In October, the City Journal ranked the University of Florida (UF) number one among 100 top private and public universities. The Wall Street Journal editorial board praised the new ranking system, which takes into account 68 variables, including academic outcomes, teaching and research quality, ideological pluralism, speech climate, curricular design, and more, as a fresh look at a school’s “intellectual growth and civic engagement.” It seems that legislative and administrative efforts to defund race-essentialist teaching in the Sunshine State’s college system have not negatively affected UF’s ability to embrace academic rigor or advance viewpoint diversity. But the other side remains unimpressed.

A recent opinion piece by a Florida college student, titled “Critical race theory belongs in Florida’s classrooms,” laments that “Florida public schools can no longer teach critical race theory.” The article goes on to argue that “teaching critical race theory classes would help students understand how common and impactful microaggressions are in our society.”

The Legal Defense Fund, the nonprofit legal group that represented a group of Florida professors in challenging Florida’s Stop W.O.K.E. Act (H.B. 7) and supported Harvard’s race-based admissions as amici curiae, frames CRT as “an academic response to the erroneous notion that American society and institutions are ‘colorblind.’” The group vilifies attempts by conservative school boards and legislatures to restrict overemphasizing racism in public education as “a cudgel to silence the voices and deny the experiences of Black people and other historically marginalized groups.”

Are conservatives really trying to whitewash history? Do teachers opposed to a theory that filters all outcomes through an arbitrary lens of race reject teaching our country’s historical entanglements with racism categorically? Are they, many of whom could be considered members of “historically marginalized groups,” harming their own groups? If not, how are they teaching the hard subject of race and racism?

Like many who adhere to ideological dogmas grounded in rhetorical soundness rather than empirical nuance, advocates of CRT simply conflate epistemology with ontology. To them, dissenting from how controversial topics are typically discussed within the Ivory Towers is intellectual treason and must be resisted as an existential threat to the totality of teaching such topics.

Reality negates this dogmatic simplification.

In Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story, historian Wilfred M. McClay observes America’s cultural shift to democracy in the 19^th century through various social and political reforms. McClay calls the cause of antislavery “the greatest of all reform cause” of the 19^th century. He further notices the rise of antislavery sentiments and movements in faith communities:

[B]y the 1830s, when the movement finally began to coalesce, it was being pursued largely as a religious cause than a secular one – a grave and soul-imperiling national sin rather than a mere withholding of rights. The great revivals of the Second Great Awakening, while encouraging the reform of slavery in the South, had awakened in the North as uncompromising desire to eliminate it as soon as possible.

But Professor McClay, whose Land of Hope has become a favorite U.S. history textbook among non-progressive education decision-makers and advocates, refuses to kowtow to intellectually unserious claims of perpetual, systemic racism. After spending a couple of pages explaining Antebellum South as “a strikingly biracial society, underwritten by stark differences of power and status,” McClay points out complexities and multifaceted contours within the South:

[T]he elite planter class was small in number, constituting only about 4 percent of the adult white males in the South, and only a relative handful of those planters (around twenty-three hundred of them) owned at least one hundred slaves. The majority of slaveholders were ordinary farmers who owned fewer than twenty slaves and worked in the fields with their slaves. The majority of whites, three-fourths of them by 1860, were not slaveholders at all and were unable to afford the rich low-lying farmland favored by the planters, who lived instead in the upcountry, and got their living largely as subsistence farmers.

Thomas Sowell, another scholar disdained by the left, holds a similar view against an absolute obsession with permanent racism. In The Quest for Cosmic Justice, Sowell opines on the absurdity of reparation policies:

[I]t remains painfully clear that those people who were torn from their homes in Africa in centuries past and forcibly brought across the Atlantic in chains suffered not only horribly, but unjustly. Were they and their captors still alive, the reparations and the retribution owed would be staggering. Time and death, however, cheat us of such opportunities for justice, however galling that may be. We can, of course, create new injustices among our flesh-and-blood contemporaries for the sake of symbolic expiation, so that the son or daughter of a black doctor or executive can get into an elite college ahead of the son or daughter of a white factory worker or famer.

Not even the staunchest conservatives in American academia deny the cruelty and inhumanity of chattel slavery. Instead, they are joined by classical liberals and practitioners in challenging CRT’s doctrinal monotone and moral imperative. In their letter correspondence published in “Letters in Black and White,” Winkfield Twyman Jr. and Jennifer Richmond zero in on issues with CRT’s media debut–The 1619 Project:

As one reads the 1619 Project, one is struck by the accusatory tone, a judgmental gaze upon the land and ideas of the Founding Fathers. It is as if all falls away over the centuries and only collective demonization matters. Jefferson and Washington, Adams and Franklin, reduced to caricatures of race and sex. The universal is transcendent. The tribal transcends nothing. And so, what better rejoinder to the centerpiece essay of the 1619 Project than the words of a Soviet immigrant who can see the blessings of liberty with fresh eyes, who knows the scars of ‘collective demonization of prominent cultural figures,’ and who offers us not accusation but a cautionary tone, an introspective gaze upon the depths of collective hounding and the greatness of the human condition.

Like McClay, Sowell, Twyman, and Richmond, other scholars and intellectuals have also provided alternative perspectives to CRT’s doom-and-gloom accounts of American history. For instance, Glenn Loury writes of our national founding for 1776 Unites:

What happened in 1776 — the founding of the United States — was vastly more significant for world history than what happened in 1619 … The narrative we blacks settle upon about the American story, the American project, is fundamentally important. Is this, basically, a good country that affords boundless opportunity to all who are fortunate enough to enjoy the privileges and bear the responsibilities of American citizenship?

Carol Swain adds to Loury’s argument with further criticisms of CRT’s revisionist approach and offers a “simple” solution:

This flawed theory suggests that race and ethnicity will always taint and pollute every decision, and, as a result, racial minorities will consistently lose out to whites because of structural racism. The message is clear: If you are unfortunate enough to be born with black skin, you are forever a second-class citizen who pays a race penalty … Rather than wallow in the past and revisionists’ efforts to build a case for reparations, we, as Americans, need to move forward while practicing the forgiveness and love of neighbor that Jesus espoused.

On a practical note, professors well-trained in history, sociology, political science, and related fields should not rely on a theoretical framework to transfer academic knowledge to their students. A parallel argument can be found in K-12, illustrated by a comment a school board member made to me on an equity board policy:

Good teachers meet students where they are. They already do that to make students feel seen, valued, and heard. Then why do you need an equity policy to accomplish what should already be done?

Similarly, a good history professor needs no CRT to do the right thing.

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