Perhaps "opportunistic Republican candidates" is repeating myself, and "Republican candidates" would do.
Strib, July 17, 2021:
GOP campaign operatives are already positioning critical race theory as a wedge issue in the 2022 midterm election, much like Republicans effectively used defunding the police as a blunt instrument against swing district Democrats last fall.
"It's this idea that the American dream — individualism, hard work, free markets — doesn't truly apply equally to everyone," said Michael Minta, who teaches classes on politics and race at the University of Minnesota. "Republicans are using the whole idea about diversity and teaching about race, and they're finding a term — that they don't necessarily quite understand, or care to understand — and using it to rouse racial resentment that's out there in the population."
The concept has become particularly controversial around schools, where conservative activists have begun disrupting local board meetings across the country, including a Rochester Public Schools meeting last week.
Critical race theory is not being taught in Minnesota's K-12 classrooms, but groups have raised alarm about the once-a-decade process of revising state social studies standards. Proposals under review would include more lessons from the Native American perspective, as well as studies in LGBTQ civil rights and the history of segregating policies such as redlining, which pushed people of color out of certain neighborhoods through lending policies or denying them mortgage insurance.
Republicans claim the most extreme DFL activists want those lessons to be added at the expense of teachings on the Civil War, World War II and the Holocaust.
"They want to tear it down and replace it with something else," said Jeff Niedenthal, a consultant who has been traveling to American Legion clubs and cities such as Ashby for presentations on critical race theory.
Mark Westphal, a history teacher and vice president of the Minnesota Council for the Social Studies, said the conversation has been around adding to, not subtracting from, current standards.
"It's trying to bring in a more inclusive set of histories, and that's where a lot of conservatives argue that it's going to be a rewriting of history," said Westphal. "It's a fear-based proposal that's going to rile up the troops."
More broadly, conservatives say critical race theory is being used to accuse all white people of being racist, whether they think they are or not.
If the candidates don't really know what they are jumping with spurs on, then perhaps teaching CRT might prove helpful. School children could go home and disavow their elders of false impressions, if taught the truth.
They are not going to remove the Gettysburg Address to make room. They are going to instead pick up the pace, should CRT become an added curriculum topic. Picking up the pace might well work to not bore the brighter of the students, while also challenging the average.
CRT could be taught in part by juxtaposition. Have Birth of a Nation available on the school network, with it discussed in terms of propaganda as well as for cinamatic groundbreaking. The horseback chase scenes were the birth of every western move horseback chase scene ever since. What was it like to ride in a segregated bus? In New Orleans, 1954 - the year the Brown v. Board of Education decision struck down school separate-but-equal fictions - bus seats had a metal grab bar atop with two holes into which the segregating sign could be moved. Blacks behind the sign, whites in front; and depending on relative passenger numbers the sign could be shifted so that everyone had a seat, which might not have been the case with an immovable sign unable to accommodate shifting percentages. I saw it in action. It seemed weird.
Students should learn how that was a reality as recently as during the Truman-Eisenhower post-war years. I attended the segregated Robert E. Lee public grade school, (since integrated and renamed). At age ten. There was a large assembly room where we'd all stand every morning before class and pledge allegiance to the U.S. flag, while on an opposite wall there was the big somber portrait of General Lee.
UPDATE: While in earlier years going to Central School in Ferguson, MO, then a sleepy white town, with the Masonic Temple next door, and schooled with a stern certainty to not ever leave school grounds and mess around there during recess. Very different times. Monkey bars and wood seat swings where if you'd swing hard enough you could do a 360.
Are there many among us who remember when CRT stood for cathode ray tube? And BLM was the Bureau of Land Management, of interest to those concerned with use of federal public lands? Whistle stop campaigning, back then? When vacuum tubes would burn out in a radio and have to be replaced.