Critical Race Theory

[Spongebob]

To be fair, most of the white adults in the book were basically written as ridiculous parodies, like the gym teacher who kept asking if what he was saying was racist every five seconds, and then you had the white Karen teacher who got his name wrong all year long, which is not a realistic situation at all and would not happen in real life, especially given that the teacher gets his name right all of a sudden when he gets in trouble. 

Bold - I dispute this.  Not at all true.  As I stated in my review, there were many varied personalities represented.  Yes, there was a gym teacher who was overly sensitive and awkward about race, but there are people like that.  He was the only character like that.  There are real people like Ms Rawls, who get people's names wrong after multiple corrections.  Would you say Alexandria was a parody?  Was Liam?  These characters were not parodies at all.  They were somewhat exaggerated, but this is a comic book for middle school students, so that's to be expected.

The message of the book to be learned ends up being that black kids shouldn't take shit from their white teachers, and that they should stand up for themselves and tell their teachers off if they get their name wrong. I simply don't think this is good advice for young black kids, as they are already being suspended at a far greater rate than children of other races, so don't give the teacher another legitimate reason to suspend you.

What does "to be fair" even mean in this context?  Doesn't matter; you are dead wrong here.

You simply did not understand this book.  The message is not just about black kids; its about fitting in.  There were multiple white kids who were dealing with issues of isolation (as I pointed out in my review) and some with personal trauma.  It was also about how people make assumptions about other people and how that is often a mistake.  Both white and black people were demonstrated doing this in the book.  And there was a ton of kids just dealing with making and maintaining friendships, which can be a problem that is often overlooked by adults.  The book simply had no such message about black people standing up for themselves; that is something you concocted yourself to justify your hatred.  So there is no such "advice" for black kids from this book.  

If there is any advice at all, which comes only in the form of Jordan learning and growing, its that everyone around you deserves some understanding (as Jordan demonstrates at the end of the book when he is kind to Andy).  There's also the advice Jordan's grandfather gives him about trying to get his friends together and not compartmentalizing his life.  There's also a warning about not assuming too much about others demonstrated by Drew when he assumes his secret santa is being tacitly racist with the gifts.  The book is full of real and important lessons that apply to different elements of life, but you are too focused on trying to find a smoking gun to see these things.  This is a case you having your mind made up about something and being inflexible when the evidence is stacked against you.

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The lessons I've learned from the book are to never give a black person a gift, just to be safe, never bring up basketball or football around black people, and just talk about hockey to be safe and make sure you don't cause any basketball triggers, and that all teachers should just call black students "hey you" so they don't risk getting their name wrong and being hanged in the town square. That's what I've learned. There are some legitimately shitty things that happened to the main character in the book, and I disavow those things, and never would have partaken in those actions.

You're an idiot.

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One idea that keeps being repeated by people who reject CRT as a valid concept is that racism in the US is gone, doesn't exist anymore, so stop talking about it.  Even some here have claimed that black people have all the freedoms white people have.  I'm not even going to attempt to unpack those opinions, but I will point out that there are a whole lot of horrific things that have happened in the US that the vast majority of people (of all races) don't know about.  I wasn't taught these things in school, so the only way to learn about them is to either happen across a book or have someone tell you about it.  Things like the black wall street massacre in Tulsa, OK, government segregation of neighborhoods, the theft of inventions by black inventors, the outright theft of land/property in the name of eminent domain; the list is overwhelming.  

Yes, I did learn about the Tuskegee Airmen and we knew about the obvious things like segregation.  But that was really just the surface; there were more evil and foundational things going on that devastated black communities when the official word was that black people are full class citizens.  Basically, that's been a lie since 1865.  in 2020, my wife's book club decided to read a series of books on this subject and with every book there were more revelations.  These are the types of events that make up what CRT is and unless you are simply a cold, heartless bastard, you have to feel some level of outrage at the injustice of it all.  150 years of this doesn't vanish overnight.  That's the point of CRT and the very reaction these naysayers have is evidence of that.  Christians today cry about persecution; I'm talking current persecution.  But those who oppose the idea of CRT deny much of what has happened to the black community and is part of the historical record.