For the Record: Families of Color Playground Night

Image by Lia Kantrowitz/New Republic (with a splendid piece by Talia Lavin).

"Critical Race Theory"  witch hunter Christopher Rufo has a new horror story, a Colorado elementary school that hosts a "Families of Color Playground Night" on the second Wednesday of each month, and the rightwing noise machine is out in force to denounce it:

Did you hear that? I think MLK just rolled over in his grave.

Pretty sure there was a whole movement to get rid of segregated playgrounds back in the day.

— The Smallest Minority (@LetsGroupHug) December 15, 2021

Do you understand how dumb you sound projecting you know shit about my life? You may be pro segregation but I’m not.

— The Smallest Minority (@LetsGroupHug) December 15, 2021

Why are you assuming I’m shunned by black people? That’s the funny part here. And what’s it say about your view on them, that they would need “alone time” on a playground because of micro aggressions? They are better and tougher than that.

— The Smallest Minority (@LetsGroupHug) December 15, 2021

If the school offers a "families of color playground night" it's because a group of people have requested it. You are complaining that it is segregation equivalent to Jim Crow laws. I assume you want to go play with them and feel left out, otherwise how is it your business?

— Condemn That Shit ASAP (@Yastreblyansky) December 15, 2021

I mean, under Jim Crow, Black folk definitely wanted to use those parks and swimming pools from which they were barred, and not one special day per month. They wanted to share the facilities (for which their taxes helped pay). 

There's a weird Northern idea that Jim Crow segregation was a kind of ethnic cleansing of physical space, in which Black people couldn't be tolerated in a room or enclosure occupied by whites. That's kind of how it feels in the segregations of cities like Chicago and New York (I'm sorry to say), and it might be something like that in the South today, for all I know. But in the former Confederacy at the time of the Civil Rights movement it was completely wrong: people of different colors constantly shared space, but in social segregation, in which the Black people were the servants; they couldn't be enjoying themselves in the same space as the whites, in a swimming pool or a restaurant or a school classroom or a church or a movie theater; they might be allowed to enjoy their own section of the movie theater or the mainline church, but otherwise they were only there to bring the towels or prepare the food and wash the dishes or sweep the floors. Black institutions, the African American church and the HBCU and the Strivers' Row type of neighborhood, evolved to provide settings in which you could spend all day without anybody calling you "boy" or otherwise questioning your equality. And the point of civil rights wasn't to create racially mixed spaces, it was to create socially mixed spaces in which everybody was equal.

In the case of the once-a-month Families of Color Playground Night, the question is who's being injured? Who's being forced into an inferior position? If you, a white person, want to protest against this institution, why? How is it harming you? If it isn't something you feel shut out of, then what?

In Denver, of course, it turns out white families can go if they feel like it, and do, but the noise machine doesn't want to know about that:

Once again Christopher Rufo has fabricated a scandal in his crusade against "critical race theory" in public schools and every rightwing outlet from NRO to Daily Caller to Giuliani associate John Solomon is out screaming about it, and it's just bullshit.

— Condemn That Shit ASAP (@Yastreblyansky) December 15, 2021

"Critical Race Theory" in rightwing discourse is really high-tone QAnon, and they're both the 21st-century reflex of Satanic rituals in the day care center.