Here’s what I would say if I were standing next to her: Stop talking about critical race theory, Representative Dow. You’re resorting to one of the oldest electoral tricks in American history: Stoking White racial fear to win an election. And you’re doing it by repeating Republican talking points. From my interactions with you over the years, I know you to be better than this.
In the campaign commercial Matthews asked to be pulled, Dow calls critical race theory — which is not taught in New Mexico’s public schools — “racist and Un-American,” part of the “woke agenda” that “radical progressives want. Then she repeats an idea you’re as likely to hear this year in Georgia or Connecticut or Texas by a Republican hopeful running for office: Critical race theory will teach school kids to hate one another.
From everything I’ve read, critical race theory is taught at the collegiate and graduate levels, not in K-12 public schools. And it focuses on how laws, regulations, cultural behavioral patterns and institutions interact over time to create different outcomes for different populations, in health, finances, incarceration rates, etc., not on individual bigotry.
I’ve spent most of my adulthood thinking about race and the role it plays in daily life and politics. Partly because from an early age it became clear to me that race influenced most day-to-day interactions in the Georgia of the 60s and 70s where I grew up. But also because, after 30 years of moving around the country, I’ve realized the myth that the South is an outlier on the subject of race is just a fiction White people elsewhere in the country like to tell themselves to feel better.
It was with that conviction and genuine curiosity, that I called him to try to understand why he considered diversity and equity programs and CRT so terrifying, so very racist. It was an unsatisfying conversation. He didn’t help clear up why he believed what he did. He just repeated talking points and acknowledged I had fair points when I posed questions to him, almost as if he’d never considered them before.
Six months after that interview, as the election year is heating up, I still haven’t gotten any closer to understanding why talking about how race and gender shape the world we live in terrifies so many people. And why in the year 2022 stoking White people’s fear is still an effective political strategy.
Honestly, it just feels like I’m back in the Georgia I grew up in so many years ago.