I just joined Zaretta Hammond‘s Facebook group (author of CRT & the brain) and she pointed me to an article in the Irish Times about the need for CRT in schools there. The article describes the need for culturally responsive teaching given the dedicated but homogeneous cohort of staff in Irish schools at the moment and also to avert the alienation and waste of skills that will occur without it. I was interested to learn that Dublin City University are working on a set of tools to help teachers achieve exactly that and was making a note to follow up to see if I could find out more.
Unfortunately I then moved on to the comments under the article where there was nothing but negativity. See some examples below:
What ever happened to immigrants adapting to their generous host society?
Regardless of whether they have been born here or not there appears to be only one Irish child in this picture. may God punish the traitors who so thoroughly destroyed our Nation.
The second comment refers to the fact that the photo the newspaper used featured only one white child.
I have seen similar outpourings in reading about the migrant crisis in Europe over the last few months. I should not be surprised and I am not surprised but it occurred to me that there is a great deal of work to be done with society in general (in this case perhaps the parents of the schoolchildren whose schools will implement CRT) to set out the value of a culturally inclusive approach. Psychologists tell us that facts alone won’t do it so maybe what we need are stories; stories about people that we can all make a connection with.
Staying on Facebook the following quote floated by on my timeline and it expresses exactly where I think we need to be going.
Opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding. The highest form of knowledge… is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world. It requires profound purpose larger than the self kind of understanding. Bill Bullard