Letters to the Editor: A retired teacher wonders if her curricula pushed white supremacy

To the editor: Sometimes LZ Granderson’s framing of an issue smacks me right in the forehead. His column, “There’s a whole new generation of white supremacists,” focusing on the fact that the recent perpetrators of racist attacks have largely been young and fresh out of our education system, was one of those times.

As a public school teacher in the 1970s, was I teaching a white supremacist curriculum? I now have to ponder my teaching career in a whole new light. This 74-year-old white woman has work to do.

To Granderson, I say thank you for saying so clearly what I had been missing: that the issue-centered crabbing about critical race theory or drag queen story hour veils what lies underneath, as if the underlying, existing curriculum were God’s chosen curriculum.

As my husband, who taught history of religion at UCLA for 30 years, often says of the doctrine that hardens around any religion, “We made this stuff up, we can change it.” Granderson ripped the veil off the standard curriculum. We made this stuff up. We can change it.

Nancy Breuer, West Hills