The new Republican governor of Arkansas, Sarah Sanders, said the move to ban critical race theory in public schools in her state was a preventative measure.

“It’s incredibly important that we do things to protect the students in our state,” she told Fox News Sunday. “We have to make sure that we are not indoctrinating our kids and that these policies and these ideas never see the light of day.”

The daughter of a former governor Mike Huckabee, Sanders is the first woman to govern Arkansas.

She is also a graduate of the Trump White House, where she was the second of four press secretaries.

Sanders made headlines this week when she kicked off her first term with a series of executive orders.

One targeted critical race theory, an academic discipline that examines the ways in which racism operates in US laws and society. Republicans across the US have successfully used CRT used as an electoral issue despite it not being taught in most public schools.

Another Sanders order banned the use in state documents of “Latinx”, defined by one expert proponent as “a gender-neutral term to describe US residents of Latin American descent”.

Such opening gambits – “hyped executive orders that looked like something important but weren’t really”, according to a columnist for the Arkansas Democrat Gazette – attracted national attention.

On Sunday, echoing Republican language in other anti-CRT campaigns often fueled by anger over the 1619 Project, a New York Times series that cast US history in light of the history of slavery, Sanders insisted: “We should never teach our kids to hate America or that America is a racist and evil country [when] in fact, it should be the exact opposite.”

Though Axios and other outlets responded to Sanders’ CRT order by reporting that CRT was not taught in Arkansas schools, Huckabee said: “Our job is to protect the students and we’re going to take steps every single day to make sure we do exactly that.

“And that’s the reason I signed the executive order. I’m proud of the fact that we’re taking those steps and we’re going to continue to do it every single day that I’m in office.”

Sanders’ host, Shannon Bream, asked if teachers in Arkansas could “still have the uncomfortable conversations about the sins of our past, about the things this country has gotten wrong”.

Sanders said: “Our teachers absolutely need to teach our history but they shouldn’t teach our kids and our students ideas to hate this country and to give a false premise about who we are and what we’re about. And that is something that we have to make sure we protect our students from.”

Speaking to Axios this week, Derrick Johnson, president and chief executive of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said: “Much of the debate around critical race theory is as much a distraction as it is a strategy.”

Johnson said the NAACP believes “accurate history is the history that should be taught”.