An Open Letter to Chris Rufo: Tell the Truth about Critical Race Theory.

Dear Chris Rufo,

I’ll give it to you. You know how to craft catchy talking points. Your one-liners make for easy clicks and retweets. However, they won’t change history. They can’t. The truth remains constant.

Even your Georgetown degree and high paying lobbying positions (writing propaganda scribbled across school board protest posters and repeated ad-nauseam) can’t undo the truth. American history is not mythology. You don’t get to make heroes out of imperialists. Your talking points won’t rewrite the history of Native American genocide and cultural erasure, enslavement, Jim Crow segregation, and the modern day reckoning this country so desperately needs.

Your America seeks shelter from the discomfort of the truth. We occupy another America, where the truth is the only thing that will set us free. The history you want to ignore and write out of our classrooms is the truth that must be told.

It is documented.

It is accurate.

And, even more important than all the evidence of American brutality and cruelty is our lived experiences of this truth.

Our ancestors lived this history. Your ancestors lived this history.

From the very founding of this country, your ancestors wrote a narrative of hard-fought freedoms against the British. They fought and won their freedoms as they stripped these very freedoms from Native Americans, who occupied the land they “discovered,” and enslaved Africans, forcibly brought to this country in the hulls of ships.

We will not right these historic wrongs by denying them. If we are to raise a generation of critical thinkers who can finally see that race is a social construct, we must tell the truth. If we are to end deadly policing practices and the school to prison pipeline we have to tell the truth about all of it — not to villainize and demonize any child who sits in our classrooms today, but to make them aware of the totality of the American experience.

We have had different experiences of America.

Your America is kind, generous, and prosperous. It offers you the opportunities of belonging, land, and even generational wealth. On the 4th of July, you celebrate freedom. I get it. You celebrate because you can — because you are enamored with the American dream (a dream you’ve realized).

As the fireworks erupt in the night sky you remember and honor your freedoms. And, like everything else in this country’s history, your celebrations are only part of the story.

Your celebrations forget the Native American people were here long before Columbus. History teaches that before the Europeans landed in 1492, there were 60 million Native Americans and this land was theirs. Today, there are only 6.79 million and we occupy their land. You also forget that the first enslaved people were brought here in 1619 and endured 400+ years of chattel slavery. They were bought, sold, and traded like cattle. Every freedom won by the descendants of the enslaved, has been hard fought. Today, the descendants of the enslaved are 13% of the population, yet only 1–3% of the tech workforce, while they make up 40% of the prison population, and are 2.5x more likely to be killed by police than their white peers.

There’s more I could say. I could talk about the Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese internment camps, and talk about the children held in cages. I could go into detail about the hateful rhetoric that insists that we build a wall to protect our borders, when history tells us that much of that land once belonged to Mexico and the Mesoamerican people you fight so hard to keep out. Let me say this again. Your America locked children in cages and justified it in the name of preserving freedoms.

The truth is, this is a land of freedoms for some and your anti-CRT campaign to hide and quiet the truth only underscores this.

And this isn’t completely your fault. You’ve been conditioned to deny and pretend your responsibilities away. If you take a moment to look at the faces of the Native American children who were subjugated in boarding schools to “kill the Indian and save the man” or you look at the Black children who were spit on and attacked (verbally and physically) as they walked into schools, you will see that this disdain continues in our systems and institutions. The idea of white superiority is still alive and well. It is actually this place of privilege that fuels your campaign. However, it will not change the truth.