Misunderstanding History: What Both Sides Get Wrong About Critical Race Theory | YDHTY, S2E6
The debate around critical race theory in America's public schools seemingly centers around one question: Which version of American history should our children learn?
To Amna Khalid, Associate Professor of History at Carleton College, the answer is simple: All of them.
In this episode of YDHTY, we discuss how her upbringing in Pakistan - a country with relatively tight controls on permissible speech - informed her views on the importance of free and open debate, how America's cultural and educational institutions often run against this principle, and how our desire to protect our children from certain viewpoints has robbed us of the opportunity to teach them how to think critically.
You can listen to the full episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever your bad self gets your podcasts.
SHOW NOTES
As a child in Pakistan, Khalid idealized the West for its commitment to diversity of thought and the unrestricted flow of ideas. Upon arriving in America, she found that, while the government placed no law on speech, our cultural and educational institutions did the job for them.
Khalid sees this playing out in the current debate over race, where our goal seems to be to protect our children from what we view as objectionable thought, teaching them what to think, rather than how to think. In her mind, this negates the purpose of teaching history in the first place.
At its core, history is the study of how we use the past to better understand ourselves in the present. By nature, this means history is a subject continuously up for debate as differing perspectives enter into the conversation.
To Khalid, it’s America’s flat understanding of its own history that leads it to continuously misunderstand its place in the world. We’ll critique countries such as Pakistan and Afghanistan for their tribal leanings while failing to see the same tribalism playing out in our own country.
To this extent, a greater diversity of thought might be exactly what we need.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
Additional work by Khalid can be found at AmnaKhalid.com
Banished, a podcast that focuses on what happens when works of art are silenced or banned.
A Third Way on the Place of Critical Race Theory in the Classroom, an article Khalid co-authored, and the one that prompted me to reach out to her.