New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb Battles GOP Congressman Over Critical Race Theory on Meet the Press
The New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb battled Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) over critical race theory on Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press.
The weekly show aired part of a recent discussion host Chuck Todd did with Donalds, Cobb and Brenda Sheridan, the chair of the Loudoun County Public Schools, which has been at the center of controversy over coronavirus protocols and school curriculum such as critical race theory.
“Congressman Donalds, I think this is the concern. You’ve heard this concern, which is – and I brought up the Tulsa race massacre because I didn’t – I wasn’t taught it in schools, with the public schools in Florida,” said Todd. “Something I learned in the last two years was Ax Handle Sunday, which was a horrible racial violence in Jacksonville, Florida. I assume you think we should be teaching these events in our public schools.”
“Absolutely,” said Donalds.
“So how would you do it,” asked Todd. “And – and what is banning critical race theory, in your mind, do to impact the teaching of, say, Ax Handle Sunday?”
“Look, the number one thing we all agree on is that history should be taught. Objective history should be taught at all times. I went to an elementary school…,” said Donalds, as Todd interjected with “Even if it’s painful?”
“Even if it’s painful,” said Donalds.
He continued:
I went to an elementary school where they taught objective history about our nation, from – from slavery, through Jim Crow, through civil rights era. So I learned that in elementary school. Every child should have that. The issue with critical race theory is that it’s a subjective view of American history and America law using race as the lens to focus.
And when you bring subjectivity into the classroom, that is what has parents upset. That is what leads, unfortunately, to children being divided in certain class segments based upon race. That has happened in some schools across our country, not all.
But when you have something like that occur, that is when parents step up and they oppose it, and we shouldn’t have subjectivity. We should definitely teach objective history in our country.
Cobb asked to respond, which Todd said he could.
“Yeah. I mean, I happen to be a historian, and historians don’t really believe that there’s such a thing as ‘objective history,’” he said. “What we do is recognize that we have a perspective, that there are – we’re all subjective.”
Cobb continued:
And what we try to do is, despite those subjectivities, follow what the evidence suggests most stringently. And so that’s how we come to the conclusion that there is this dynamic of race in which people – one group of people have disproportionately been victimized and one group of people have disproportionately benefited from that victimization. It’s difficult to get around that, even if people think that it will make people feel uncomfortable.
The last thing I’ll say is that there is no teaching of critical race theory in our schools. You know, I wrote about this in The New Yorker. The critical race theory is an advanced issue of jurisprudence, legal jurisprudence for which there’s an extensive body of scholarship. If your fifth -grader is learning critical race theory, then I would say congratulations because you have a genius on your hand, and they’re in their last year of law school.
Watch above, via NBC.
