It was the summer of 2020 when protests erupted across the country around the police killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. While Black folks demanded changes to policing ranging from completely abolishing the system altogether, to defunding and reforming, the U.S. government had a different plan. Following those protests in 2021, President Joe Biden signed a bill commemorating Juneteenth as a federal holiday — ironically another free day off for white people whose past descendants were responsible for slavery. We celebrated Juneteenth, again, but this time as a holiday we can’t teach because of the Critical Race Theory (CRT) movement. It’s painfully cynical that we can’t even teach children what it means now that we have the federal holiday. The core idea of CRT is that race is a social construct and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice. The ideals of CRT are typically taught in a college-level course and is an elective that one would have to...
