Anti-Critical Race Theory arguments are de rigueur these days. This is interesting because the theory emerged in the 1970s when it became clear to Derrick Bell, a Black legal scholar at Harvard University Law School, that the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s had stalled out at reducing, yet alone eliminating, racial discrimination in housing, health care, education, voting, and criminal law.

It’s not difficult to describe the effects of race in any one of these areas. As a starter, locally, with the end of the eviction hiatus due to the COVID pandemic, expect a disproportionate impact of homelessness on individuals from African-American and Latina/o communities. It will be disproportionate because many minorities have not had a fair shot at accumulating enough income, yet alone wealth, to maintain stable housing.

As to health care, it’s demonstrable that African-American and Latino/a individuals with COVID have gotten sicker, ended up in hospitals more often, and died at a greater rate than others. The inference is that these demographic groups have more health issues due to their living in proximity to industrial pollution, inadequate access to health care, and problematic treatment of medical conditions. African-American women die more frequently with pregnancy and child birth. They have worse outcomes with breast cancer and suffer hyper-tension and diabetes at higher rates than whites.

Many conservative politicians, pundits, and Wall Street bankers argue for public charter schools as the solution to “achievement gaps” between minority children and white kids. Oh that it were so. But the overall consequences for minority students of living in poverty, taking in polluted air and water, having unhealthy nutrition, struggling with unstable housing, and receiving inadequate health care stunt their learning in any education environment, period.

On reflection, the individual and social strains of racial discrimination are ongoing, systemic, and deeply damaging. They haven’t ended in the more than 400 years since African American slavery began in the Jamestown colony, or since the Civil War, or since the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

While racial discrimination is not the entirety of the nation’s past and present, its bearing on minorities is a critical feature of their American life. And while discrimination’s deleterious daily impact is perhaps less felt or even negligible for many white Americans, its effects are enormous on society as a whole as a trillion-pound weight against the fulfillment of economic, education, and social opportunity for minority Americans.

A question for critical race theory antagonists is this: If these issues are not addressed at some point in a student’s public education, how can the country expect the nation’s future to bend toward equality, equity, and justice for all?

If the issues are substantively confronted only in higher education, loads of people won’t have an understanding of racism’s consequences. If the issues are left to adulthood, it’s easy to imagine that they’ll continue to fester under the surface of American life. Too many majority Americans are ostrichs when it comes to race and discrimination.

To have a thriving America in the future, much as Germany today is a thriving nation due to its own reckoning with its past, our public schools must meet the challenges of presenting an honest history of the nation. It’s likely that some white children and their parents will be offended by the facts of this history. It’s likely that some white children and their parents will feel shame. Imagine the shame German students feel when they visit Dachau, but they do it.

But shame and guilt are not where a good education leaves honest history. Honest history leads to open minds, self-reflection, empathy and compassion for others, and a passion and commitment to do better by our fellow citizens.

Honest history leads to a dedication in Americans to ferreting out legacy obstructions to opportunity, equality, and equity buried in our laws, our environmental policies, our health care services, public education, and criminal justice.

Honest history doesn’t tell individuals who have suffered racial discrimination, or whose ancestors lived through slavery and Jim Crow, to “just get over it.” That’s not how humans feel and live. Honest history asks us to acknowledge, analyze, and act to make the union “more perfect” for all who live here.