An open letter to Utah state Sen. Lincoln Fillmore:
We’re coming up on Juneteenth, which HB238 made a Utah holiday this year. It commemorates the Union army bringing to enslaved Americans, in the last holdout of the Confederacy, the deliverance promised two years earlier by Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Whatever our other divisions, this is something for all Americans to celebrate.
You share the names of two antislavery presidents, Lincoln and Millard Fillmore. But you’re one of only five state senators who did not vote for the Juneteenth holiday. You didn’t vote against it — no senators did — but you’re one of the few identified as “absent or not voting,” either for it or not. Maybe you just missed that vote.
I’m writing you because last year, you sponsored SR901, the Senate Resolution on Critical Race Theory (CRT) in Public Education. Whatever your non-vote on the Juneteenth bill says about your personal views, most of your colleagues, at least, see no conflict between that bill (now law) and your CRT resolution: 16 state senators who voted for your SR901 also voted for HB238.
I think I understand how your colleagues reconcile suppressing CRT with celebrating slavery’s ending. But I disagree, for reasons I can most easily explain by quoting Lincoln.
In his first message to Congress, Lincoln declared that the “leading object” of American government is “to lift artificial weights from all shoulders; to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all; to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life.”
Obviously, abolishing slavery was necessary to making “the race of life” fair. But was it enough? Few, even among your colleagues, would say it was — given the century and more of struggle that followed. But I think most of them would say the race is fair now. That is why they can celebrate the end of slavery — and even the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, by giving Martin Luther King his holiday — while also supporting your anti-CRT resolution, which exhorts that students be educated on “the negative impacts racism has had throughout history.”
Because details aside, CRT’s core thesis is that the struggle to give all an unfettered start is not over. It did not end with the Emancipation Proclamation, or the Civil Rights Movement, or even Barack Obama’s election. Yes, we have progressed — laudably — as a nation. But even with the most obvious and overt legal discriminations gone, their more subtle legacies persist and continue to burden some of our fellow Americans with artificial weights. And so, we still must continue, even now, the work of forming a more perfect union. That is CRT’s essential upshot.
So long as there is a statistically significant correlation between ethnicity and how well one places in life’s races — educational achievement, earnings, etc. — it’s vital to expose our children to the idea that we still have work to do, to make those races fair. Because so long as such differences remain, children — being smart — will wonder why. The most obvious answers are (1) whites are better than Blacks and (2) the race of life is not yet fair. Deprive children of information supporting (2), and they will naturally gravitate to (1).
So yes, as your resolution exhorts, let’s not teach our children “that one race is inherently superior or inferior.” Let’s not teach them that either by telling them so — or by “protecting” them from scholarship pushing back on that lie. And this Juneteenth, instead of just celebrating what our forebears have done, let’s also think about our part in bringing Lincoln’s vision closer to its full realization.
L. Rex Sears
L. Rex Sears, Ph.D., is an attorney practicing in Salt Lake City.