Trump and his acolytes have thrown around the term “critical race theory” without e we defining it. He picked it up from rightwing extremist Chris Rufo, who thought that it could be used as a blunderbuss to smear public schools. He convinced large numbers of anxious white parents that the public schools were teaching their children to be embarrassed and feel guilty about being white. That, Rufo implied, was the inevitable result of teaching the unpleasant facts about slavery, Jim row, and racism.

Here is a different point of view, written by Alan Leveritt in The Arkansas Times.

He readily admits that he is a beneficiary of critical race theory.

He writes:

Believed to be circa 1945, a map illustrates redlining practices in the Little Rock area. Red means Black neighborhoods and no loans, while green means white neighborhoods and access to FHA loans.

Credit: dsl.richmond.edu

I came close to graduating from college, damn close in fact. Last I looked (about 30 years ago) I was three hours and an overdue parking ticket short of a history degree from UA Little Rock. But even though I remain a doubtful scholar, I am a devoted student of Arkansas history and its ability to instruct us regarding some very big issues facing our country. 

I am, of course, talking about critical race theory. 

Army 1st Lt. J.P. Leveritt came back from World War II, got his master’s degree in physical education and in 1950, along with my mother, built one of the first houses in Lakewood in North Little Rock for $8,000. Thus began my family’s long and beneficial association with critical race theory. 

To paraphrase the Oxford American Dictionary, critical race theory argues that many of our social and economic institutions have been created for and by white people. Those institutions, many dating back almost a century, were designed to lift white people up and keep Black people down. I am a direct beneficiary of that system. 

When President Franklin Roosevelt tried to create the Federal Housing Administration as part of the New Deal, his proposal to make home ownership accessible to ordinary people through federal home loan guarantees met with opposition from members of both parties. What we take for granted today was just one step from communism then. Southern Democrats ultimately agreed to support the establishment of a Federal Housing Administration on the condition that Black citizens be excluded. Now white people could more easily become homeowners and Black people could more easily become renters. 

When my parents bought their home in Lakewood, they had to sign a covenant never to sell to Black buyers. This was an actual FHA requirement. Had they not signed, the FHA would have refused to guarantee them any loans in Lakewood. If Black people could move into Lakewood, the property values there would crater, putting the FHA loans at risk, was the explanation. 

Another FHA innovation was to rate neighborhoods based on class and race, the thought being that neighborhoods occupied by Black people were too risky for government guaranteed loans. The Little Rock/North Little Rock redline map is color-coded, with green neighborhoods approved for FHA loans and red neighborhoods (predominantly African American) ineligible for bank loans. Thus the son of Lakewood homeowners inherits $175,000 upon his mother’s death in 2012, while the Black son of Rose City renters gets nothing. 

This is an example of critical race theory in action. The primary source of intergenerational wealth is home equity. Even though Black households earn 60% of what white households earn, they only have 5% as much wealth. That wealth should have come from home ownership, which never occurred because the game was rigged. 

My dad had a good war. He grew up in Smackover and went to Arkansas A&M at Monticello, where he played for the Rambling Boll Weevils and learned deep tissue massage as a trainer. He was headed to North Africa as a medic but through a series of happy accidents, wound up in the White House as President Truman’s masseuse and private trainer. 

As with all vets after the war, the GI Bill allowed him to further his education and receive low-interest home loans among other benefits. But while the language of the GI Bill was inclusive of all vets, it was administered by the states, which meant that Black vets, especially in the Jim Crow South, received on average 70% of the benefits their white comrades did. Despite the GI Bill of 1944 offering free college education, it was 11 years before the first Black veteran enrolled as an undergraduate in a state-supported college in Arkansas with the exception of all-Black Arkansas AM&N. Up to then, they were directed to vocational schools if at all.  The low-interest home loans the GI Bill provided weren’t much help, either. Because Black veterans could not live in white neighborhoods and Black neighborhoods were redlined, they seldom could get a loan to buy a house where they were permitted to live. 

Discrimination for FHA mortgages and GI benefits has in part been remedied by various civil rights laws, many of them from President Lyndon Johnson’s time. But to understand the great economic disparity between the races, we need to know history, especially Arkansas history. The economic disparities we see today are a direct result of what happened years ago when we came up with race-based barriers to education and wealth. 

Why would our Legislature and governor try to disappear this history? Why would they try to decertify an Advanced Placement African American Studies class in our high schools, or discourage honest study of systems that set some of us up to thrive but left others to struggle? Their argument that if we teach these facts, some white child might be made to feel guilty is pure nonsense. 

Get over it. It’s our history. Teach our kids the truth and maybe they will be better people than we are.