Critical race theory ad with young Black father, daughter isn't what it claims | Opinion
Editor's note: This column has been updated to correct the number of jurisdictions where anti-CRT measures have been adopted, including Wisconsin.
When I first saw the commercial on critical race theory, I thought I was watching a parody. By now, you've probably seen it at least a few times. It's been in heavy rotation, airing especially during football games across Wisconsin.
The ad features a young, Black father, “Kory,” and his daughter, “Royalty.”
Both look into the camera, and he tells her, “Daddy teaches you that you can be anything you want in this world. Don’t Daddy teach you that?"
Royalty, a cute little girl with glasses who is missing her two front teeth, responds, “It doesn’t matter if you are Black or white or any color.”
Kory says, “Critical race theory wants to end that.”
“You can make friends,” Royalty says innocently, which brings a chuckle from her dad.
“You can make friends no matter what color you are, so we need to stop CRT,” Kory said.
The ad ends with American flags in the background and a voiceover saying: “The truth wins when we are all brave enough to tell it.”
The truth is the ad, and its entire premise, is a lie. Not just a cute, little white lie, but a bald face lie.
What upsets me the most is the conservatives who put the father in the ad don't care about him or anyone who looks like him. They just used him as a pawn to push their agenda of keeping us ignorant about race in America and rob us of conversations we urgently need to heal our country.
Factual critical race theory definition not included in the ad
Critical race theory doesn’t teach racial division. Nor is it taught in K-12 schools in Wisconsin. The video of the dad and daughter originated on TikTok two-years-ago. It has been edited into other commercials and replayed on conservative newscasts with headlines like, "Father destroys critical race theory in heartwarming video with daughter."
Critical race theory cannot be reduced to a bumper sticker slogan. At its heart, it argues that we all can start to address our nation’s problems with race and racism if we admit to the wrong of slavery and look at how laws, systems, policies, and institutions contributed to racial divisions and continue to do so.
More broadly, it is an academic framework that looks at whether systems and policies perpetuate racism. The idea is that race is central to the social, political, and economic makeup of the country and that racism is not simply a matter of individual bigotry.
The concept was developed in the 1970s and '80s by African American scholar and professor Derrick Bell, who was a champion in the civil rights movement. Bell, who died in 2011, challenged people to see how racism is embedded in government systems and intentionally created disadvantages for people of color.
The only people who would disagree with this are those who believe we don’t have a race problem in this country or those who benefit from keeping racist policies and laws in place.
Kory Yeshua is conservative social media influencer from California
I first thought the ad was a spoof from The Onion because it uses a young, Black man to discredit the idea. It’s not just that the ad used a Black man; they used a Black man who looked like many Black men often stereotyped in our culture.
Marquette University professor and Black historian Robert Smith said using Black people to discredit the theory shows you just how low opponents of the truth being told will go to get their point across.
“When I first saw the ad, I didn’t believe it either," Smith said. "I felt they used this Black man to get their point across, and honestly, I felt like he sounded ignorant."
More perspectives: Students of color events further division. Separating people by race is bad policy.
In the ad, the father, Kory Yeshua, who is a conservative activist and social media influencer from California, wears a black hoodie and a black baseball hat covering his long braids. I describe what he was wearing because, honestly, what he was wearing sounded like some of the vague descriptions that might come off a police scanner.
I could be reading too much into his attire, but race is the central issue of the ad itself.
I know personally because I am a big, Black guy with locks; I’ve been on elevators with white women, and I could sense their fear of me or what the media has said they should fear. I’ve been profiled by cops who asked me if "I have a job” and I’ve been stopped for driving while Black and nothing else.
CRT opponents ignore truth that racism is a problem
Some of the young Black men in Milwaukee, whom I have had the pleasure to mentor at the “We Got This” community garden, have told me how angry they feel just because they were racially profiled when going into the mall. They talked about how a security guard or a police officer followed them or were closely watched by a store owner.
Smith said CRT has become a hot-button issue among conservatives who are out to make it a term people should fear and, therefore, shut down the discussion on race in America. He argues we can never move forward if we don't have an honest dialogue about this country's racial history and how that has impacted Blacks generation after generation.
Whenever I hear people critical of CRT, they typically cite the following:
It will create a further divide between Blacks and whites in America.
It teaches hate.
It will make white kids feel terrible about being white.
It makes white people of today feel responsible for slavery and racism.
“None of these criticisms are true,” Smith said. “I have a better question, "Why wouldn’t we want to be smarter on race?”
It’s a great question. Critical race theory is a framework for people to answer questions about our race problem using a lens based on facts of historical and current data. The theory is only taught at the upper graduate levels in college.
According to a database maintained by the UCLA Law School, 750 anti-CRT efforts have been introduced at the local, state, and federal levels. Gov. Tony Evers vetoed a Republican bill in 2022 that would have banned it from being taught in schools. Locally, UCLA says 8 of 10 measures at the county, school district and library levels have been adopted.
Ad paid for by begoodtokids.com, an LLC formed by Ohio law firm
Milwaukee Public Schools do not teach CRT, but you wouldn't come away with that impression after watching an extended version of the Wisconsin ad that features teacher Angela Harris.
In that version, a video clip from inside her Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School classroom shows Harris saying, "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the Afro-American people." Then it cuts to Kory Yeshua saying, “Not with my children; it’s not going to happen.”
There are two problems with that. First, Yeshua's video was filmed well before the Harris video. Second, Harris said the ad took her words out of context, and as a result, she has received hundreds of negative comments with people saying she should be fired and that she was trying to brainwash kids. Students at the school recite the Pledge of Allegiance and a pledge to the Pan-African flag, created by Jamaican political activist Marcus Garvey.
More James Causey: Critical race theory makes some people uncomfortable. We should teach it in Wisconsin schools anyway.
The school does not teach CRT, but judging by the criticism Harris is receiving, it proves adults struggle with how to communicate about race. The ad is being paid for by Be Good to Kids, LLC, an Ohio company formed by a conservative law firm with ties to nonprofits and super PACs that pour millions of dollars into election ads, according to a 2015 Politico profile.
Instead of having conversations about race, ultra-conservatives are pushing to stop our young people from learning about racism and how it is ingrained throughout this country's fabric.
The goal of CRT isn’t to paint America in an ugly light. However, the truth about how America was built and the role America played in slavery does need to be told in totality and not the sanitized version because the truth is, the truth is ugly.
But the truth is the only way to heal our land.
Reach James E. Causey at jcausey@jrn.com; follow him on X@jecausey.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: CRT isn't taught in Wisconsin schools and doesn't foster racial strife
