CRT (Critical Race Theory) is the latest acronym to be added to the American vocabulary by state legislatures that lack the courage to admit the streak of bigotry that permeates the phrase.

The North Dakota legislature has fallen in line and teachers are not allowed to talk freely about African-American history. 

Of course, the law doesn’t specify the targets but it is no secret that white supremacists and Christian-Nationalists are aiming primarily at the African-American community. 

To conceal their bigotry, CRT is written generally about the idea that racism is systematic in our institutions and assures the continued dominance of the white people, thereby denying 400 years of denigration of black Americans. 

Look at the Record

From the day they were put ashore in 1620, their experience has been bitter, brutal and heartbreaking. At major turning points in American history, circumstances stripped African Americans of their God-given equality with other humans.

African Americans lost in the U.S. Constitutional Convention when the northern states let North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia take charge of creating the new nation. They threatened the convention that they would not sign the document without compromises.

First, slavery would be permitted for the next 20 years; slaves would be counted as 3/5ths persons in congressional elections and, according to the Charleston Library, “another compromise was to omit any direct references to slavery in the Constitution.” 

Slavery Rebounds

Just as the cotton industry was dying in the 1790s, two things happened: 1. A new variety of cotton could be grown in the whole south and not only North and South Carolina and Georgia. 2. Eli Whitney came up with the cotton gin that could quickly process the new variety. 

This brought incredible new prosperity for the whole South, resulting in pressure to expand the country’s boundaries westward.

Just then (1803), President Thomas Jefferson bought the Louisiana Territory, adding thousands of square miles for cotton. This opened the door for cotton planters to move into Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, Missouri, Texas and Arkansas. Slavery was given a new birth.

Ordained by God?

Claiming to be ordained by God in “manifest destiny,” the United States aggressively pushed Mexico into war in 1846 and signed the peace treaty in 1848 that took almost one-half of Mexico, giving Texas new territory for cotton. 

Even the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 by Lincoln declaring that slaves under the jurisdiction of the Southern states were free was fraudulent. The purpose was not to free slaves but to keep England from joining the South in the Civil War.

The election of 1876 resulted in success for Democrat Tilden but a handful of Democrats made a secret deal with Republican Rutherford Hayes to give him all contested electoral votes, enabling him to assume the presidency by one electoral vote. 

A part of the secret deal was devastating because it gave jurisdiction of African Americans to the Southern states, leading to another 100 years of terror under oppressive “Jim Crow” laws and the Ku Klux Klan.

Lose Elective Offices 

While African Americans won elective offices under the protection of the Army but the Army left as a part of the secret deal after which African Americans not only lost elective seats but were administratively denied the right to vote.

Throughout the last half of the 1800s and first half of the 1900s, African Americans were brutalized by the South until the federal government started passing legislation in 1965 to protect them. Nevertheless, they are still living in a form of slavery that strips them of their equality and dignity.

So the North Dakota legislature has outlawed truth-telling in the public schools by pretending that CRT doesn’t exist. Four hundred years of chronic oppression testify otherwise.