Valley Center basketball debacle starts with Republicans’ war on racial diversity | Opinion

By now, you’ve probably seen the video from Saturday’s Valley Center High School basketball game that shows the school’s student section taunting Topeka High School’s team with a Black baby doll and chanting “He’s a (profanity for vagina)” at a Topeka player.

Topeka’s coach is alleging that n-words were flung about, that his players were threatened after the game, and that Valley Center’s adult supervisors did little to try to stop it.

The racism and profanity on display was ugly, disgusting and outrageous.

But it’s not surprising.

For about the past two years, practically the entire Republican political leadership of Kansas has made it their mission in life to prevent students from being taught how not to act like that.

Ordinarily, I try to avoid blanket condemnation of political parties, which are, after all, made up of individuals of varied beliefs and values.

But in this case, it’s warranted, because virtually every prominent Republican voice that’s weighed in on racism and intolerance in schools has attacked the people who are trying their best to mitigate it.

The GOP’s scary acronym for the past couple of years has been CRT, which stands for critical race theory. CRT holds that the national history of slavery, racism, redlining and segregation persists into the present, and intentionally or unintentionally affects societal and governmental institutions today.

It’s a complicated school of thought, generally reserved for graduate-level university and law school courses. CRT opponents have been informed time and again that it’s not being taught in K-12 schools.

It’s been around since the 1970s and wasn’t particularly controversial until the GOP seized on it as a dog whistle to placate some white voters who see their communities becoming more diverse and are frightened by that.

It’s a divide-and-conquer political strategy and it’s been fairly successful.

In the recent election, the GOP failed to unseat Gov. Laura Kelly, but maintained a veto-proof majority in both houses of the Legislature and captured seats on the state school board.

A year ago, anti-CRT agitation made major strides in taking over local school boards. It nearly succeeded in Wichita, and would have if one candidate on the GOP-promoted slate of four hadn’t gone completely off the rails and seriously proposed using schoolchildren as guinea pigs to test his crackpot theories about COVID-19.

In the halls of the Legislature, Republican lawmakers have consistently distorted, denounced and attempted to outlaw efforts by educators to teach “diversity, equity and inclusion” and “social-emotional learning” in schools.

Diversity, equity and inclusion is about what it sounds like: teaching students to be more tolerant and welcoming of students who are different from themselves, and to spot practices where lingering prejudice in society holds them and their classmates back from receiving fair educational opportunities.

Social-emotional learning is more about teaching kids how to manage their feelings and learn to cooperate with others to meet personal and organizational goals — vital skills they’ll need when they enter the workforce.

Probably, most Kansans support teaching kids those skills.

So Republicans politicians lie about it and tell you that DEI and SEL are really CRT in disguise. They tell you that the effort to teach tolerance in schools is really about making kids feel guilty and ashamed over mistakes made by their ancestors.

Nobody blames teenagers of today for slavery or Jim Crow. The problem is, if you don’t teach them what their ancestors did that was wrong, how are they supposed to avoid making the same mistakes?

So we have high school students waving a Black baby doll to taunt Black basketball opponents. Valley Center teens are on the network news as the face of intolerance, racism and white privilege in America.

The school district has promised to investigate. It’s too little, it’s too late.

What went wrong at Saturday’s basketball game started long before the opening tipoff.

It started with Republican politicians and their misleading, misguided, cynical and opportunistic attacks on what they pretend CRT is.

And now, the children of Valley Center really are paying for the sins of their elders.