Many thanks for reading. CRT is already a poisoned chalice that's now academically useless outside of law schools. Dispense with it entirely and rename it truth and reconciliation history.

As a history teacher I always insisted on absolute academic freedom. This means nobody legislates how I teach. I offend everybody sometimes and provide no safe spaces or trigger warnings, just instruction on how to construct an argument and support it with evidence. When my director at Riga Business School told me to censor my students' production of Lysistrata because he thought it was too sexy, I told him, "fire me now if I don't have absolute control of my content." He didn't.

You've drafted an honest compromise that, while interesting, ignores the asymmetry between the authoritarian yahoos legislating whitewashed history and their targets. This is not about history, but about power and the narcissistic nationalism and its mythologized revisionist history that sustains it. Hone the fine art of understated intellectual contempt and ask your opponents when they learned of mass kidnappings of free blacks by Lee's army in Pennsylvania, the Amistad and 12 years a slave cases, Tulsa 1921, Wilmington 1898 and 20th century lynching postcards, redlining, restrictive covenants, the exclusion of black veterans from GI Bill benefits (herein: https://medium.com/illumination-curated/critical-race-theory-safe-space-for-conservative-snowflakes-1f8a6f5af715 ) and here: https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/lost-causes-and-their-lying-losers-americas-south-and-japan-c6dc560bff4a

Then lobby for teachers' ABSOLUTE academic freedom to teach critical thinking; the how and why of history instead of mandated decontextualized facts to be memorized. There is no template with which you can build a workable compromise with demagogic, bad faith ignorant authoritarian yahoos. The draft legislative texts that they've cloned from Texas to Florida to Wisconsin contain too many trap doors to negotiate away. Don't go down that rabbit hole. It's a one way trip.

And, finally, would you compromise with

David Irving?

The Japanese textbooks that deny the Rape of Nanjing and the mass rape of the Korean “comfort women”?

A German proposing to erect a statue of Rommel in Berlin or to put a bust of Guderian in the Bundestag? or a monument to them in the Alps similar to Georgia’s Stone Mountain?

The museum in Alexandria, Egypt exhibiting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as true?

Didn't think so.

Thanks again for reading.