Critical race theory teaches about who controls our law-making structure. This alone should show a need for CTR in our schools.

And it also explains why Marc Thiessen (“The danger of critical race theory,” Nov. 14) and the Republicans do not want it there.

How many teachers can say that our white culture has not dominated our laws, giving whites powers and freedoms that are denied to people of color, oppressing them?

Therefore to deny that whites are the oppressors, while they have the power structure to oppress and have done so from the beginning of our nation, undermines the truth and reason.

Our teachers, our kids, and their parents have to have critical skills to analyze “what is the truth.” Otherwise, how would we all know what is true?

It should be easy for most middle school students to understand their Black friends don’t benefit from the constitutional rights our government has given to the white community.

Looking at it another way, has the minority population in America been able to control the laws that have suppressed and oppressed their lives?

Were they able to pass laws against slavery? Were they able to pass laws allowing them to vote as citizens? Were they able to repeal Jim Crow laws? Were they protected against lynching? Were they able to pass laws, like whites have, to exclude whites from their neighborhoods?

Were they able to pass laws that gave their kids the same education that white children were given? Were they able to obtain loans from banks to buy homes in white neighborhoods? Were they able to “ride the bus” and sit up front like whites? Were they able to eat in a white diner, use a white bathroom and stay in a white hotel?

Blacks were also unable to marry a white person by law, if they wished to.

Black women were considered slaves, even sex slaves, by many white men, while laughing about it, protected by their status. President Thomas Jefferson was one.

Why did the 101st Airborne have to protect Black students attending elementary school in Little Rock from harm from a large mob of white people? Not once, but every day they went.

As Thiessen said in his column, “As a new study from the American Enterprise Institute shows, the media does not explain its key tenets in its coverage.”

If the media continued the question list outlined above, it would be clear to many that Blacks were and are being oppressed by Americans under its laws. It started with white wealthy founding members and continues today.

I also highly doubt the philosopher Immanuel Kant believed, as Thiessen noted, that, “Reason was inadequate to give shape to our lives.” How could someone be “critical of reason” without reason?

John Wade, Lewiston

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