New York Times writer and “1619 Project” creator Nikole Hannah-Jones said Sunday on MSNBC’s “Velshi” that parents’ concerns over Critical Race Theory were a “Republican strategy” to suppress “the racist past of this country.”
Anchor Ali Velshi asked, “It has evolved and become convoluted with critical race theory and it has become the thing that Republicans are very, very determined that their children don’t learn, not because it’s actually an interesting part of history, but because you are accused of having little white children hate themselves. can you please correct the record for me?”
Hannah-Jones said, “I don’t even know what to say to that. Clearly, there’s nothing in this project or in critical race theory that says anything about little white children and how little white children should feel. That is just a Republican strategy. It’s a way of dismissing this work that is forcing us to confront both the racist past of this country and the way the racist past shapes the society we live in by pretending what it’s really doing is trying to paint all white children as racists or make all white people think they’re racists. That’s actually the opposite. My work is about structures, not about individuals. They’re actually trying to move us away from thinking that individuals alone are responsible, a few bad apples are responsible for inequality and are responsible for discrimination, and trying to show that there’s actually much larger structures at play here. That’s what we’re trying to do. they don’t want an examination of the systems of power or the larger structures that we started to see coming out of the global protest movements last year. They want to pretend that the inequality we see is a matter of a few bad actors and they’re trying to suppress these truths.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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