Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) went on MSNBC on Thursday to state that “the real question on this Critical Race Theory is why we’re so afraid of race. Why is it the third rail?”

When Jackson Lee was asked about the debate over critical race theory being taught in schools, she replied, “You know what we should be teaching is truth. We held people in bondage, we had a brutal history, meaning America. There were masters and slaves. The Constitution did not grant us citizenship or even status as one human being. But we survived and we had the Harriet Tubmans of the world, the Sojourner Truths of the world, we had the Frederick Douglasses of the world.”

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“And so, that is the beauty of America. We were resilient,” the Democrat added. “We should tell that story. Brutality comes with survival and success, and then we need to tell the story that the day that we were freed shows America’s compassion and love for freedom. The day of the Emancipation Proclamation and in 1863, the President, Abraham Lincoln, who did not survive this period, indicated that a nation divided against itself cannot stand. And so, Juneteenth is a reckoning that we wanted to survive as a nation and we freed the slaves. That’s a beautiful story, even in the backdrop of the brutality.”

“I think the real question on this Critical Race Theory is why we’re so afraid of race,” Jackson Lee later continued. “Why is it the third rail? When we are better when we talk about it, when we understand it, and when we acknowledge that my race should not be any more difficult to discuss than the pilgrim’s pride, than of course, our friends who are truly Native Americans or Latinx or LGBTQ or the Asian community or the South Asian community. America, you’re an experiment, show the world your experiment is working. Juneteenth today…shows America and shows the world that we can accept our difference and we can establish what freedom is all about.”