Republicans newly alarmed by critical race theory see bans as ‘more of a preventative’

At the beginning of the year, Texas state Rep. Steve Toth thought his bill to prevent schools from teaching concepts of systemic racism was dead in the water.

But by the end of April, Toth, a Republican, said things had changed. That month, a Texas grand jury indicted two school board members in Southlake, an affluent Dallas-Fort Worth suburb, who supported new diversity and inclusion training requirements for students and teachers. (They were accused of violating the state open meetings law.) Then there were reports of an elementary school in the wealthy Dallas suburb of Highland Park recommending the picture book “Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness” to students.

“All of a sudden, you start hearing from parents across the state of Texas that, ‘Oh, my God. This is going on in our school. This is going on in our district,'” Toth told NBC News. “And they’re alarmed over it.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed Toth’s legislation into law in June, making it one of a handful of the more than 20 similar bills introduced across the country to cross the finish line. Republican efforts to ban what conservatives have labeled “critical race theory” comes amid the debate around teaching about race and racism that followed George Floyd’s murder last year and the largest outcry over racial justice in decades.

Yet there is scant evidence that CRT itself — an academic area of study that examines the modern-day impact of systemic racism in law and society — is actually being taught in K-12 schools, and six lawmakers who authored or sponsored anti-CRT legislation told NBC News their efforts are mostly pre-emptive. In interviews, they took issue with the idea that racism is embedded in all aspects of American society, in part because they did not see evidence of widespread racial tensions growing up.

“I don’t know why there’s such a rush right now to burn everything down and to make everything about race,” Toth said. “It’s not always about race. Sometimes it’s about race. And there’s a cry now to say that there is institutional racism everywhere — all aspects of our economy, of our school system, our education system, of the family unit. It’s all based on white structure. It’s just, it’s not true.”

Teachers have said these bills are already having a chilling effect on their lessons, with some becoming leery of what could be considered crossing the line. Experts said the legislative rush comes in response to a movement to disrupt the old way of educating children about race that people of color, at least, have long said is insufficient — a system they said served to inform these lawmakers’ own views.