“Race is the part of the human experience in which American schoolchildren are most painstakingly instructed. Their studies of literature, of war, of civics, are all subordinated to it”

— Caldwell, C. (2021). In The age of entitlement: America since the sixties (p. 10). essay, Simon Schuster.

Here, Caldwell was building on work by Derrick Bell in which he “described the quarter-century after the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decision Brown v Board of Education of Topeka (1954) as ‘the greatest racial consciousness-raising the country has ever known.'”

Civil rights legislation had ostensibly sought to eradicate racism as it existed in modern society, at least in practice. Racists might carry the feelings in their minds and emotions, but they would not be permitted to express it in their daily life in relation with others in society. This appeared noble and righteous as it addressed actual offenses of one human against another based solely on race. No one can deny the existence of racism in the history of human nor in the present day in which we live. Still, this legislation was mean to level the playing field so that all would be treated equally.

This quote uncovers a dirty little secret however. Rather than eradicating racism and leading all to be color-blind, race has become one of the defining factors of life in society. Children are bathed in the fact of race in all their subjects. Rather than hearing that a person did such and such, they usually get a racial descriptor added. That descriptor may be used to describe why that person chose to do such and such. That descriptor may be used to describe the effects of such and such on another race. Regardless, race becomes a seemingly necessary part of any lesson.

Rather than becoming color-blind to race, children are taught to see everything in full color in order to understand the world. They are now possibly more aware of their differences than their similarities. This seems counterproductive to becoming one people under God. Christians can do better than this.