Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Sun editorial:

America won’t reach its potential until it honestly addresses racism

Black

Alex Brandon / AP

In this Aug. 28, 2020, file photo, a woman holds a “Black Lives Matter,” flag during the March on Washington at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, on the 57th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech.

Teaching children about racism is not anti-American, nor is providing diversity training to adults in the workplace.

To the contrary, both do nothing but strengthen our country. To reach our potential as a nation with the foundational values of freedom and equality, it’s critical for us to recognize that racism exists and to discuss it. Only then can we come to a better understanding and continue to make progress.

As with so many other issues, however, President Donald Trump and his administration are trying to turn back the clock on racism education and training, to a bleak time when white privilege was institutionalized in our country. He and his administration did this in two ways last week:

• Directing federal agencies to end diversity programs, which Trump referred to as “a sickness” and which his director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, labeled as “divisive, anti-American propaganda.”

• Trump making an absurd threat to withhold federal funding to schools using The New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project in their lessons on history and racism. Point of fact: Trump can’t unilaterally cut off funding to schools. In some cases, the president can legally withhold funding appropriated by Congress but not without notifying Congress.

The focus of these attacks is critical race theory, a school of thought designed to generate critical thought on how race and racism are perpetuated in law and culture. A core element of the theory’s framework is to examine white privilege — the advantages that whites enjoy in politics, the economy and social areas. The theory is designed to provide individuals with greater understanding of white privilege, thereby putting them in better position to challenge it.

There’s nothing unhealthy about this. In fact, it’s designed to provide people of color with a space to share their experiences and open the eyes of whites to the privileges some might not have been aware of. The goal is to promote fairness.

Enter Trump and the extreme right, however, and critical race theory becomes a target of white victimization. Somehow, the act of acknowledging systemic white privilege is racist against whites. Vought called it indoctrination training.

Wrong. It’s reality, and it manifests itself in all sorts of ways. It’s why suburban whites may not understand why Black Americans fear for their lives when they interact with police, or victim-blame Blacks who are shot by police by saying they were violating the law, were intoxicated, etc.

A history of white privilege has led whites to expect to be treated respectfully and humanely by officers if they follow instructions, after all. They may be surprised or resistant to learn that for Blacks, even a simple traffic stop is a cause for intense anxiety, so much so that families teach their children methods to avoid confrontations, such as rolling down their windows and placing both hands on the steering wheel before an officer walks to the car.

White privilege is in education, where white children attend better-funded schools than Blacks, statistically. It’s in banking, where whites have a far higher rate of getting mortgage refinancing and home loans. It’s in many workplaces, where a preference for whites over people of color persists in hiring practices. It’s in the attitude of white sports fans who take a “shut up and dribble” mindset to protests by Black athletes.

Recognizing racism is a first step to addressing it. Racism education and training should remain firmly in place. Americans aren’t afraid of frank discussions, and we’re entirely capable of educating our children about racism in ways that aren’t scarring. 

Trump is not only exposing his own racism but making a political appeal to his followers’ discriminatory impulses to push them to the polls in November.

But ignoring racism or banishing discussion of it won’t make it go away. It will only make it worse and inhibit our progress toward leveling the playing field.

It only makes our ideals more distant and is yet another reason to push out an administration that is determined to drag America backward on race and racism.