A Fox News host challenged Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Sunday over one of her first actions as Arkansas governor: a ban on so-called critical race theory (CRT) in state schools.
Sanders, who was sworn in as the state’s first woman governor on Tuesday, immediately issued a series of executive orders, including the CRT ban. Supporters have praised the move as an important step in the GOP’s broader culture war, however critics have said that the theory doesn’t even appear in school curriculum.
Fox News Sunday host Shannon Bream pressed Sanders on the matter, mentioning a Democratic state lawmaker who said “CRT is not being taught” in classrooms. She also cited an Axios article that said there’s “no indication that the college-level course is taught in any Arkansas public school.”
“So, if that’s true, why the executive order?” Bream asked Sanders, a Republican.
Screenshot/Fox News Sunday
“It’s incredibly important that we do things to protect the students in our state,” Sanders said. “We have to make sure that we are not indoctrinating our kids, and that these policies and these ideas never see the light of day. We should never teach our kids to hate America, or that America is a racist and evil country. In fact, it should be the exact opposite.”
Sanders, 40, is the country’s youngest governor and is also the daughter of a previous Arkansas GOP governor, Mike Huckabee. She once served as the White House press secretary for then-President Donald Trump.
Legal scholars developed CRT in the 1970s as a framework to help explain the systemic racism present in U.S. institutions and laws. Arkansas is just the latest in a long line-up of conservative states that have attempted to prevent America’s youth from encountering the idea.
During her inaugural speech last week, Sanders railed against the “left-wing political agenda” supposedly aimed at “brainwashing our children,” although she didn’t mention CRT by name. Shortly after her tenure began, she signed seven executive orders, including one aimed at scrubbing school education policies of any type of “indoctrination”—CRT included.
The controversial academic framework wasn’t the only thing that Sanders sought to ban.
She also signed an executive order prohibiting use of the word “Latinx” in any official state government document. The gender-neutral descriptor has spiked in popularity in recent years in academia, where it’s often used as a substitute for the terms Latino/Latina.
However, a Pew Research Center report from August 2020 found that only around 3 percent of Hispanic adults in the country refer to themselves that way.
Newsweek reached out to Sanders’ office for additional comment.
