NC Senate leader says he wants Critical Race Theory debate. What does his bill say?

The North Carolina Senate’s new bill on Critical Race Theory in schools makes an important and welcome distinction that separates it from CRT bills in the N.C. House and in state legislatures across the country.

Like most CRT legislation, the N.C. Senate measure announced Wednesday by Senate leader Phil Berger forbids districts from promoting CRT and similar concepts in schools. But unlike most CRT measures, the bill purposefully defines what “promoting” is: “compelling students, teachers, administrators or other school employees to affirm or profess belief.”

The definition presumably would allow teachers to discuss Critical Race Theory and related concepts surrounding America’s history with race. That’s intentional, Berger indicated in prepared remarks he read to media Wednesday. The Senate leader doesn’t want to ban ideas, he said. He wants them debated.

“Children must learn about our state’s racial past and all of its ugliness, including the cruelty of slavery to the 1898 Wilmington massacre to Jim Crow,” Berger, a Rockingham County Republican, said. But, he warned: “Students must not be forced to adopt an ideology that is separate and distinct from history; an ideology that attacks ‘the very foundations of the liberal order,’ and that promotes ‘present discrimination’ — so long as it’s against the right people — as “antiracist,” Berger said.

This editorial board certainly values debate, and we appreciate that unlike Republicans across the country, the Senate Leader is signaling that he doesn’t want to forbid conversation about our country’s racial history. But the Senate’s CRT legislation would discourage teachers from confronting that past, and the bill solves a problem that doesn’t exist.

North Carolina’s public K-12 schools aren’t teaching Critical Race Theory — something Berger’s office acknowledged to the Editorial Board this week. The Senate leader believes, however, that CRT is “ascendant.” In remarks Wednesday to reporters, he noted that Durham’s city government authorized a report on race that called on teachers to host “in-class conversations about … white privilege and how white people can be supportive of anti-racism.”

There’s a lot of distance, however, between a city task force supporting anti-racism to CRT being taught, let alone promoted, in North Carolina’s public school classrooms. Berger’s bill is premature at best.

Worse, the bill will likely have a chilling effect on the exchange of ideas Berger said he wants to promote. It’s not difficult to imagine teachers hesitating to candidly discuss America’s history on race, given the threat that might invite from parents, students or lawmakers evaluating whether the lesson is an “impartial discussion of controversial aspects of history” and an “impartial instruction on the historical oppression of a particular group of people based on race, ethnicity, class, nationality, religion, or geographic region,” as Berger’s legislation mandates.

The bill also requires that schools notify the Department of Public Instruction 30 days prior to “providing instruction” on CRT-related concepts. That doesn’t allow for the free-flowing exchange of ideas that our classrooms should have and Berger says he wants. What if a student decides without warning to ask a question about race and history, about systemic racism, about our founders and slavery, and a teacher hasn’t sent the necessary 30-day paperwork into the state? The Senate Leader may not want to police thought, but by placing CRT discussion under the umbrella of legislation, that’s exactly what happens.

And that’s exactly what many parents and legislators want to do. CRT bills — even those that attempt not to chill speech — give into the fear of uncomfortable ideas. They overstate the power of teachers and understate the ability of our children to think and process and talk about concepts with others, including their parents.

In his remarks this week, Berger advocated for just that. “This is the only avenue — informing, debating, reasoning — to truly combat an illiberal doctrine,” he said. But his bill doesn’t encourage that discussion. It regulates it. That’s unnecessary, and it’s not good for our schools or our children.