By Jacqueline Richardson
A quarter million people heard Dr. Martin Luther King give his famous "I Have a Dream" speech on August 28, 1963, in Washington, DC. His address is recognized by many still today. Little did we know how well certain lines would be remembered and repeated after this event.
The March on Washington in which he spoke, dominated Network television. The next day the New York Times ran seven pages on the March. In one photo, President John Kennedy smiled with leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the United Automobile Workers, the American Jewish Congress, the United Presbyterian Church, the NAACP, and other civil rights groups. Dr. King's speech was especially electrifying when he said, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
I can remember the first time I met Dr. King. It was in 1966, and I was a young college student attending Morris Brown College, which until 2019, was a member of the Atlanta University Center and Consortium in Atlanta, Georgia. I wonder what Dr. King might say today in response to the current debate and dialogue regarding Multiculturalism and "critical race theory." The landscape is different now, several decades later. Still, racism is very much alive, and today there is a lively debate about how to teach African American history, multicultural education, and critical race theory. As American public schools have grown more diverse, educators have introduced multicultural education programs to help students understand and appreciate the differences among them: differences in terms of race, religion, socioeconomic status, sexual identity, and other personal characteristics.
According to the nonprofit National Association for Multicultural Education (NAME), multicultural education is a range of strategies to help students become familiar with and knowledgeable about diverse groups' histories, cultures, and contributions. The educational programs vary by state and even within individual school districts. Most programs address issues of racism, classism, linguicism, ableism, ageism, heterosexism, religious intolerance, and xenophobia, according to the NAME Association's website.
Critical race theory (CRT) is a way of thinking about America's history through the lens of racism. CRT developed during the 1970s and 1980s in response to what many scholars viewed as a lack of racial progress following the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. It centers on the idea that racism is systemic in the nation's institutions, which work to maintain the dominance of white people in society. It is important to note significant differences between multicultural education, anti-racist education, and critical race theory. Unlike multicultural education, anti-racist education focuses on race and race-related issues. Pirette McKamy, the first Black principal of Mission High School in San Francisco, in an article in the magazine, The Atlantic, states that anti-racist teachers "create a curriculum with black students in mind" and "view the success of black students as central to the success of their own teaching."
Sheldon Eakins, a former teacher and school principal who founded the Leading Equity Center, notes that many educators and researchers argue that schools serving predominantly white communities benefit tremendously from multicultural education. At the same time, Eakins and others, including education professor Wayne Au of the University of Washington Bothell, have criticized multicultural education for failing to prepare students to confront and dismantle racism. On the other hand, supporters of CRT claim that it teaches students how to deal with and confront racism.
CRT is a cross-disciplinary examination, by social and civil-rights scholars and activists, of how laws, social and political movements, and media shape and are shaped by social conceptions of mainstream and alternative views of racism and racial justice, including conservative, liberal, and progressive ones. The word critical in the name is an academic reference to critical- thinking, critical theory, and scholarly criticism, rather than criticizing or blaming people. CRT is also used in sociology to explain social, political, and legal structures and power distribution through a "lens" focusing on the concept of race and experiences of racism.
Academic critics of CRT argue it is based on storytelling instead of evidence and reason, rejects truth, opposes liberalism, and indoctrinates children. Conservatives have sought to ban or restrict the instruction of CRT along with other critical education in primary and secondary schools.
Scholars of CRT say that race is not biologically grounded and natural. Instead, it is a socially constructed category used to oppress and exploit people of color, and racism is not an aberration but a normalized feature of American society. According to CRT, negative stereotypes assigned to members of minority groups benefit white people and increase racial oppression. Individuals can belong to several different identity groups.
As the debate over these different concepts occurs in local school board elections and meetings, they, unfortunately, serve to politicize the education of all of our children and do little to bring about Dr. King's dream that the judgment of all children be on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.
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