Mocs News Reporting the news that matters most to UTC
Update: this is a opinion piece created by me.
CHATTANOOGA (mocsnews.com) Recently, the Tennessee General Assembly has banned the teaching of critical race theory for K-12 schools.
This means that Tennessee will pull funding from any school that teaches CRT.
Even though this law has not been enforced on Tennessee colleges and “…the fall schedule has not been affected.” as said by Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Jerold L. Hale.
Hale also stated that “There may be consequences that were unintended.”
One of these possible consequences could be a college student who is taught several things about race relations not being able to teach future students about these facts of race relations at lower grade levels.
This could lead to students not knowing about the struggles that their classmates of different color go though and could lead to those students acting cruel to said classmates of color.
Another big issue with the banning of critical race theory is that it could serve as a sort of stepping stone towards creating other laws that could harm colleges, like not having financial support for people of color.
Yet another big issue is that a lot of the drama about Critical Race Theory was started by a journalist called Christopher F. Rufo who often contributes to conservative stories.
Rufo has been against anti-racism movements and actions for a good while when he decided to use CRT to progress the current culture war conservatives have been raging against a supposed progressive racial ideology since the Obama years.
He talked about how CRT is a good weapon to use since it’s connotations can seem to be negative to a wide range of Americans thanks to the way the theory is worded.
He also appeared on Fox News more then a couple of times and advised the language for more then ten bills, which makes his impact very clear on the teaching of CRT.
This could be very bad since CRT and similar classes can teach students about the struggles of their fellow man and how to fix long standing issues caused by face.
UTC student Austin Holt said that the law extending to colleges could be bad since “…you go to be informed of things that middle and high school didn’t teach you.”
He also stated that “…we typically pay out of pocket to go to college.” so if CRT laws extend to colleges, especially big colleges, then college students would be losing a significant chunk of classes that college students could take, even if those classes could help with getting a job.
While a lot of colleges require students to take some sort of ethnic studies class in order to graduate, conservatives could try to take away those requirements and even take away classes that could be considered CRT to them.
Even talking about CRT in a normal way can lead to chaos like shown in this video.
However, I do think that teaching students, both young and old, should be taught about what happened to certain races during history why certain races, especially African Americans, can often be treated terribly by modern society.
That way we can actually start to work on fixing the issues society imposes on us and try to make things better for less privileged members of the American populace.
