Critical Race Theory

[ZappasGuitar]

This nation will NEVER have an honest discussion about Critical Race Theory until the GOP STOPS LYING ABOUT IT...


Ted Cruz's erroneous definition of Critical Race Theory explains WHITE America

The Texas Senator is apparently confused about CRT and the KKK.


At the conservative Faith and Freedom Forum this past week, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, launched an attack on critical race theory. Such rants have become a staple for Republicans lately, but Cruz set himself apart by asserting that the legal theory was “every bit as racist as the Klansmen in white sheets.”

Cruz offered no evidence for these claims, because there is none.

To say this is nonsense feels painfully obvious. The Ku Klux Klan’s ideology began with the premise that racial differences were an obvious biological and scientific fact and that all human activities had to be organized around that fact; critical race theorists take as their starting point the belief that race is a fiction, that it’s an invented concept that has no basis in biology or science.

The Klan worked to put its racist beliefs into action through Jim Crow laws in the South and immigration restrictions for the nation as a whole; critical race theorists have devoted themselves to identifying the remainders of that racism in the law and rooting it out.

And, most obviously, the KKK was a terrorist organization responsible for decades of white supremacist violence that included thousands of murders, mutilations and bombings of African Americans and other minorities. The law school professors behind critical race theory are not.

Despite the vast differences between the Klan and critical race theorists, Cruz twisted himself into knots insisting they were the same by grossly misrepresenting the scholarly field. "Critical race theory says every white person is a racist," the senator asserted. "Critical race theory says America's fundamentally racist and irredeemably racist. Critical race theory seeks to turn us against each other and if someone has a different color skin, seeks to make us hate that person."

Cruz offered no evidence for these claims, because there is none. Far from arguing that individual white people are all racist, critical race theorists assert that focusing on the actions of individuals is meaningless because racism is more deeply rooted in larger structural and systemic problems.

Rather than believing America is “irredeemably racist,” critical race theorists have stated that their reckoning with the submerged role of racism in America is a path to redeem the nation and fulfill the promises of emancipation and the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. Critical race theorists also do not seek to turn Americans against each other, but rather to help them understand the actual history of the nation they share as citizens.

While Cruz’s claim that critical race theorists are “every bit as racist” as Klansmen is laughable, it notably fits into a larger historical pattern in which white southerners asserted that the critics of white supremacy were just as bad — or worse — than the defenders of white supremacy.

During the civil rights era, segregationist leaders across the South complained that they were being besieged by “extremists on both sides,” by which they meant white supremacist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and its white-collar counterpart, the White Citizens’ Councils, and civil rights organizations, like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

In Louisiana, Democratic Governor Russell Long in 1956 blamed racial troubles in his state on “extremists” he saw in both the NAACP, which was seeking enforcement of the Supreme Court’s rulings against school segregation, and the White Citizens’ Councils, which was working furiously to block its implementation. The Louisiana legislature even tried to ban the NAACP, notably using a law originally designed to crack down on the Klan.

In South Carolina, Judge J. Henry Johnson told a grand jury in 1958 that both sides of the civil rights struggle were to blame for racial turmoil in the region. “The NAACP is just as bad as the KKK,” the segregationist asserted, because he believed both as “violence inciting organizations.” (Cruz might be interested to note that the judge also disparaged Communists, who he said tended to be “first or second generation Americans with names ending in X, or Y, or Z.”)

This is a tried-and-true line of attack from those who wish to preserve the status quo.

As government officials like Long and Johnson advanced this false equivalency between civil rights organizations like the NAACP and white supremacist ones like the KKK or White Citizens’ Councils, ordinary white southerners soon drew the same conclusion.

In 1962, for instance, a letter to the editor of the Knoxville Herald argued that the NAACP and the KKK were in the same class. “Both are extremists,” the correspondent claimed. “Both incite violence. Both have the hate that is not part of the American way of life.”

Convincing ordinary Americans that the enemies of the Klan were just as bad as the Klan itself was, of course, the entire point. It still is.

This is a tried-and-true line of attack from those who wish to preserve the status quo, but in this instance it’s especially egregious. Critical race theorists seek to expose the ways in which white supremacists — like Long, the Louisiana state legislature, or Johnson — abused the powers of their offices to embed racist principles and policies in our political and legal systems.

It’s bad enough that Cruz slanders them. But it’s even worse that he uses the exact same line of argument against them that those segregationists did.

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/ted-cr...white-n1271484

[archives]

Pretty obvious it is one of the right's campaign wedge issues for 2022, plays to the base and can be adapted to cover an array of dog whistles, the Willie Hortons are too obvious in the twenty first century

[cawacko]

Pretty obvious it is one of the right's campaign wedge issues for 2022, plays to the base and can be adapted to cover an array of dog whistles, the Willie Hortons are too obvious in the twenty first century

Cruz is an idiot comparing this to the Klan. It’s amazing though that progressives somehow never use racial dog whistles to appeal to their base. I don’t know how you guys do it. (and yes that is sarcasm)

[Flash]

This nation will NEVER have an honest discussion about Critical Race Theory until the GOP STOPS LYING ABOUT IT...

I'm not trying to discourage further conversation, but I don't know what an "honest discussion" would involve that has not already been said again and again. When some say "we need to have a discussion about..." suggests we have not already discussed it. There is no element of race relations in the U. S. that has not been studied, written about, discussed, taught in schools....

Those that say we need to have a conversation about....usually mean everybody does not accept their views on the topic, not that we haven't discussed it.

[ZappasGuitar]

I'm not trying to discourage further conversation, but I don't know what an "honest discussion" would involve that has not already been said again and again. When some say "we need to have a discussion about..." suggests we have not already discussed it. There is no element of race relations in the U. S. that has not been studied, written about, discussed, taught in schools....

Those that say we need to have a conversation about....usually mean everybody does not accept their views on the topic, not that we haven't discussed it.

This country has yet to have an honest discussion of CRT because every time we try, partisan GOP shills divert the conversation with the same nonsense Cruz brings up.

To claim Critical Race Theory is “every bit as racist as the Klansmen in white sheets” as Cruz claims is just nonsense.

[archives]

Cruz is an idiot comparing this to the Klan. It’s amazing though that progressives somehow never use racial dog whistles to appeal to their base. I don’t know how you guys do it. (and yes that is sarcasm)

What would be a “racial dog whistle” that the left leaning politician would use to appeal to their base? Cite us an example

[evince]

Cruz is an idiot comparing this to the Klan. It’s amazing though that progressives somehow never use racial dog whistles to appeal to their base. I don’t know how you guys do it. (and yes that is sarcasm)

You are a racist for denying obvious racism and lies to protect racism


No way around that fact wack

[T. A. Gardner]

This country has yet to have an honest discussion of CRT because every time we try, partisan GOP shills divert the conversation with the same nonsense Cruz brings up.

To claim Critical Race Theory is “every bit as racist as the Klansmen in white sheets” as Cruz claims is just nonsense.

Critical Race Theory derives from Critical Legal Theory (invented by Harvard professor Derrick Bell), that came from Critical Theory, and that from Critical Pedagogy. Critical Pedagogy was the invention of Brazilian Communist Paulo Freire. The central tenant of it is that ‘all education is political indoctrination.’ It uses Marxist economic class struggle as its core. See Freire’s book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) for more on that.

CRT does the same thing as Critical Pedagogy only with the classes defined by race. In CRT there are racial groups that are oppressed and others that are oppressors. These are defined by cherry picked examples of individuals within those groups and then applied to the group as a whole. Thus, for the CRT advocate, there are individual Whites that are racists by example and that makes all Whites racist as they are deemed an oppressor group. Individual Black racists are ignored because Blacks as a group are deemed oppressed. This division by race and status becomes the basis for indoctrinating students into racial class warfare.

An example of CRT in action would be using The 1619 Project to teach history from a racial perspective. As history, The 1619 Project has been thoroughly discredited. Historians, including many Leftist ones, have panned it as a work of fiction. The New York Times made a retraction of claims it was historically accurate. Yet, it is used, including in thousands of schools, to teach history as a racial struggle as CRT requires.

CRT is radical Leftist indoctrination and nothing else. It seeks to turn groups by race against each other to tear down society so it can be reborn into a Marxist utopia.

[cancel2 2022]

.
Black intellectuals like Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele and John McWhorter thinks CRT is just Marxist bullshit, how can anybody intelligent conclude otherwise?

YOU ARE NOT A RACIST TO CRITICIZE CRITICAL RACE THEORY.

Dismiss those pretending that if you don't like what's happening in our schools, you're a jingoistic moron who doesn't want kids to learn about racism.

John McWhorter
Jun 17

Since a year ago, CRT-infused members of The Elect, traditionally overrepresented in the world of schools of education, have sought to take the opportunity furnished by our “racial reckoning” to turn American schools into academies of “antiracist” indoctrination.

And the backlash is on. One by one parents, teachers and even students are speaking out against the idea that the soul of education must be to battle the power that whites have over others.

Yes, that’s the watchcry. It’s why The Elect can make so little sense to the rest of us: they actually believe that the heart of all intellectual, moral, and artistic endeavor must be battling power differentials. They get this from Critical Race Theory. And what most alarms The Elect is that state legislatures are proposing to ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory in schools, Florida being the latest example.

One response to this backlash is that anyone who questions the takeover of schools by CRT is against schoolkids learning about racism, and wants schoolkids to have the adulatory view of the American story typical of the 1950s and before. A sarcastic tweet by a certain famous black figure employed by the New York Times who won a Pulitzer recently encapsulates this kind of view:

“Our children must learn that we are the greatest and freest country in the history of the world, and we will demonstrate this by barring educators from teaching things we do not like, and in the name of liberty, mandating government control of what ideas can be exchanged.”

So, whenever a body of lawmakers (or anyone else) is against their kids being taught not how, but what, to think, and call this "Critical Race Theory" just as many of its teachers do, that body of lawmakers is a nest of racists.

Let's break this down.

* * *

Elects commonly insist that critics of CRT would feel differently if they read actual foundational articles about it. But the issue is what is being done in CRT's name, not what some articles contained decades ago.

The early writings by people like Regina Austin, Richard Delgado, Kimberlé Crenshaw are simply hard-leftist legal analysis, proposing a revised conception of justice that takes oppression into account, including a collective sense of subordinate group identity. These are hardly calls to turn schools into Maoist re-education camps fostering star chambers and struggle sessions.

However, this, indeed, is what is happening to educational institutions across the country. Moreover, it is no tort to call it "CRT" in shorthand when:

1) these developments are descended from its teachings and

2) their architects openly bill themselves as following the tenets of CRT.

In language, terms evolve, and quickly -- witness, of late, how this has happened with cancel culture and even woke. To insist that “CRT” must properly refer only to the contents of obscure law review articles from decades ago is a debate team stunt, not serious engagement with a dynamic and distressing reality.

A useful document for parents in the new resistance just released by the Manhattan Institute may be useful for those who still bristle at the use of CRT to refer to … well, what it now means. One could be more precise:

"What we are interested in here might be termed “critical pedagogy.” “Critical pedagogy” names — without exhaustively defining — the host of concepts, terms, practices, and theories that have lately taken hold in many public and private schools. This term alludes to a connection to CRT — it might be thought of as critical race theory as applied to schooling — but also to “critical studies” and “critical theory,” a broader set of contemporary philosophical ideas that have been particularly influential in certain circles of the modern Left."

* * *

Now – are there some among critics of today’s CRT who just want us to stop talking about race at all? Are some of them the kind of white person who thinks racism of any note basically ended in the 1960s and that today we need to “stop stirring all of that stuff up”? Likely. But the evidence that this is the heart, the primum mobile, of resistance to "CRT" in our schools is comic book stuff.

Is anyone taken seriously actually proposing that students should learn nothing of slavery in school, or that students should never be taught that racism is anything but cross-burning and the N-word? Or, is it that a certain kind of person goes about ever hungry to accuse people of this aim, in order to fulfill their duty of identifying racism wherever they can find it?

In a dialogue premised on good faith, we can assume that when politicos and parents decry “Critical Race Theory,” what they refer to is the idea of oppression and white perfidy treated as the main meal of an entire school’s curriculum.

In other words, the issue here is not whether schoolkids should learn about racism. A certain kind of person loves to stand and breezily say that there are swarms of people out there who don't want kids to know about racism – and they say this with admirable oppositional poise but not a shred of evidence.

Rather, what most of us (as opposed to the Establishment in schools of education) think, and are correct about, is this:

1. Young children should not be taught if white to be guilty and if black to feel a) oppressed and b) wary of white kids around them (and if South Asian to be very, very confused …).

2. Young children should not be taught that the American story is mainly (note I write mainly rather than only, but mainly is just as awful here) one of oppression and racism. Not because it’s unpleasant and because sinister characters want to “hide” it, but because it’s dumb.

It is willfully blind to the complexity inherent to history, not to mention reality itself. Just as resonant a case could be made that America is founded on sexism, or classism – and the cases would be equally simplistic propaganda.

Finished my pandemic project of War and Peace, I’m now plowing through one more, Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace’s magisterial history of New York City, Gotham. It dedicatedly covers the endless injustices against black people here, including how deeply ensconced this city was in the slave trade. However, the roiling panorama of this 1200-page book (which even at that length only gets to 1898!) makes it clear that any notion that the story was “all about” oppressing black people is simply whack. It would be the conclusion of someone with a single hobbyhorse, disinclined to curiosity or reflection.

3. While there is room for the above ideas to be presented to children as some among many – maybe; I’m bending over backwards here – this kind of thought should certainly not be the fulcrum of a school’s entire curriculum, as has been reported at schools like Dalton and others in New York.

The above assertions are not those of someone who thinks slavery and racism should be hidden away from young minds. The assertions are simply human. I highly suspect all but a sliver of Americans agree with them. It is quite natural that these assertions will, in our times, be termed as opposition to “CRT.” The term’s meaning has morphed. That’s not wrong – it’s ordinary.

* * *

There is type who, understanding the above points but viscerally devoted to smoking out the evil operators who want to keep racism secret out of “fragility,” insists that the modern version of CRT is not actually being foisted upon students anywhere – or at least, not enough to matter.

Well, there are crystal clear reports of the takeover of this ideology at several schools in the New York area these days – I am aware of seven at this writing. Then, there are reports of school boards actively considering ideas like these nationwide. Then there is a source that I admit needs to be processed so that it can be aired officially, that we could call “Glenn Loury and John McWhorter’s inboxes” – a good 15 messages we get from concerned parents and teachers every single week (now since last summer) about this ideology permeating schools nationwide. The organization FAIR will also attest to the sheer volume of cases of this kind. As do the contents of the message sections of certain Substack newsletters.

Still just a bunch of anecdotes? Okay, let’s try this. If there were this volume of reports of exactly this kind – the same combination of media and independent testimony – of cop killings of black men, it would treated with no hesitation as evidence of a national scourge. It would treated that way if the corpus consisted of about a quarter of the volume of the one I refer to. Anyone who claimed that this body of reportage and testimony qualified as mere “anecdote,” and that there could be no verdict until the data were all in and subjected to years’ worth of statistical analysis (over which the experts would then fight for another decade then yielding no real conclusion …), would be dismissed as a pariah within milliseconds.

I do love, for the record, the ones who claim people like me are making this up because it isn't happening in their school district – just imagine: "There's no problem between black men and the cops. Nobody has gotten killed like Philando Castile or Tamir Rice where I live!" It would be Do Not Pass Go for that person before they even hit Enter.

Okay – but that means that requiring a comprehensive survey of schools’ curricula nationwide, including the journalistic shoe leather that study would require, before decrying a painfully obvious nationwide trend in educational administration is, again, a stunt, from people who simply savor the idea that America’s true founding was when Africans were brought here in chains because it tastes good to them, or because they don’t want to get called a racist on Twitter for denying it.

Good for them. But in the meantime, we must understand:

1) Criticizing Critical Race Theory as it operates in 2021 does not require perusing the oeuvre of Kimberlé Crenshaw, and the critique is not invalidated by the differences between what articles like that contained and what’s happening in our schools now.

2) Criticizing Critical Race Theory does not mean teaching students that America has been nothing but great. Constructive dialogue about complex and sensitive issues is impossible within the pretense that all matters reduce to binary oppositions. The Elect cannot reasonably insist America be more sensitive in their perspectives while responding to all critique with sandbox logic based on yes vs. no, off vs. on, and Selma vs. utopia.

Quibbles and cavils and performance art over what we call what's happening in our schools are just that. The urgent thing is not what we call these developments, and pretending you have to be a legal scholar to have anything to say about them but Amen.

The urgent thing is to stand up against this rule of terror by people sincere yet misled, brandishing the mighty tool of calling us names on social media if we displease them.

A mature society cannot operate in this way.

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p...t-to-criticize

[ThatOwlWoman]

What would be a “racial dog whistle” that the left leaning politician would use to appeal to their base? Cite us an example

Probably using words like "inclusion" and "diversity." We all know what THOSE words mean, eh?

[anonymoose]

To claim Critical Race Theory is “every bit as racist as the Klansmen in white sheets” as Cruz claims is just nonsense.

Agree. I’ve tried here but I hit a brick wall once I ask a very simple question.
If CRT is about socioeconomic context why is race even mentioned?
Why not Critical Socioeconomic Theory?
I never get an answer. Too uncomfortable a question I suppose.

[ThatOwlWoman]

.
Black intellectuals like Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele and John McWhorter thinks CRT is just Marxist bullshit, how can anybody intelligent conclude otherwise?

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p...t-to-criticize

Who cares what your scurrilous sources claim? It's just opinion.

"Marxist bullshit" is the new catch-all phrase barked out by the typical Reichtard like yourself when presented with something that might possibly benefit someone other than yourself.

[T. A. Gardner]

Agree. I’ve tried here but I hit a brick wall once I ask a very simple question.
If CRT is about socioeconomic context why is race even mentioned?
Why not Critical Socioeconomic Theory?
I never get an answer. Too uncomfortable a question I suppose.

I gave the answer to that above. It isn't about socioeconomic context, it's about race. CRT divides everyone in society by race and then deems some racial groups oppressors and others oppressed. It's just a twist on the original class struggle in Marx between proletariat and bourgeoise with the same end intention: To create class struggle between groups in society with the end goal being the destruction of that society so that a Communist one can rise in its place.

[cancel2 2022]

This country has yet to have an honest discussion of CRT because every time we try, partisan GOP shills divert the conversation with the same nonsense Cruz brings up.

To claim Critical Race Theory is “every bit as racist as the Klansmen in white sheets” as Cruz claims is just nonsense.

No you don't, it's just bullshit lapped up by the likes of you. Nobody sensible need pay it any mind.

[archives]

I'm not trying to discourage further conversation, but I don't know what an "honest discussion" would involve that has not already been said again and again. When some say "we need to have a discussion about..." suggests we have not already discussed it. There is no element of race relations in the U. S. that has not been studied, written about, discussed, taught in schools....

Those that say we need to have a conversation about....usually mean everybody does not accept their views on the topic, not that we haven't discussed it.

“no element of race relations in the US that has not been ……. taught in schools”

That in itself is debatable. In a nutshell, most, and I am sure even today, learned little of slavery’s actual role in framing of the country, nor understanding it’s portrayal in the Constitution. Usually the three fifth’s compromise is discussed and that is about it, the institution of slavery then fades until the era of Sectionalism, and then understood solely from political implications. Civil War, move onto Reconstruction, and then a jump to the Civil Right’s Era of the 1960’s, its a typical survey approach and all from a white perspective

None of that helps us understand where we are today two hundred plus years later