This essay ends with a call for courage. Ironically, it was scheduled to appear a few weeks ago on a different web site, when the editor informed me that a “higher-up” decided that they were afraid to run it. I then submitted it to the Law and Liberty Web site. To their credit, they accepted it.
Excellent!
Well good luck with that. Maybe Uncle Joe will read it and call off the campaign of terror he has promised. But I doubt it. BLM and CRT are thevsoul of the Democratic Party. Yes, resistance is good. But offering hope might stir courage, Unfortunately, the most hopeful of possible ways up from where we are now is one that you dismiss out of hand.
Heather mac Donald observes:
“The median black eighth-grader does not possess even basic math skills. “Basic” skills, as defined by the National Assessment of Education Progress exam, means partial mastery of grade-related knowledge. Fifty-three percent of black eighth-graders scored “below basic” on math in 2017. Only 11 percent of black eighth-graders were proficient in math, and 2 percent were advanced. By contrast, 20 percent of white eighth-graders were below basic in 2017, 31 percent were proficient, and 13 percent were advanced. Only 12 percent of Asian eighth-graders were below basic, 32 percent were proficient, and 32 percent were advanced.
The picture was not much better in reading. Forty percent of black eighth-graders were below basic in reading in 2017, 17 percent were proficient readers, and 1 percent were advanced readers. Sixteen percent of white eighth-graders were below basic in reading, 39 percent of white eighth-graders were proficient readers, and 6 percent were advanced readers. Thirteen percent of Asian eighth-graders were below basic, 45 percent were proficient, and 12 percent were advanced readers.”
https://www.city-journal.org/achievement-gap-explains-demographic-disparities
A decentralized campaign at the state level to eliminate teachers unions would be a good start. Childhood exposure to unionized public school teachers causes the loss of thousands of dollars annually. Recent findings that reading levels have not been affected by the shutdowns and that math achievement has only declined about 10 percent, something families will likely overcome as they discover better teaching techniques, puts the public school problem in context: we can safely undertake radical reforms at little risk to children because the pre-covid status quo was so heart breakingly abominable. We can change this if we have the courage.
It would be a nice thing if BLM and CRT were the only oppressive ideologies destroying the nation. Spoke with a niece tonight finishing up a masters in library science who told me about the essays she was required to write defending censorship. Apparently Confucianism is cool with censorship so not tolerating censorship is incompatible with multiculturalism or something. But the impression I got is the Chinese communist political influence was strong on her campus. Besides running the universities, tech industry, online merchandising, mainstream media and DC think tanks, one has to wonder how much more they will soon be controlling in the USA.
Excellent essay Arnold. Not that long ago everything in it would have been accepted by most people as simple common sense. It is sad that it now takes courage to say such things publicly and effort to find anyone willing to publish them.
>—-“Most people do not know what CRT is, how it is embedded in many institutions, and how false and dangerous it is.”
This is very true and is under appreciated by most people on both sides of this issue. Most people still hear “anti-racist” and think it means just being opposed to racism. Few understand that, in CRT, it means telling all white people they are racist. Nothing could be better for old school racists because CRT quite predictably causes a big backlash and removes most of the stigma from the term. It is entirely counter productive as a way to really help black people.
Thanks for making my day. Your last paragraph implies the racist equivalence of one “old school racist” and one million CRT’s white people. This is the standard moral math of rotten and corrupt democrats.
I didn’t say that or mean that but I’m glad your day is so easily made EB.
I there ‘anti-racism’ is understood to entail a little more than just being opposed to racism ( ‘non-racism’), such as the moral obligation to ‘do something’ to fight putative racism. The idea that it’s wrong to merely not be racist, that you have to attend protests, or your shoe store can’t just be a shoe store that doesn’t take political positions, but has to at least vocalize support for various movements, etc., isn’t just a rarefied academic position. I’d say popular anti-racism has also introgressed the ideas that there should be different rules or standards for people of different races and that racial disparities are mostly caused by discrimination. IOW it’s true it isn’t as extreme as its academic variety, but I think there’s considerable daylight between the ‘popular’ idea of anti-racism and standard equal opportunity egalitarianism. The people I’m around tend to have more formal education than average and so are not representative, but at least in my experience it isn’t quite just ‘judge me not by the color of my skin’ revamped. They know what they’re getting at is something different.
I agree with everything in your comment Mark with one clarification. There tends to be a pretty big divide between those who actually use the word “anti-racism” in their own speech and those who simply hear others using it. I have many friends and relatives who take an interest in politics and the next time I hear any of them actually say the word “anti-racism” will be the first.
I think you have given a fair and accurate description of how the term is understood by non-academics who don’t really know the details of CRT but feel a need to personally do something about racism as they perceive it.
That is a different understanding in important ways from both, the understanding of it that academic advocates of CRT itself have, and what the many people who are unaware that there is an ongoing attempt to redefine the language around race hear it as meaning.
Fair point, definitions may vary considerably from one person’s passive vocabulary to another’s active vocabulary.
I don’t hear the word much either in real life, though I think I encounter the idea. Many neologisms have failed to penetrate people’s real life vocabulary other than as pejoratives. I’ve never known anyone who self-identified as politically correct, alt-right, postmodernist, or critical race theorists, but I’ve known people who seem to fit each description. People seem to run away from these words once they go mainstream; it’s hard to peg the popularity of the ideas they describe when people actively resist any attempt at ideological taxonomy.
It’s a very good essay. Two nitpicks.
1. If one is going to allow people to sue police officers for alleged violations of civil rights, then it would be appropriately balancing to propose that police officers be given additional rights to sue suspects for injuries (i.e., repeal “fireman’s rule” policies) and also some protection against becoming scapegoats and subjects of false agitation propaganda and resultant racialist hysterias. It might not even matter, as an obvious consequence would be to make every police employment contract in the country contain a clause requiring indemnification from their employer if sued under formerly immunized circumstances.
For example, McWhorter says that “Hands up, don’t shoot!” was never based on reasonably reliable evidence and was furthermore verifiably untrue early on in the tensions following Michael Brown’s death, but continued to be repeated as factual countless entities for long periods thereafter (indeed, some continue to repeat it.)
The current state of the law tends to give a police officer effectively zero recourse and no protection *except* for what they get from qualified immunity. If you yank that too, you are going to get permanent donut-shop strikes in every American city, and a lot of extra homicides that go along with it. So, let policemen sue, and maybe the same media entities which got their fingers burned by Sandman will be more willing to use the same cautious, hedging language they use for suspects. The truth is that “qualified immunity” arose as a judge-created coping mechanism and kludge to deal with previously judge-created rules that were making ordinary law enforcement all but impracticable.
When regulatory rules get very intricate, burdensome, and uncertain, individuals and entities need to be able to have some kind of “safe harbor” when they are following their training and doing what they are told without a substantial risk of ‘surprise’ liabilities, especially if those are likely to fall on individuals in their personal, private capacity. If you don’t have this, then you are going to get so much risk aversion you won’t be able to motivate people and entities to accomplish their missions and purposes. Look at the kind of government guarantees, subsidies, and promises of indemnification that had to be given to the vaccine-making companies to encourage them to accelerate their programs and engage in what would otherwise be prohibitively risky activities if pursued for purely entrepreneurial reasons under typical incentives. It’s a manifestation of the same larger problem.
2. It’s fine to tell people to be courageous, but I would have liked to have seen some realistic examples walking through a case in which an individual faced some risk by speaking out, they summoned courage to speak up, and it ended up well. There is a kind of a myth that people acting out courageously has the benefit of inspiration and encouragement for all the suppressed people out there, but that’s only true in the heat of collective battle, not one at a time, when it has precisely the opposite effect.
Tiffany Riley was courageous, and just got fired. If people are courageous and it turns out poorly, all that teaches anyone is who rules over them and that they had better keep their heads down and mouths shut or end up like Tiffany Riley.
If you don’t want the Tiffany Riley’s of the world to get fired in the first place, then the courage that’s required is whatever is needed to make the people that fired her too afraid to do so. Maybe they’d just be afraid of support for public education taking another unnecessary hit, or maybe they’d be afraid of new kinds of civil rights lawsuits. But the problem is that it didn’t take any courage to fire Tiffany Riley, but it will take courage to make such terminations risky enough to require real courage in the future.
> If one is going to allow people to sue police officers for alleged violations of civil rights, then it would be appropriately balancing to propose that police officers be given additional rights to sue suspects for injuries (i.e., repeal “fireman’s rule” policies)
That sounds sensible, but is meaningless in practice. Try to picture a typical person of a kind that’s responsible for injuries to police officers. How much of any judgement do you think can collect from him? Let police sue, win, and then what? Garnish food stamps?
Thank you Arnold Kling for a clearly reasoned and articulated essay. It deserves to be widely read and pondered. The vice grip that CRT has over our discourse can be broken, and must be broken.
Sorry, Arnold. Too little, too late.
I enjoyed it.
Really good essay. And calling for courage, but then not getting it published … because of a lack of courage. Proves the need for it.
And the lack of it.
Along the theme explored a bit by Glenn Geher a few posts back.
I have the feeling that men are more often courageous, especially those unmarried and without kids. And I believe there are evolutionary reasons for this. But this might be more physically, rather than intellectually.
And we now need more intellectual courage to find truth, especially if we find some that is not what we want reality to be like.