Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes that the fight against teaching Critical Race Theory in schools is the brainchild of Christopher Rufo. So we can blame it all on one white conservative activist.
The Washington Post tells almost the exact same story.
a) coincidence?
b) co-ordinated leftwing media attack?
c) Rufo self-promotion effort?
I am guessing it’s mostly (c), with some (b)
Concerning the leftwing narrative that CRT is benign and the attacks on it are desperate and racist, Andrew Sullivan writes,
This rubric achieves several things at once. It denies that there is anything really radical or new about CRT; it flatters the half-educated; it blames the controversy entirely on Republican opportunism; and it urges all fair-minded people to defend intellectual freedom and racial sensitivity against these ugly white supremacists.
Note how far removed we are from a discussion of race, or of critical race theory per se, or of how these topics should be handled in school. Instead, we see observe each side accusing the other of exploiting racial divisions in order to exercise power.
But it is hard for me to be charitable to the left on this one. I think that conservatives are willing to discuss the real issues, and progressives are ducking them. I can remember when the progressive mantra was “We need to have a conversation about race.” Now their mantra is “Shut up, racist.”
UPDATE: a reader points me to an anti-CRT piece by Donald Trump. That will probably make it harder for any Democrats to do anything other than support CRT. All in all, it would not surprise me if the anti-CRT movement manages to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
So the left is teaching hatred to five year olds, and Arnold’s response is “well what can you do, Donald Trump was against it so society has to be for it, can’t expect anything better from them.”
“anti-CRT movement manages to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory”
CRT loses 60%-40% in a generic poll, but it has 86% support among democrats and I bet a similar majority amongst school administrators and HR people. That means the 40% has a lot more power than the 60%, and if you don’t live in Trump country you don’t even have 60%.
I’ve found the “don’t ban CRT stuff” put out by the “anti-woke” but not right wing to be misguided. How exactly do you expect uncoordinated nobodies to take on the entire establishment? They need a simple coordinating mechanism and goal with a call to action that has meaningful results they can actually effect. Anything less then blanket banning of it from curriculum will allow the people who set the curriculum to worm it back in. They spend all day every week on this stuff, are paid to do it, and have all the levers of institutional power. The other side has concerned parents operating part time on their own dime that can maybe vote in a school board election every few years.
I posit something simple. If you took the same CRT materials being taught to kids and substituted “black” for “white” do you think anyone would oppose banning it under free speech grounds? Doubt it.
I think raising a generation of kids on this in K-12 is game over, and that’s true even if a few red counties manage to opt out. You need to take it more seriously.
The fact that CRT is such a vague notion makes it both easier to ‘worm back in’ and makes bans of it potentially overbroad. It would be both legally more robust and better rhetoric to specifically ban, well, racism from school curriula, specifying racial collectivism, collective guilt, and negative racial stereotypes, etc. They could then fairly say that they’re merely reifying the consistent enforcement of civil rights law.
Making ‘CRT’ the metonymy for anti-white racism and jumbling it up with other unrelated things was a massive rhetorical surrender by conservatives (as if their goal is to prove George Lakoff wrong at every turn). Now, when you go after ‘CRT’ even if just to prevent indoctrinating kids with racial guilt, leftists can say you’re just trying to prevent teachers from calling Thomas Jefferson racist. And it doesn’t help that conservatives tend to get sidetracked and try to defend Thomas Jefferson as not ‘fundamentally racist’ or whatever.
James Lindsay’s coinage, ‘neo-racism’ would’ve been much better, and focusing on the obvious racism rather than on defending the dignity of the founders or whatever would’ve been much more compelling and had much broader appeal. Arnold it right imo that the right is danger of totally bungling it.
There is no course of action anyone can take to actually address this. In other words there is no snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. There is no jaws of victory. This is simply about pushing back. Common pedagogy would not be where it is today if it were actually examined and critiqued occasionally. You cant pass a law and change 40 years of Education colleges. The issue is not that teachers are choosing to push a certain ideology, its that what they are teaching is the only ideology they ever became familiar with. If you ban CRT it doesnt matter because teachers couldnt teach another way even if they wanted to. This is all they know. The main problem that this campaign will hopefully address to some extent is the belief that this can have a policy solution. Or that kids rebel so it doesnt matter what is crammed down their throats. Both of these are absurd beliefs that need to go.
Education colleges have NOT been teaching CRT for 40 years. What they have been teaching is:
a) “Every child can learn.” Meaning just about every child can successfully complete a rigorous college prep curriculum.
b) There is no meaningful difference between the races. Indeed, “race” is biologically meaningless.
c) There is a tremendous achievement “gap” between blacks and whites (race is socially meaningful). It is very, very, very important to close this gap.
This means there are only two possible reasons for the “gap” and two possible ways to fix it. One, blacks don’t behave as well as whites, and should. That is very, very, very bad manners.
The second is CRT and DEI, which teachers will come to on their own.
Yeah, faced with a complete onslaught from all sources of power and trying to overturn the very education administrators that control their school systems what opponents of CRT really need to do is engage in acrimonious debates over the nuances of terminology that their opponents will morph whenever and wherever it pleases them and use that as an excuse for inaction.
They are teaching your kids to hate you when they aren’t mutilating them and pumping them full of hormones, but what we really need is to make sure we are hitting all our own theoretical ideological purity tests perfectely.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyR51MqOl5I
Exactly! Let’s please have a meta discussion on whether “neoracism” or “CRT” is the correct term to use. Seems like this might really help us at the present.
Hint: there is a reason why the libertarians always lose. They fixate on the microscopic nuance vs. the larger issues. Classic missing the forest for the trees thinking.
GSD (get sh*t done) vs. masturbating over terminology.
That’s conservatism vs. libertarians in a nutshell.
Right, this is too important to care about minutia like actually doing it right and in a way that maximizes the chance of success.
The proverbial train has left the station. It’s working.
Also, I have zero faith in the libertarians in getting the messaging correct.
A point of view that’s more nuanced than mine (probably behind a paywall):
***
One of the more significant milestones in America’s culture wars is the relatively recent convergence on the term “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) as the label to describe the collection of concepts and ideas associated with American liberalism’s cultural “awokening” on the issue of race.
And so the broader point is this: The name of the debate doesn’t really matter. The debate itself is what matters. What’s more than likely behind the opposition to assigning the CRT label to these ideas is that assigning any name to the ideas of the Great Awokening is an admission that these ideas are in fact new, and a sharp break from what has come before. For proponents of these ideas, and for liberals who would simply like to avoid the subject altogether, identifying them as a distinct ideology and a radically novel system of belief makes them politically contestable and debatable.
Until then, no amount of head-in-the-sand avoidance or academic hair-splitting will help them understand how something as obscure as “critical race theory” managed to become the center of the national conversation.
https://www.inquiremore.com/p/why-the-great-awokening-isnt-allowed
I could offer plenty of pragmatic arguments about how to maximize success…but none of them relate to terminology masturbation.
Agreed, CRT is too vague and malleable. We need to stand against neoracism and define exactly what neoracism is.
You can’t define what neo racism is. CRT uses post structuralism to deconstruct words that it doesn’t like and uses that to dismiss the ideas, and so opposition can never properly define anything to attack it. Does that sound absurd? Well they already got you to agree that CRT isn’t a good phrase and they will do the same with neo-racism. There is no way to properly define words with someone who rejects your “structure.” This is an epistemological truth that has been known since the fifties. You will run from definitions forever.
Racism actually means something in people’s minds, and it has specific, deeply ingrained connotations of discrimination and animosity against some races. CRT does not. It just sounds like some arcane academic theory. And now conservatives have to explain to people why it’s bad, when if they just called it racism, they wouldn’t have to explain that.
If they just stuck with calling it racism, then supporters would have to spend a lot more time trying to explain to the public why discrimination or fomenting antipathy against some races isn’t really racism. And they don’t have a lot of answers that won’t disturb most people, not just conservatives.
Racism means nothing to anyone. Yeah I got it I was taught it meant something specific in my youth, but what I was taught wasn’t the truth either.
People want an explanation for why blacks suck at everything. They’ve been denied genetics. So they come up with things like systematic racism.
For a generation or so you could throw up your arms and say “I dunno man, maybe because the fathers don’t stick around and the gangs”, but that was untenable in the long run and attempts to bring it back are doomed.
A large portion of the population already holds a definition of racism that is completely operational for the advancement of the same goals people practicing CRT have. If you attack them with racism the portion of people who hold this operational definition will grow. You cannot rationally argue definitions, which is fundamental to any rational debate, with them. Any definition you offer will need to be made with other words, all of which have definitions that can be debated. The best thinkers have spent 70 years or more trying to resolve this. What you want cannot be done rationally. At some point you have to give in. Or continue and realize you cannot make your point with mutually agreed definitions.
CRT uses post structuralism to deconstruct words that it doesn’t like
So what? Most people aren’t post structuralists. Most people think racism is bad, and if you can convince them that something is racism, they will be against it.
The at-least-temporary victory of CRT has been to convince a lot of people that judging people on the basis of their race is actually anti-racism.
People have to hit back hard at that. I look forward to the first politician who says to an opponent pushing DEI, “If you want to see a racist, look in the mirror.”
But everybody seems to be too polite (or too cowed) to say anything like that.
Rufo describes himself in his recent New York Post article (https://nypost.com/2021/06/22/washington-post-tried-to-smear-me-for-criticizing-race-theory-and-failed/) as “the nation’s most prominent opponent of critical race theory.” So self-promotion is a likely component.
Yarvin is pretty convinced that this effort will fail even if it ‘succeeds’ in getting bills passed (though of course he is sort of invested in this kind of thing failing).
But he makes some good points in a recent post, such as:
1. What judges are going to enforce these laws? The federal judiciary already doesn’t seem to care much about e.g. preferential government subsidies to ‘diverse’ farmers etc. which clearly violate existing anti-discrimination statutes.
2. Are you ready for dozens of NYT articles about brave teachers in Red States standing up to Power to teach children the Truth about Racism?
I think banning CRT will help, and that we should always and everywhere be looking for any kind of victory we can get.
But even if it’s kind of like dissident electoral bodies that would pass laws when whoever the overlord is wasn’t going to let them be law, it would still be valuable. It sets down what the body politic thinks is “legitimate”. This may or may not become law, and it may or may not get subverted by judges, but when your kid comes home and says what he learned in school today if its CRT garbage you can at least say that the American people voted against it.
I would not ban CRT, but I would insist that alongside readings from writers such as Kendi, Coates & D’Angelo, teachers & staff should be encouraged to read Wilfred Reilly, Glenn Loury & Shelby Steele (and others) as counter points.
I can tell you that, in my son’s school, it is all one side, and the head of school is resistant to even reading the counter points I present to her. I would like to tell her that I find it hard to believe she is capable of teaching critical thinking if she is unwilling to practice it herself, but I don’t want it taken out on my son.
We may find ourselves forced to leave anyway, either to home school or perhaps we’ll move permanently to our second home in Montana. We’ve already learned through the grapevine that 8 of 54 kids will not be returning.
99% of people pay taxes to public schools to get free babysitting alongside non-ideological 3Rs education.
They don’t want their kids spending all day reading books about racism and anti-racism. They can do that shit at home if they want. A class that had them read Loury and kendi would be better then just Kendi, but it would be worse then simply not wasting time on it at all. We don’t need 5 year olds addressing this at all.
The reason they are pushing it to five year olds is because they can’t close the gap. They will not, and will never, allow it to be taught in class that the gap is due to black genetics. So any exploration of black failure is going to be about people blaming white vs people blaming blacks. I do not need my tax dollars wasted on that, and I don’t think refusing to have my tax dollars fund endless circular debates over the cause of black failure is a free speech issue. If they give me a refund they can bloviate about whatever they want.
Let me be clear: they are pushing Kendi, et al, on the parents. It is much more subtle in the classroom. For example, the 5th grade social studies curriculum in our school is focused on the founding and in particular the American Revolution. For the Revolution, they read the novel “Chains” about a slave girl in New York City, circa 1776-77. One of my son’s friends told me that the Declaration and the Constitution were the result of “a conspiracy theory” developed by “white men” designed to keep them in power forever! And this is in a private school!
I supplemented my son’s learning with “Johnny Tremaine,” read portions of McCullough’s “1776,” and my wife and I have purchased a number of used textbooks dating to the 1980s that should cover him into and through high school. But it is insidious and will require vigilance and participation by parents to counteract
There is a 0% chance you are going to be able to overcome the children’s authority figures, peer group, and mass media if they are all against you and all you can offer. You’ve got to chip away at some of these things whenever you can by whatever means you can.
It’s always useful to remember that your opponents don’t see you as a human being and will never stop until you stop them for good.
I don’t think they hate me, not in the case of our school, and I don’t hate them. It all came on suddenly, with the pandemic/lockdown followed closely by George Floyd & the summer of BLM. I know these people, they are nothing like the dedicated leftists I knew in grad school. I think they are caught up in a moral panic, and all I have to do is stand firm until it passes. If we move to Montana full time it is because of California governance writ large, not our little community school
Here is some further support for b) a media attack on Rufo
“conservative activist Chris Rufo” keeps showing up time and time again.
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/06/22/texas-critical-race-theory-explained/
Side note 1: it’s fun to watch the left pretend like they are experts on the esoteric religion known as CRT. Can they pass the final exam?
Side note 2: is our host aware of the major retractions and edits to the WAPO story?
https://thefederalist.com/2021/06/22/washington-post-clarifies-error-riddled-hit-piece-on-top-anti-crt-investigative-journalist/
Mission accomplished, right? Mentions of CRT have gone from zero to the moon in 6 months even though CRT has been kicking around for years.
CRT is the new Cultural Marxism.
Well I think the mission would be accomplished when there is actually some remedial action taken.
Regarding “when the progressive mantra was ‘We need to have a conversation’ “, the subtitle of DeAngelo’s book rather gives away how pretentious and deceitful such “conversations” have usually been.
Most often, any doubts about the Revealed Truth are met with, either a barrage of ad hominems, or deployment of Straw Men.
Whenever I hear any such maneuvers (save maybe for folks I’ve learned to trust), I end the “conversation” ASAP.
That subtitle is “Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism”, but should’ve been
“Why It’s So Hard for White People to *let themselves be manipulatively lectured* About Racism”.
The only solution is getting ones kids out of the public schools.
Yes, I can use the wages from my woke capital job which has ordered all of its employees to attend a mandatory woke struggle session to pay for a private school.
Then I can keep supporting my kids for the rest of their lives because any college they might attend or company they might work for or major metropolitan area they might live will be woke.
I’m not against people sending their kids to private school, I might even do it myself, but the idea that nearly all of society is going to go woke and somehow the fact that you send then to some homeschool academy during k-12 is going to protect them when they are drowning in it is absurd. Who will their peers, co-workers, and neighbors be? Where are they going to launch a career that isn’t woke?
We are trying to build a world they grow into and live a full live. Not a tiny expensive bubble they can exist in as children only to get swallowed up later.
I suppose you can wait for the world to turn around while your children grow.
It is the Moo Cows of the world educating them right now.
I guess I’m not understanding the swipes at Rufo in this post:
1) he was one of the earliest to the fight at a grassroots level
2) he helped out our community tremendously in drafting our initial playbook against CRT in k-12. We were successful in defeating it.
3) he always takes the high road when debating
4) he is willing to debate the other side and more than holds his own (to state it lightly). See his appearances on tv with Marc Lamont Hill or Joy Reid. Is it even close?
5) he is supported by many FIT picks including Bari Weiss, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, James Lindsay, Glenn Greenwald, Wilfred Reilly and many others
6) he is doing the work with many others to build a stable foundation to oppose this nonsense in our schools in conjunction with Reihan Salam
https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1407428941158051840?s=21
What am I missing here?
What you’re missing is that if you’re willing to fight the left on a cultural issue, you’re by definition an icky rightwing “extremist,” probably with cooties, and non-leftists who care about looking cool would rather let the left win than have anything to do with you.
In short, the left wins on these issues, not because those who fight them “snatch defeat from the jaws of victory,” but because establishment conservatives, free-market types and libertarians won’t fight the left themselves and can’t bear the indignity of being associated with those who do.
In the Exit vs Voice debate, we have to remember that Exit can be fundamentally parasitic. I get that if you’re a middle man minority symbolic manipulator your first instance when things get to hot is to run away to some other civilization and state over. But that proposes that if you “exit” there is somewhere to “exit to”.
Ultimately, you’re manipulating somebody else’s core symbols and concepts that they created. You didn’t create them. We can’t all be middle men that run at the first sign of difficulty.
The Woke are, ultimately, calling the bluffs of people that fold when pushed too hard. It’s a giant game of chicken. The only true answer is to fight. Always fight. Always try to win. Don’t get caught down in the minutia. Go for the killing blow, always and everywhere. I support every and all attempts to refine the best way to land a killing blow, but I never condone in any instance an unwillingness to fight.
Is anyone really trying to “exit” over CRT in the schools? I doubt it. Anyway, this garbage is going to be pumped into schools everywhere in the country. The education bureaucracy and teachers unions are the same everywhere, and the state and local politicians are easily over-awed by corporate pressure, lawsuits and federal money (see the cave in on girls’ sports by the governor of ND, formerly a GOP star). I guess you could avoid CRT by moving to Japan, if they let you in.
Like the “center left” before them, the respectable, elite “center right” is just going to roll over and die on this issue, as they do on nearly everything other than tax cuts.
No matter how much the general public hates this stuff, they do not have the organization, political or rhetorical skills, focus, energy, or attention span to mount a successful fight on this issue (or any other) without elite and professional leadership – which will not be forthcoming. I expect to see some money raising scams, though.
CRT defenders try to dismiss critics of CRT as not really knowing anything about it, pointing out that CRT is a theoretical movement within the field of legal scholarship, and correctly pointing out that nobody is teach legal scholarship in K-12 schools. This is of course a clever dodge. The fact is that there most certainly is a CRT influenced pedagogy working its way into many school curricula. The challenge for the right, which I took up because of my experience in FITS, is to first read & understand exactly what CRT is.
I recently read “Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, 3rd Edition,” 2019, Delgado & Stefancik. Richard Delgado is one of the founders of legal theory CRT. But this book is not a legal reference book. It is written for the lay person with the clear goal of extending CRT beyond the legal academy and into other fields & institutions. Indeed, anyone who has read Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robin D’Angelo, Ibram Kendi, etc. will see CRT finger prints throughout their works once you’ve also read Delgado & Stefancik. In several interviews, Kendi has explicitly identified CRT as both an inspiration and an influence on his own thinking. CRT is not difficult to understand and I have sympathetic attachment to some of its goals, but as an analytical approach I find the rejection of both liberalism and rationalism to be both misguided and disturbing.
I have discovered in several recent online debates that, once I display that I understand CRT and can describe the core concepts as well as (and, usually, much better) than its defenders, they disappear from my timeline. Another effective tactic is to agree that, no, academic CRT is not being taught in schools, but CRT influenced pedagogy is and then to give examples (I am able to present worksheets & assignments from my son’s recently completed 5th grade as evidence).
Another thing that schools are doing is not just going at the kids, but at their parents. Our school created a parents’ book club and the two books discussed this year were, you guessed it, “White Fragility” and “How to Be an Anti-Racist.” The school encouraged parents to join ethnically segregated “affinity groups” to discuss their experiences and/or privilege. I can now demonstrate that there is a direct line from CRT theory to Kendi, et al, and to school curriculum & practices. I don’t need to reference Christopher Rufo or James Lindsay or any other person identified with “the right.” They have to identify with me and to engage in debate over the core ideas. At that point, they are on the defensive.
This is a long winded way of exhorting people to read the source material and turn it back on those who seek to use it.
Not trying to be funny here, but could you guve me a paragraph or two on the “core concepts” of CRT?
Thanks in advance.
This was to TR5749. Not sure why I cant nest comments.
“CRT is a theoretical framework which views society as dominated by white supremacy, and categorizes people as ‘privileged’ or ‘oppressed’ based on their skin color.”
I’m sure there are other definitions out there. It’s a nearly impenetrable esoteric philosophy. Thus, let a thousand flowers bloom.
I actually ignore the philosophy itself and focus my attention instead on the policy prescriptions. Where the rubber meets the road is the most fundamental way to understand whether you support it or not.
Thanks. Where does your quote come from?
Link below.
We could quibble for years on the definition (that’s kinda the whole point), so you are welcome to disagree. However, I found it to be the most concise without sacrificing too much of the nitty gritty.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/texas-suburb-defeats-critical-race-theory-southlake
That was a very strange article to read. Well, at least your students are encouraged to chant “nigger nigger nigger” after homecoming events now!
I guess any kind of suggestion that maybe a little sensitivity training might be in order is CRT? Thats the way it looks from here.
Well, I’m off to Vegas to play cards. Maybe I’ll do a little more research on my downtime.
Hopefully your card skills are better than your reading comprehension skills.
this thread is a pretty good summary, but it leaves out a few points:
https://twitter.com/AlsoACarpenter/status/1387193306715590657
the key points that it leaves out are a rejection of The Enlightenment & Rationalism and the centering of personal narrative over traditional forms of evidence
Thanks. Good link.
For those who want more info on CRT from James Lindsay, author of Cynical (not Critical) Race Theory,
here is a podcast by him which is available for FREE.
Rather than subscriber as is usual.