“Critical race theory” is the newest front in the culture wars, and conservative activists are intent on making Vermont one of its battlegrounds.

At least 16 states with Republican-led legislatures or Republican governors are considering or have signed into law bills to limit the teaching of critical race theory, which, simply stated, considers how racism has been a powerful force in American history that has disadvantaged Black people and other people of color.

About 100 residents packed a church in Essex Center, Vt., on May 28 to hear speakers denounce critical race theory, which they claimed was being taught in the Essex-Westford schools. The school district denies this. Liz Cady, a newly elected member of the Essex-Westford school board, labeled the theory “downright dangerous” and compared the Black Lives Matter movement to Nazism. Cady did not respond to an interview request for this program.

Across the street at another church, members of the student-led Social Justice Union at Essex High School talked about the anti-racism work that students have been pursuing.

“This is about racism. It is not complicated,” asserts Emily Bernard, the Julian Lindsay Green and Gold Professor of English at the University of Vermont. “Critical race theory is not coming to get you.”

“There is a pocket of people in this country who are afraid of their ideas being challenged,” says Bernard. “There are people who were afraid of the telephone. They thought it would destroy society…. So this resistance, this fear, this hysteria is not new.”

Bernard’s latest book is Black is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine, which won the Christopher Isherwood Prize for autobiographical prose at the 2020 L.A. Times book prize competition. Last year, Bernard was named a 2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, a prestigious $200,000 award given to scholars who are working on “important and enduring issues confronting our society."

“We are not going to end racism through your feelings," Bernard insists. "We have to end it by the work that you do and the work that you undo.”