Critical Race Theory Is Making Both Parties Flip-Flop

Among the dozens of bills filed by Republicans to restrict how educators teach about race, perhaps none was more carefully written than the one in North Carolina. And therein lies the larger problem with such bills: The downside of even the most cautious efforts likely outweighs their benefits.

In numerous other states, legislators purporting to target critical race theory or “divisive concepts” have packaged sensible reforms—including prohibitions on requiring students to proclaim particular points of view—together with irresponsible clauses that are highly likely to discourage valuable instruction. Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, worries that many of these bills “are so vague that they arguably forbid teaching about slavery or racism at all.”

Yet even harsh critics of this kind of legislation grant that North Carolina’s effort is less vulnerable to censorious abuses than those of other states. For example, the Acadia University instructor Jeffrey A. Sachs surveyed more than 50 bills in 24 states that would add restrictions to what K–12 educators could tell students about race or sex. He concluded that legislators who wanted to ban teaching topics such as white privilege and the work of authors such as Robin DiAngelo and my colleague Ibram X. Kendi had “drafted bills so broad and clumsily written that entire historical eras and swathes of contemporary events would be barred from discussion.” The large majority of these bills “are repugnant to an open society,” Sachs declared––yet he noted that “North Carolina’s bill is the exception” and “would probably do little harm.”

That’s because House Bill 324 would not prohibit elementary- and secondary-school educators from merely discussing anything, including white privilege, DiAngelo’s White Fragility, or Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist. Rather, it would prohibit them from “promoting” seven specific concepts: