The Frontier reported last week that Oklahoma teachers are squeamish about teaching history. Four educators interviews by
The Frontier said they’re avoiding topics for fear of repercussions.
That comes two years after the passage of HB 1775, meant to outlaw the teaching of critical race theory, which the Encyclopedia Britannica defines in part as an “intellectual and social movement and loosely organized framework of legal analysis based on the premise that race is not a natural, biologically grounded feature of physically distinct subgroups of human beings but a socially constructed (culturally invented) category that is used to oppress and exploit people of colour.” One of HB 1775’s authors, Rep. Sherrie Conley, a Republican from Newcastle, told The Frontier that no one can know for sure if racism caused the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot. “It’s just a terrible tragedy in our state, and whether or not it was actually racism that caused the thoughts of the people that started it — we can try to speculate but to know for sure, I don’t think that we can,” Conley told The Frontier.
State Superintendent of Schools Ryan Walters was met with a backlash when he said something similar at a Norman Republican meeting in early July. Asked how the Tulsa massacre could be taught under the state’s definition of Critical Race Theory, Walters said in part, “Let’s not tie it to the skin color and say that the skin color determined that.”
He later claimed the media took the statement out of context and that he believed the massacre was a racist event.
The ambiguity heightened educators fears when Tulsa and Mustang schools’ accreditation was placed in jeopardy over the issue. There’s no ambiguity among the Black community in Tulsa, however. The Oklahoma Eagle reported extensively on the massacre a few days ago in the wake of a court’s decision to deny reparations for three survivors of the massacre. It’s a much different view of systemic racism.
Walters, Conley and others argue that no one is racist just because they’re white and should be ashamed of their skin color because other white people were racist. The other side argues that’s a thinly disguised way to pretend racism doesn’t exist, thereby perpetuating it.
Oklahoma was not alone. All states but one put forward anti-CRT proposals, which are tracked by the UCLA School of Law’s CRT Forward project.
