How the Fight Over CRT Threatens Black History

America’s past is often not pretty, especially when it comes to racism and Black history. It’s filled with slavery and massacres and redlining communities, and yet much of it isn’t discussed in U.S. History classrooms. And that’s a real problem if we are ever to make real progress, according to Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Associate Professor of History at The Ohio State University. Students need to learn about the ugly parts of this country’s history, he argues, just as much as they need to learn about its successes and triumphs. But with critical race theory debates running rampant through the states, that history is in jeopardy. CRT is a legal scholarship term, yet somehow conservative pundits and lawmakers have been able to turn it into a boogeyman that, according to them, somehow teaches students to be racist. And it’s having real-world implications for how U.S. History teachers approach their classrooms.