Bolded for importance.
And there are tens of thousands of examples of good and powerful common sense lessons for school kids of all ages to recognize historical systemic issues, and recognize the places, privileges, and disadvantages that people -- including themselves -- may fall into due to no fault or excellence of their own. Those don't grab headlines or the outrage of partisan think tanks, though.
We can find dozens of examples of stupid/poorly thought out language and techniques in schools that try to address the bigger picture of race. For example, I think most of us here think that the use of the term "oppressor and oppressed" as applied to school-age kids is not helpful.
We can also find dozens of examples of racist conduct, happening in real-time, among school kids right now, today. Kids who tell their classmates they blame them for COVID because they are chinese, kids calling other kids wetbacks and saying that they'll call border patrol on them, all that shit. It happens. In fact, it's been INCREASING in frequency in recent years, after a long trend of declining.
I don't want kids called oppressor or oppressed. I also don't want them to be racist shitbags, or to allow racist shitbaggery. An honest evaluation and reckoning of our country's history on race, where that's left us today, and the kind of things we should think about doing in light of those facts, is exactly what I want an educated, critical-thinking society to do. Which means that the discussion belongs in the place where we should learn to do those things: school. And those concepts fall squarely in the bullseye of the broad concept of "critical race theory," so using a broad brush and creating an outsized boogeyman is not only pointless, it's counterproductive. Our society has been deeply emotionally invested in the approach of never admitting that we did anything wrong. And if we did, that was a long time ago, so get over it, things are all good now. It's a lie, it's stupid, and it condemns us to stay in the same rut we've been in.
We fucked over black people. We enslaved them. We lynched them. We enacted whole sets of laws to fuck them once they were freed. We turned dogs and water hoses on them. We redlined their neighborhoods. We denied them access to government programs to help people move up, when white people got full access. Etc. etc. ad infinitum. We need to acknowledge ALL of those things. And then acknowledge the reality that the effects of 400 years of fuckery just might not be erased just yet. And then.....have a thoughtful conversation about how we, as a collective group called "Americans," can work to remedy some of that. It baffles me why this is so fucking hard. But apparently, it's not just hard -- it's a threat to all of Western Civilization to even talk about it.