Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says she isn’t sure if 7-year-olds need to learn critical race theory in schools.
“The way we’re talking about race is that it either seems so big that somehow white people now have to feel guilty for everything that happened in the past,” Rice said, adding that she didn’t think the topic was productive for children.
“I would like Black kids to be completely empowered to know they are beautiful in their Blackness, but in order to do that, I don’t have to make white kids feel bad for being white,” Rice said on Wednesday’s airing of “The View.” “So, somehow this is a conversation that has gone in the wrong direction.”
Rice said growing up in Birmingham, Ala., where she couldn’t go to a movie theater or to a restaurant with her parents, she did attend segregated schools until her family moved to Denver.
“My parents never thought I was going to grow up in a world without prejudice, but they also told me, ‘that’s somebody else’s problem, not yours,’” she said. “‘You’re going to overcome it, and you are going to be anything you want to be.’ And that’s the message that I think we ought to be sending to kids.”
