Hawkeye Reporter

U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst and Iowa House Speaker Pat Grassley's support of U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton's (R-AR) amendment, called the "Stop CRT Act," helped the amendment advance. 

The act bans the use of federal funds for teaching the critical race theory in schools. Cotton introduced it as an amendment to the $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill. The amendment was advanced in the Senate in a 50-49 vote, according to Just The News — and that was made possible in part by the backing of Iowa's Republican legislators Ernst and Grassley. 

Upon Iowa's passage of similar legislation, Ernst said, “We absolutely should not be indoctrinating our children to judge one another by the color of one’s skin, gender or sexual identity,” the New York Post reported June 23. 

“Critical race theory teaches students to label, stereotype and demonize people based on their race, gender or sexual identity rather than judge people based on their character," Grassley said, according to the New York Post. "We cannot fight racism with more racism.”

One debate in the Senate this year has been over whether federal funding should go to schools in order to help them purchase materials and inaugurate programs that teach critical race theory in schools for students K-12.

“They want to teach our children that America is not a good nation but a racist nation," Cotton remarked ahead of the vote, according to Just the News. "Those teachings are wrong and our tax dollars should not support them. My amendment will ensure that federal funds aren’t used to indoctrinate children as young as pre-K to hate America."

Cotton also pointed out examples of what prompted his introduction of the amendment, which mainly aims to prevent schools from teaching that white people are inherently racist. Thirty public school districts in 15 states have assigned a book called “Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness,” which depicts “whiteness” as the devil, aa Aug. 11 New York Post article reported.

Critical race theory is an academic ideology that teaches racism in actually embedded into America's society and the institutions of American society, according a post written for The Conversation by Nicholas Ensley Mitchell, an assistant professor of curriculum studies at the University of Kansas.

One of the concerns about legislation prohibiting critical race theory is that teachers will "either 'distort' history in the eyes of lawmakers who say it’s wrong to teach that America was racist from the start. Or they will distort history by ignoring the fact that — as the U.S. Supreme Court once noted itself in 1857 — Black people were 'not intended' to be regarded as 'citizens' under the U.S. Constitution and therefore had no constitutional rights," Mitchell wrote. 

Critical race theory has nothing to do with sentiment, guilt or shame, Daniel HoSang, professor of ethnicity, race and migration and American studies at Yale University, said.

“It's taking us out of racism as a psychological and emotional question, and is focusing much more on the structures, the policies that people create that govern our lives,” he said, the Texas Tribune reported.

Tara Yosso, a professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Riverside, said crtitical race theory can be an approach used to theorize, examine and challenge the ways which race and racism implicitly and explicitly impact social structures, practices and discourses, according to an article on The American Bar Association website.

As for the Senate debate on Cotton's amendment, all Senate Republicans, including Iowa's Ernst and Grassley, voted in favor of the amendment, while all Democrats but Joe Manchin of West Virgina voted against it, Just the News reported. 

Iowa's Gov. Kim Reynolds signed into law a ban that prohibits schools from teaching critical race theory in schools, which took effect on July 1. Reynolds has referred to the theory as being “indoctrination not education,” according to the June 23 New York Post story.