> Do you believe systemic racism exists?
No, the idea is absurd. Every policy will affect different demographics differently - be that race, age, class, location, schooling and profession. If the academics could come up with a way to tease out individual threads from that tangle then we'd probably find that everything else is more important than race.
There are racists using the system to achieve their aims - but that tends to be intentional. I like to cite the efforts at stymieing Asians from getting into top-tier universities for example. But we don't need academic study to identify it, and teaching people to go look for a race angle is a bad idea. The academics are going to be people who focus on race all day, see race issues everywhere and are going to get caught up thinking racialist policies are the solution to problems - which will then fail massively as racist policies tend to do.
> I did learn of things like the Trail of Tears in college, however.
That is the central issue, isn't it? All the people involved have been dead for more than a century, the political ideologies at the time have largely been washed away and have no public support and I don't know much about that specific incident but there are unlikely to be special lessons there given how many horrible things happen in history (which is a large and horrible place!).
Compare that the large amount of damage authoritarianism and war has done recently, and there is a pertinent question of why are children being told to focus on race? The communists did more damage to their own people than any other faction. The Nazi's famously managed to get their empire dismantled through warmongering. The Cold War was not a racial issue, it was a clash of major ideologies. We're in a situation that looks to me like the prelude for WWIII and people don't seem to be able to recognise the hubris of being reckless in internationally tense situations.
I'm not against the idea of teaching a few nasty race incidents, but there is so much more history to look at that is recent, relevant and more important. We don't need people analyzing Russia-Ukraine-US-Europe through a race lens. We don't need racial dynamics of Afghanistan, Iraq and friends. We don't need to study economic hardship through race. We need policies that are race-blind and benefit everyone that promote peace and prosperity. Studying things based on their impact on peace and prosperity is where the focus should be. It also means suddenly we'll have divisions being created on racial lines which is a waste of effort arguing against.
> I acknowledge and I do believe what you're saying
If we're going to be overcome by reasonable discussion, not that the policy in the article is wildly stupid, because the premise is that parents are leaving their children in the care of known racists and the authorities are going to control the situation by adding more bureaucrats.
- If they have misjudged the situation they're going to look really silly.
- If they have correctly judged the situation they're attempting to deal with it in a stupid and ineffectual way. They'll probably end up with even worse ideologies than race creeping in if they have one person picking the reading list.
They'll rue this particular aspect of the law if it ends up achieving anything, at best it is a well executed own goal.