One Small Town’s Big Battle Over Critical Race Theory

Last year, after George Floyd’s murder by police, Kara Fikrig, a white 28-year-old working on her doctorate in entomology at Cornell University (“mosquitoes,” she explained), began to reflect on the ways her small hometown of Guilford, Connecticut, hadn’t adequately prepared her for difficult conversations about race and racism.

As an undergraduate at Yale, Fikrig said, she “wasn’t immediately exposed to different ideas in terms of diversity and a more complete history of the United States.” But her best friend at undergrad was Black, and in their discussions about news events and...