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This whole CRT moral panic isn't about white kids being made to feel guilty, it's about the anxiety some people feel about white kids learning to empathize with the pain and suffering of black people in the American past, and learning to condemn the white people who inflicted it.
If calling out the undeniably racist and oppressive actions of white people who lived over 150 years ago makes a 21st century white person feel guilty, then that's not really the teacher's fault, is it? Just seems like an invitation to some self-reflection.
Working to build cross-racial solidarity, empathy, and trust has long been part of the American democratic tradition. Working to undermine that has long been part of the American antidemocratic tradition. Choose accordingly.
It's also important to note that the history of enslaved people, when taught well, also teaches children to identify with the resilience and resistance of black people in the American past, and to recognize the bull#^&#^&#^&#^& justifications that white people gave for white supremacy.
The history of slavery, when taught well, also teaches kids to understand power in systemic terms. Slavery was not just interpersonal nastiness or some negative attitudes in some peoples' heads, it was an integrated political, economic, social, and cultural system.
That system was reproduced, day by day, by the actions and inactions of the overwhelming majority of white people who lived at the time. Trying to understand how so many otherwise "nice, well-educated, people of faith" could be complicit with such horror seems worthwhile.
But in a larger sense, it’s about preserving the notion of individualism that lies at the heart of American capitalism. As soon as you begin to doubt that, you begin to question the underlying premises of consumer capitalism on which monopoly capitalism rests.
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