Our minds are quick to support these doubts. We start listing all the prerequisites we haven’t taken, all the students who have, all the New York Times articles* we haven’t read, and all the students who have. The comparisons become endless, and the more we focus on what we lack, the deeper we sink into the belief that we’re not enough.

Our culture tends to fixate on the future-–on the brightness of what may unfold in our next phase without giving us the space to grieve what is left behind.

This widespread mobilization against Critical Race Theory made me want to examine what it is, what it addresses, and whether it poses the existential threat to our society that some say it does