A Nevada group is calling for teachers to be equipped with body cameras to ensure that they are not teaching critical race theory, The Associated Press reports.
Conservatives have spent months targeting the teaching of critical race theory, which essentially draws a line from slavery and segregation to the embedded inequities that continue to pervade society to this day. School districts in Nevada have insisted they do not teach “critical race theory” but conservative groups have extended their complaints to any material that discusses race and inequality.
“You say there’s no CRT in this curriculum,” one resident said at a recent Reno school board meeting. “It is being taught in our schools right now. When you use words and language like ‘white male privilege’ ‘systemic racism,’ that’s straight out of CRT.”
One group has a novel plan:
The Nevada Family Alliance wants teachers to wear body cameras to ensure they are not “indoctrinating” students by teaching them that institutional racism exists.
“You guys have a serious problem with activist teachers pushing politics in the classroom, and there’s no place for it, especially for our fifth graders,” Karen England, the group’s leader, said at a trustee hearing.
"Creating a record that could be viewed by appropriate parties, if necessary, might be the best way to urge teachers to stick to traditional teaching," England said in a statement on Wednesday. "We expect that the teachers' unions will reject this proposal immediately. But we should ask, what they have to hide? If police do a better job interacting with the public when they are wearing body cameras, how much more important is it for teachers to do the same?"
What is critical race theory?
While conservatives have raged against “critical race theory,” few seem to have a firm grasp on what it is.
“It's an approach to grappling with a history of White supremacy that rejects the belief that what's in the past is in the past, and that the laws and systems that grow from that past are detached from it," Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor at UCLA and Columbia, told CNN.
"Critical race theory attends not only to law's transformative role which is often celebrated, but also to its role in establishing the very rights and privileges that legal reform was set to dismantle," she said. "Like American history itself, a proper understanding of the ground upon which we stand requires a balanced assessment, not a simplistic commitment to jingoistic accounts of our nation's past and current dynamics."
