Demonizing Critical Race Theory

[diegobueno]

Demonizing Critical Race Theory

Charles M. Blow
New York Times

Critical race theory is the political right’s new boogeyman.

The theory, born in the 1970s among legal scholars, uses race as a lens through which to examine structures of power. It was, I would argue, a relatively obscure concept — not because it lacked merit, but because it was novel.

That was until Donald Trump elevated it in order to attack it.

In September of 2020, during the run-up to the presidential election, with Trump trailing in the polls, the Office of Management and Budget issued the following directive:

“All agencies are directed to begin to identify all contracts or other agency spending related to any training on ‘critical race theory,’ ‘white privilege,’ or any other training or propaganda effort that teaches or suggests either (1) that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or (2) that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil.”

Critical race theory was simply an analytical tool, but to some white people, the fact that white supremacy was overtly used to infect America’s systems of power with both racial oppressions and racial privileges is too much to handle. It is discomforting. It unravels the American myth.

But critical race theory doesn’t diagnose the country as evil, even though it is beyond dispute that some evil people designed the architecture of racial oppression in this country and that there are still some who help maintain it.

In fact, I don’t even believe that most people have any real concept of what critical race theory is. It’s just a collection of words that hint, to them, at agitation and aggrievement: a theory that mentions race and that is critical, or, in their minds, criticizes.

Critical race theory began to stand for any teachings that challenged the narrative that white America had crafted about the country, and that unveiled any truths that it had tried to hide or erase.

Identifying and challenging racism was seen by some as racist. Pretending racism didn’t exist — that merit and sloth, excellence and pathology, explained away racial imbalance — was viewed as egalitarian and unifying.

So the rush by states across the country to ban the teaching of critical race theory in schools isn’t really about a real threat. Very few schools even teach C.R.T. as a core part of their curriculums, if at all.

Republican are using their tried-and-true playbook of fear mongering about the rise of otherness and the displacement of whiteness, the white patriarchy and a dominant white narrative.

Critical race theory has simply become the latest tool.

Right-wing politics in America is exhausted, out of ideas on how we should proceed and progress as a country, so instead they focus on maintenance: How can power and influence be maintained in its current form — white-controlled, largely by straight white men — or, how can we revert to a time in which they had even more power?

This is done by whipping up hysteria in the base about something, anything, that threatens to bring about fuller inclusion of more people and an expansion of rights.

This attack on critical race theory is no different than the rush during the Obama administration by states to ban Shariah law in state courts, even though there was absolutely no threat that Shariah law would be recognized or used in those courts. This is simply an extension of the Obama-is-a-secret-Muslim conspiracy and the backlash to his presence in the White House.

In fact, in the Republican primaries to challenge Obama in his re-election bid, Republican candidates were falling all over themselves to condemn Shariah law. However, in the 2016 primaries, the anti-Shariah law crusade died down. In its place, Trump vowed to ban Muslims from entering the country.

The freakout about critical race theory is also not dissimilar from the ongoing attack on trans people, particularly people who were assigned male at birth. First came the introduction of a wave of “bathroom bills” that made it a crime to use a bathroom designated for a sex different from the sex you were assigned at birth. Most of these bills failed.

Now states are moving to ban trans girls and women from participating in high school and college sports, although this is not really an issue. As Larry Strauss, a USA Today columnist, pointed out in April:

“In the more than eight years since the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) began allowing high school athletes to compete as the gender with which they identify — regardless of what they were assigned at birth — there has not been a single case in which a trans female athlete has been dominant enough to stir protest.”

Just like these initiatives that Republicans whipped up to rail against were by and large not a problem, but rather a wandering outrage in search of a problem, critical race theory is not a problem.

Republicans know that there are a few cultural buttons that they can push to easily generate enough fear and outrage to energize their voters and get them to the polls: the ascension of nonwhite people, the immigration of nonwhite people, a threat to white security, a displacement of white power and white culture, an expansion of rights for “the gays” and abortion.

Republicans attack as a form of rallying cry.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/13/opin ... e=Homepage

[Belle]

This report is silly and vacuous.

I actually believe this man and the courts will hopefully uphold his case: we shall see. The illiberal Leftist media has to skew the facts because that's the only chance they've got to uphold their pernicious ideologies. Lies built upon lies; these really are dangerous people now and, of course, the New York Times (purveyers of propaganda) are also implicated - and this was inevitable:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzhDtrGmLxs

That you continue to cite the NYT and seldom, if ever, demonstrate any wider reading or thinking exposes the degree of ideological capture. Thank the deity of choice that smarter people are now calling this out and are actually 'on the case'. Douglas Murray holds out hope that the illiberal Left will be called to account, and so do I.

[jserraglio]

The US has engaged in some form of apartheid since post-Reconstruction days. I don’t need to read any more widely about it. I include it in a popular elective I teach in a very conservative Catholic high school.

I grew up immersed in Cleveland, Ohio’s peculiar institution of apartheid. Cry, the beloved country.

From my earliest days, I was taught to believe that Blacks were fearsome and unclean. My mother would tell and retell the story of how she had to take her baby boy home and wash him clean with soap and water after a black coworker of hers gave him a hug on the streets.

That baby was me.

I cannot recall a single family gathering where Blacks were not denigrated. That remains true to this day.

To my point. Self-appointed demagogues on the right know that schools are not really mandating CRT as a matter of policy but cynically use isolated abuses by teachers or administrators to weaponize the term as a means of advancing their cherished battle to turn the clock back to the 1950s.

Their agenda all boils down to Ralph Ellison’s advert jingle in “Invisible Man”: Liberty White Is the Right White.

Bigotry by any other name smells no more sweet.

[diegobueno]

That you continue to cite the NYT and seldom, if ever, demonstrate any wider reading or thinking exposes the degree of ideological capture. Thank the deity of choice that smarter people are now calling this out and are actually 'on the case'. Douglas Murray holds out hope that the illiberal Left will be called to account, and so do I.

To the contrary, the fact that you continue to indulge in this ultra-ultra-ultra right wing disinformation shows how far down the lunatic rabbit hole you've fallen.

You cite Newsmax of all things, and then have the nerve to accuse me of "ideological capture".

[maestrob]

Mark, thanks for posting Charles Blow's column here. My internet went down before I could do so yesterday.

Very glad you're here in the Pub.

[jserraglio]

WAPO OPINION Republicans are afraid of history

by Jennifer Rubin

Why has “critical race theory,” an obscure academic term of uncertain meaning (especially to those who vilify it), risen as a top target in the GOP’s culture wars? It is not new, nor is it controversial.

Education Week explains: “The core idea is that racism is a social construct, and that it is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.” Think of the War on Drugs or the disparate sentencing guidelines between crimes involving crack and powder cocaine. These were not the result of one racist legislator; they are the legacy of mass incarceration that disproportionately harmed Black men and wreaked havoc on Black communities. Whether it is redlining or environmental discrimination (e.g., putting polluting factories in Black neighborhoods), critical race theory recognizes that race reverberates through decades, insinuating itself into seemingly neutral institutions.

So what’s the problem? There isn’t one. But somewhere between the New York Times’s 1619 Project and the MAGA addiction to race-baiting, critical race theory became code for anti-White racism or even anti-Americanism. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) bizarrely tweeted last week that it was “Marxist inspired.”

Given that MAGA provocateurs do not have a firm grasp of the concept, it is hardly surprising that laws “banning” critical race theory in schools are nonsensical and hopelessly vague, leaving it anyone’s guess as to what is banned. That’s the point, one can infer.

At one level, such legislation is simply part of a pattern of scaring White people, leading them to believe they are “losing” their country and that something foreign — accurate history! — is being imposed on them by elites. But at another level, it is even more disturbing. Caterwauling about critical race theory is designed to intimidate teachers from presenting students with an holistic, accurate account of U.S. history. The aversion to truth-telling, as many learned during the commemoration of the anti-Black massacre in Tulsa, leads to historical ignorance and lack of empathy. That historical amnesia is the goal of MAGA critics.

Robert P. Jones, chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute and author of “White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity,” explains, “White Christian opposition to ‘critical race theory’ is an attempt to protect a counterfactual myth of white innocence.” The Southern Baptist Convention, an evangelical denomination at the heart of MAGA support, went so far as to declare last year that critical race theory was “incompatible” with the denomination’s faith. This is simply one more instance of religious conservatives attempting to deny the role evangelical churches played in institutionalizing racism — the same thing an accurate telling of history unmasks.

White supremacy depends on the conviction that White people are victims, not oppressors. Therefore, any attempt to upset the status quo and seek racial justice is alien, radical and dangerous. That’s the essence of the MAGA movement (Make America Great Again ) and at the heart of its obsession with the noxious idea of “replacement” fearmongering.

President Biden’s remarks in Tulsa this month went to the heart of the insidious nature of historical denial. “Just because history is silent, it doesn’t mean that it did not take place,” he said. "And while darkness can hide much, it erases nothing. It erases nothing.” He added, “Some injustices are so heinous, so horrific, so grievous they can’t be buried, no matter how hard people try. . . . Only with truth can come healing and justice and repair.”

That is true, but the mission of Biden’s opponents is to create a false history and prevent empathy and understanding, much less address historic wrong and embedded racism. So they throw temper tantrums about some scary-sounding racial framework. Through the “big lie” about the 2020 election and educational censorship, MAGA troops seek to create the modern equivalent of the Lost Cause. They produce a narrative that protects them from history, truth and responsibility for their own conduct. We saw it plainly as Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said in March that he had no reason to fear violent White insurrectionists the way he does Black Lives Matter protesters.

Biden had it right when he counseled, “We can’t just choose to learn what we want to know and not what we should know. We should know the good, the bad, everything. That’s what great nations do: They come to terms with their dark sides. And we’re a great nation.” But not if the MAGA crowd have anything to do with it.

[jserraglio]

NBC Critical race theory battle invades school boards — with help from conservative groups

A booby-trapped billboard. A list of demands. A conservative media frenzy.

Jeff Porter, superintendent of a wealthy suburban school district in Maine, had no idea that his community was about to become part of a national battle when in the summer of 2020 a father began accusing the district of trying to “indoctrinate” his children by teaching critical race theory.

To Porter, the issue was straightforward: The district had denounced white supremacy in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by police, but did not teach critical race theory, the academic study of racism’s pervasive impact.

But the parent, Shawn McBreairty, grew increasingly disgruntled and soon connected with No Left Turn in Education, a rapidly growing national group that supports parents as they fight against lessons on systemic racism. That action turned a heated conflict with the school board into one that soon drew national attention, mobilized by a new, increasingly coordinated movement with the backing of major conservative organizations and media outlets.

It’s a movement that has amped up grassroots parental organizing around the country, bringing the lens and stakes of national politics — along with the playbook of seasoned GOP activists — to school boards.

See the rest at https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/cr ... s-n1270794