In Texas, the news coverage of the bill—which the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, is expected to sign—has focussed on the idea that it will “ban critical race theory,” as one local news station put it. But the term “critical race theory” does not appear in the text. What it seeks to do, on closer reading, is establish a protective halo around white students, so that they do not hear that their success might have something to do with their race, or that the structures of racial power and privilege in the past also apply to the present. The bill doesn’t rewrite history in the way that the campaigns to protect Confederate memorialization have sometimes sought to. Instead, it tries to cleave off students from any feeling of historical responsibility—as if, with each generation, America were re-created, blameless and anew.
This notion—that a generation can arise purely in the context of its own experience rather than that of its parents or generations before them—recurs often in American politics, and especially right now. Increasingly, conservatism after Donald Trump has been defined by a fear that American society is on the verge of being displaced by a progressive reimagining, with woke politics and aggressive redistribution. Progressivism is defined by an equally urgent hope that it can, in fact, displace old patterns of ecological destruction and discrimination. It is interesting—and slightly ironic—that critical race theory, with its invocations of structural racism, should be so central to the policy debate right now: part of its teaching is that the patterns of American society can’t be easily dislodged by a change in manners, and that if you are snapping your fingers to make the past disappear you are only doing so in tandem with the rhythms of the past.
That is reason to think that the conflict over critical race theory might endure, even when the attention of Fox News inevitably drifts. The question of what children are held responsible for cuts deep, and the answer isn’t always determined by a person’s ideology or partisan identity. When I spoke with Terry Stoops, a conservative education-policy expert at the John Locke Foundation who had been appointed to a task force on “indoctrination” in public schools by the conservative lieutenant governor of North Carolina, he told me that he wasn’t sure how long the outrage of some grassroots conservatives would ultimately last. But he did think their anger had been misunderstood. “I’ve seen so much discussion about the fact that conservatives are advancing these critical-race-theory bills because they don’t want the truth of slavery or racism to be taught, and I haven’t seen that at all. I think parents want their children to learn about the mistakes of the past in order to create a better future,” Stoops said. “They don’t want their children to be told that they are responsible for the mistakes of their ancestors, and that unless they repent for those mistakes then they will remain complicit.” The debate isn’t about history, exactly. It is about the possibility of blamelessness.