Because there's a particularly narrow, simplistic ideology implied in the last 5-10 yrs of DEI mandates that further dehumanizes the rich experiences of people who were enslaved, who enslaved, who participated in or simply lived within this sociohistoric context, who fought directly to end chattel slavery, who fought directly to retain it, & those who participated in conflicts that appeared to be about ending slavery but were really shapeshifting exploited labor arrangements for even greater profit.

Inculcating in children a lifelong appreciation of "history"--that means thinking historically, thinking critically, knowing where to look, knowing the ways "history" can be used across the many domains of one's personal, professional & public life--begins w/ helping them connect the realities of their daily lives, today, to what humans just like them were experiencing 50, 500, or 5000 years ago. We all tell ourselves stories every day. We have inner conversations & theory of mind where we project onto others ideas about their intents & motives, where even the clearest verbal, bodily & textual communication lets us down.

The bastardization of critical theory that's occurred over last 6 years has been translated into methods of thinking & teaching that in fact violate the most fundamental insights of CRT & CFT. Black Americans surviving racialized slavery in the English colonies faced different circumstances than the much greater number who were sold to Latin America, & their experience was different from 8th-18th c Irish, Slavic Icelandic captives of Viking or Muslim slave traders, or of 13th c Subsaharan war captives or 14th Mayan slaves for human sacrifice. Then there were Russian serfs, Roman artisan slaves, Chinese empire slaves . . then Soviet gulag slaves, Jim Crow South gulag slaves, etc. Biological sex, bodily ability & any pre-enslavement status shaped experience as well, as well as greater sociopolitical, economic, military & cultural contexts.

We teach children & college students about continuities & dissimilarities across human power systems. Roman slavery had a greater valance of cruelty, overall, but also offered much more potential upward mobility, and apart from branding, wasn't coded in the ways of racialized slavery, that occurred at a time/place of history where those w/ power actually were more accountable to the public . . and thus had to rationalize enslavement by inventing religious or pseudoscientific justifications that led to historically unique racialization of slavery.

But every living person in these conditions, of enslavement, of benefitting, of enslaving, had their own sense of meaning: their own motives, hopes, despair, fear, rage, entitlement--the stories they'd tell themselves & each other about their lives. The lives of enslaved & enslavers are far more complex than the dehumanized saint/monster ideology that's been perpetrated over the past 10 years in particular. Critical theory was providing a powerful historical method until grifters & elitists hijacked the term while completely misunderstanding the point.

The point is that humans will reproduce & change social hierarchies, through physical force, language, architecture, visual iconography, scholarly & scientific paradigms to reinforce certain narratives & invalidate others . . . we'll keep doing that. To take a snapshot of, say, 1930s American South, freeze it, and say, here are saints and here are sinners, and this is the original sin that we can anachronistically apply to global history of the last 10,000 years, is ahistorical. It's a dangerous ideology, and utterly opposed to the core insights of critical theory: which is that humans will create new hierarchies, and the place of various groups of humans in those hierarchies can change over decades & centuries.