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Denouncing attacks on efforts to address systemic racism in the United States and urging the Pennsylvania House of Representatives to reject House Bill 1532, which aims to prohibit instruction on the history of racial oppression and the examination of how racism functions in our law, policy, and society.
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WHEREAS, Calls to address widespread racial inequalities in the United States have become more prominent in recent years with the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement and mass protests that took place in the summer of 2020 following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery; and
WHEREAS, Initiatives such as the 1619 Project, a collection of longform journalism and associated curriculum, have highlighted present day racial inequities in areas such as public health and education, the criminal justice system, and housing, while identifying the roots of these disparities in the founding of our nation and its laws and policies by examining issues from redlining practices during the New Deal to the war on drugs and mandatory minimum sentences; and
WHEREAS, These efforts to reexamine the history and founding of our country sparked a widespread backlash from conservative lawmakers seeking to suppress dialogue and exploration of concepts such as structural racism, white privilege and white supremacy, intersectionality, implicit bias, race and gender-based oppression, and
Critical Race Theory (CRT); and
WHEREAS, CRT is an analytic framework that was developed by legal scholars as an extension of Critical Legal Studies in the 1970s in response to hindered civil rights legislation.
Critical race theorists hold that race is a social construct; that our nation's history of racism is embedded in our systems and institutions and continues to impact outcomes for Black Americans and other people of color; and that the lived experiences of people of color should be elevated and inform law, policy, and scholarship; and
WHEREAS, In Septe...
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