Critical race theory and Covid restrictions have turned education into a wedge issue for voters.

Jason Riley:

During a recent appearance on “The View,” former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice weighed in on the national debate over teaching racial propaganda to schoolchildren. In the process, she made a broader point about the mindset of a previous generation of black people when it came to dealing with racial adversity.

“My parents never thought I was going to grow up in a world without prejudice,” said Ms. Rice, a product of segregated Birmingham, Ala. “But they also told me, ‘That’s somebody else’s problem, not yours. You’re going to overcome it, and you are going to be anything you want to be.’ ” Ms. Rice said that blaming whites today for past racism strikes her as unproductive. You don’t help black kids by making “white kids feel guilty for being white.”

The contrast with the current woke approach to racial inequality is stark. In that earlier era, there was an expectation among blacks that advancement would take place despite racial barriers, that discrimination was no excuse for not trying. The generations that produced such civil-rights luminaries as Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King Jr. understood that whites had a role to play in changing a fundamentally racist system. Yet they also understood that blacks had a role to play, and they were willing to hold black people accountable for their behavior.