by Mary Fahnestock-Thomas, Hamilton
In your letter addressed to me in the Star on 10/27/21, your anger, adamance, and insults suggest that you are not open to a reply. But the general reader deserves some response:
1. Critical Race Theory (CRT) is not taught outside of law school and simply advocates reading American history as it was lived instead of in idealized and expurgated form as has been prevalent since at least the Civil War — as if someone had a guilty conscience or something. The point of CRT is not that everyone is racist and needs to feel guilty, but that THE SYSTEM from its beginning has been biased toward white people. That’s natural since white people were the invaders and overlords, but it’s past time we got beyond that short-sightedness.
2. Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) recognizes that to be educated, human beings require more than “readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmetic” and sports. To be whole we need to learn about ourselves and about each other as individuals and in groups; we need to learn critical thinking and thinking outside the box; we need to care about ourselves, our families, our communities, country, and cultures; we need to recognize that intellectual intelligence is important, but perhaps not more important than emotional intelligence, which helps us communicate with individuals quite different from us so that life is better for all of us.
3. Equity: Imagine that you and a couple of friends want to watch a baseball game from outside the fence. Your tallest friend can see over, and the other has found a knot-hole at just the right height. But there you are, stuck in your wheelchair. That’s equality. Now imagine that someone provides a ramp and a platform so that you, too, can now see over the fence and enjoy the game. That’s equity. The point of taxes is to provide government with the resources to help all of us when and where we need help so that we can all pursue “life, liberty, and … happiness.”
4. “Fixing it”: You say that the exclusion of 1.2+ million Black veterans from the GI Bill has been “rectified.” If you were abused or raped as a child or younger person and the perpetrator has now been punished, does that mean that experience has no further effect on your life? If your parents could not afford (or didn’t know that they could afford) to give you a bicycle when all your friends had them and you particularly wanted one, or to support you in pursuing an education or a project you had set your heart on, has that had no effect on how you feel about yourself, your parents, your life and prospects? Have those situations been “rectified”? Our past cannot be canceled out, but can be recognized and remediated when necessary so that we all can have better, guilt-free lives.
5. “Rules”: Helen Sabin and I and everyone reading this — we are all old enough to know that rules and clear-cut answers rarely work very well for long because human beings are more complicated than that. Please think about that when politicians and over-zealous citizens try to rope you into their particular cause. What George Washington called the great American “experiment” — a democratic republic — depends on our being awake to what makes life better for all of us.