anti-CRT (and often anti shutdown/masking) candidates won victories across the country— notably, in specific Des Moines and Kansas City suburbs.

But for every “turn back the clock to 1954” victory, there was another anti-CRT effort that stalled in its tracks. From Connecticut to Washington State and even in the supposed "anti-CRT” victory zones (Kansas City and Des Moines both had other suburbs who roundly rejected the insurgent slates), suburban (disproportionately White) voters didn’t take the bait. This is very good news! It is also consistent with recent polling from the Policy Innovators in Education (PIE) network that suggests that, contrary to the “all White people are just waiting around to join an anti-CRT'' mob rhetoric, viewpoints across party lines (vis a vis “CRT in schools”) is surprisingly nuanced.

Graphic credit: Policy Innovators in Education Network

You may have heard that Mequon, Wisconsin was supposed to be a clear test case for the anti-CRT strategy. It’s a well-heeled, majority-white, slightly more-blue-leaning-recently but historically conservative place that virtually every family moves to “for the schools.” That town’s effort to recall school board members, primarily on vague CRT-ish grievances, had the full support of big money Republican donors and the GOP establishment (notably, Rebecca Kleefisch, the leading GOP candidate for Governor). Given what we all saw in Virginia, Mequon was absolutely poised to provide another big victory for the anti-CRT crowd last night.

The problem for “Team Racialized Resentment '' is that the grand victory never happened. The recall effort lost resoundingly. And in talking to friends in Mequon who observed both campaigns intimately, it lost for pretty clear, easily replicable reasons. While the recall folks had a lot of money, the anti-recall team ran an impeccable, well-organized and altogether pleasant grassroots organization. After weeks of an incredibly well-executed door-knocking operation, volunteers for the Support the District campaign spent Halloween night following up with folks whose doors they had knocked earlier while their kids trick-or-treated, hanging out in cul-de-sacs and just generally reinforcing the message that their community was better than this. Not to be reductive, but their secret successful strategy was that they were generous— both with their time and in the spirit with which they approached their neighbors.

Now, there was a large structural advantage that the “support our district” campaign discovered as they talked to parents: Mequonites were largely still pleased with how they were treated by their district (as an aside— this is actually pretty common; that same PIE Network poll found that nationwide, nearly 70% of voters feel generally positively about the direction of their local schools).

Mequon parents felt like their kids were being loved and challenged and that the schools were well-resourced and that nothing was on fire, which made them less likely to buy into the dystopian rhetoric from the “Recall” side. This happened to be a district that was open for a larger percentage of last year than most, which meant that there was less “reopen our schools” vitriol mixed in with potential CRT vitriol. And yes, it’s very true that if any of that were not true, the pitch in Mequon would have been harder. But here’s the key: Organizers were only able to discover those undercurrents because they were willing to listen to, rather than just lecture, their neighbors to see how they were experiencing the district.

Nationally, the response to this “anti-CRT” moment from the left has been to try to smarty-pants, “well actually” our way out of it. Again, I have already written about this! All this “it’s not really CRT, that’s a brainiac law school thing” and “this is a continuation of a decades-long project by which White women are enlisted as the constant gardeners of segregation” honors-student-with-our-hand-raised-style correction we do is both factually accurate and profoundly ineffective! It is like when my eight-year-old tries to correct my four-year-old when she claims something ludicrous, like how she was “a baby in mommy’s tummy when mommy was a little girl.” It doesn’t matter that my son is absolutely right: his sister literally doesn’t care about biological accuracy! She likes how it makes her feel to say it, that it establishes that there was never a moment in which she wasn’t loved by her mother. Her feelings literally don’t care about his facts.

In the same way, when we share videos of dudes at rallies who are very mad at CRT but don’t know what it is, we are missing literally millions of points. Nobody actually cares if CRT is real, or if it’s being taught in kindergarten! What is at play is that there is a group of (disproportionally but not solely) White people who are feeling something about their relationship with schools and, in many communities, the only people willing to talk to them about it are the worst, most malevolent, bad faith racist grifters. So, of course that’s where they land!

There is an alternative here, and it looks remarkably like what you saw in Mequon: It is to reject the dichotomy that says the only two options are to coddle or condemn. We don’t need to go door-to-door in suburbs and put on our concerned, Times-reporter -at-a-Pennsylvania-diner empathetic face and say “Tell me, why ARE you so scared of Toni Morrison? Why should we never make your child read anything but a Children’s Treasury About How The Founding Fathers Were Benevolent Angels Sent To Us From Heaven And How The Second Amendment Was Their Best Idea?.” It’s to go door-to-door, as the Mequon parents did, and listen to folks’ actual experiences as parents in their local school system.

In some places, we’ll find that, when listened to, folks realize that they actually aren’t that aggrieved. In other places, a lot of feelings will come up— frustrations about whether the district supports students with disabilities, about how lockdowns legitimately threw their lives in an uproar for a year, about how teachers at their schools could be more communicative. And when that’s the case, neighbors can strategize together to develop actual responses to those needs, not the false comfort of racism and resentment.

Just because White people’s racism and fear of change is deeply illegitimate doesn’t mean that we don’t possess any legitimate emotions on any topic. Just because White parents often have overly myopic relationships to our kids’ schools doesn’t mean that we aren’t allowed to be worried, when we put them on the bus each morning, about whether they’re going to be loved and valued. Yes, all of our angst is cocooned in privilege and none of it is that-big-of-a-deal-considering-what-our-country-makes-communities-of-color suffer-through. But, if those of us who love justice aren’t willing to hit the doors and actually listen even to each other’s moderate, privileged worries, goodness knows there’s another crew that is more than willing to do so. The worst possible outcomes are only inevitable if we allow them. A better world may be possible, but not if we aren’t willing to build it together.

End notes:

-Want even more good news about how organizing works? Yesterday, Cleveland passed a really good police oversight initiative, thanks to a lot of inspiring organzing in a ton of communities INCLUDING great door-to-door work in working-class White neighborhoods (literally using some of these same principles) by SURJ Ohio.

-As always, The White Pages is free but is made possible by readers like you (lol) who pitch in to support The Barnraisers Project, which trains White people to have exactly the kind of conversations we’re talking about today, helps keep this train going (modestly) down the tracks. Thank you!

Song of the week! It’s on the nose but it holds up!