What Marxism, 'Critical Race Theory,' and Tucker Carlson Share - The Atlantic - "Because Austen herself was very interested in capitalism, patriarchy, and psychology—though she wouldn’t have used any of those terms—these varied ways of reading could reveal new aspects to the story. Still, one also learned how to maintain some distance from all of the theorists, especially those who claimed unique access to truth. It was important to stay well away from bad Marxist scholars, for example, the kind who insisted that their way of reading Pride and Prejudice was the only way to read Pride and Prejudice. That attitude led to many dead ends: In the Soviet Union (where bad Marxist scholars were eventually the only scholars allowed to publish anything at all) literary scholarship, like scholarship more generally, became not just dull and boring but actually dangerous for anyone with a different point of view... General Mark Milley endorsed the underlying philosophy of Lit 130, which also happens to be the underlying philosophy of a liberal education: Read widely; listen to everybody; make your own judgment about what’s important. Here is how he put it: “I do think it’s important actually for those of us in uniform to be open-minded and be widely read.” The phrase widely read means that you can and should read things you disagree with. You can definitely read Marx without becoming a Marxist. You can read critical race theory without becoming a “critical race theorist,” however you define that. Doing both will help you become an educated person—or, as in Milley’s case, an educated soldier... The Carlsons, Ingrahams, and other culture warriors who now dominate the world of conservative infotainment seem now to believe that the study of American history—the knowledge of what actually happened on the territory that lies between the two shining seas—should be forbidden. The Republican-controlled state legislatures and school boards that are currently seeking to ban the teaching of “critical race theory” have this same intention. Most of them seem not to have a very clear idea of what the phrase means, and so invariably the ban will be interpreted broadly and clumsily: Schoolchildren should not be taught the history of racism in America; they should not learn about slavery; they should not be allowed to think about the long-term consequences. That, apparently, is now the consensus in a segment of the Republican Party.
Given that post-Marxism dominates schools, the academy and elite circles (e.g. people want to put trigger warnings on conservative op-eds), we are urged to "decolonise" the curriculum (i.e. throw out the old stuff and bring in only the CRT perspective), that so-called anti-CRT laws don't do what the author claims they do, and that Milley claimed he wanted to understand "white rage" and wanted CRT texts in military reading lists without contrary views, the author is either naive or disingenuous
Meme - Rita Panahi @RitaPanahi: "When did Sesame Street turn into CRT for toddlers?"
Diana S. Fleischman @sentientist: "This clip raises several questions about muppet racial categories, muppet dialects, muppet inequality and the history of muppet colonization."
Meme - Wilfred Reilly: ""Leftist mental illness" is an almost perfect description of Wokist formulations like: "Speaking Japanese in Japan is an unfair 'privilege.""
Asian Dawn @AsianDawn4: "The Japanese aren't falling for it. School districts are now targeting anyone attempting to teach this "theory" in Japanese schools. They specifically call it "leftist illness""
"These people are trying to bring here this weird logic that is considered a huge social problem in in America. They are trying to bring the social chaos in America to Japan"
Rutgers professor calls white people 'villains' - "A professor at New Jersey’s Rutgers University said she believes that white people are historically “committed to being villains” — and that her unfiltered solution to addressing white supremacy would be to “take them out.” Brittney Cooper, a professor of women’s and gender studies and Africana studies, addressed the history of colonialism during a discussion last month about critical race theory with the Root Institute. “I think that white people are committed to being villains in the aggregate,” Cooper said during the online conference. She said white people don’t trust society to redistribute power to diverse groups of people “because they are so corrupt.” “You know, their thinking is so murky and spiritually bankrupt about power that they … they fear this really existentially letting go of power because they cannot imagine another way to be,” she said... “The thing I want to say to you is we got to take these motherf–kers out,” she said, though she quickly added that she “doesn’t believe in a project of violence.”... She argued that white people are already “losing,” noting the rising cost of living and that demographics are shifting. “White people’s birth rates are going down … because they literally cannot afford to put their children, newer generations, into the middle class … It’s super perverse, and also they kind of deserve it,” she said. She said only future generations may see an end to the so-called culture war. “‘Kids actually can grasp critical race theory because the issue that the right has, is that critical race theory is just the proper teaching of American history,” she said."
The Right Wang Podcast - Posts | Facebook - "What is Critical Race Theory and why is it complete nonsense! A legal and political framework that originates in American Law schools back in the 1970s, it attempts to tackle the issue of race-related inequities by critiquing the existing legal and political framework. What they came up with wasn't pretty. By asserting that all existing framework outside of CRT only helps the majority peoples, it is a racially motivated system designed to perpetuate racism so that the majority can maintain its' hold on power. None of these claims were ever proven, and they don't need to, since facts and research only serve to protect the majority's claim on power, this creates a vicious feedback loop of not ever needing to prove anything. To further solidify this notion all systems outside of CRT only perpetuate racism, CRT proponents encourage storytelling as a mechanism to internally validate CRT's claims. If enough minority peoples tell enough stories of lived experiences of racism, this will serve to prove CRT is a valid framework to view society with. Put aside the fact that stories can be embellished, incorrectly remembered, wholly forgotten, and sometimes outright lies, the main problem with this method of assessing the world is the way it deflects any criticisms by framing it as either a personal attack (since the stories are usually personal) or framing it as a racist attack (because, remember, all your treasured beliefs are racist), proponents of CRT believes this makes them immune to outside criticism. Contradiction is not persecution, even in academia, where scholars are meant to be in an open market of ideas and free to challenge any of them, CRT-based assertions soundly reject all criticisms by saying such "attacks" (all criticisms are attacks) are racially motivated to maintain the majority races' hold on power. In the CRT worldview, there are no singular instances of racism, all racist actions are in fact reinforced and embolden due to the state's actions and policies. In the CRT worldview, the majority race is benefiting from this racist system, thus imbuing them with privilege, whether or not they are conscious of this fact. In the CRT worldview, it is not enough that anyone with such privileges is just simply not racist because their inaction means they are condoning and justifying the state's racist system, and must actively be an "anti-racist" to show their support for oppressed minorities. In the CRT worldview, we are just automatons with no agency, we are blind puppets with strings dancing to the tune of the racist state, if you are part of the majority you must be racist, if you are part of the minority you must be oppressed. CRT is flawed, but also dangerous, minorities are taught to believe every member of the majority race is out to oppress them, to actively keep them from attaining success due to the colour of their skin. I hope this comic will highlight what CRT is and bring a greater understanding of why this belief system is so dangerous."
The War on History Is a War on Democracy - The New York Times - "These Russian policies belong to a growing international body of what are called “memory laws”: government actions designed to guide public interpretation of the past. Such measures work by asserting a mandatory view of historical events, by forbidding the discussion of historical facts or interpretations or by providing vague guidelines that lead to self-censorship. Early memory laws were generally designed to protect the truth about victim groups. The most important example, passed in West Germany in 1985, criminalized Holocaust denial... A hundred years after the Tulsa massacre, almost to the day, the Oklahoma Legislature passed its memory law. Oklahoman educational institutions are now forbidden to follow practices in which “any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress” on any issue related to race"
There's so much to unpack in this article. I like how it's dangerous to not teach kids to hate each other based on their race. Plus, the left gets upset when exploring nuanced views of history that depart from the party line (e.g. that slavery was not entirely bad), and they want to ban "hate speech" and "harmful speech". And it's rich to go on about how criticising the 1619 project is dangerous at the same time as complaining about "a mandatory view of historical events".
The left keep claiming they feel "unsafe" when they hear views they disagree with, yet the writer claims "History is not therapy, and discomfort is part of growing up" (using a very imaginative interpretation of anti-CRT laws - comparing the actual text of the Oklahoma law) reveals that the author is lying about it, since the law forbids "any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex" being a *concept* that that's part of a course
Critical Witchcraft Theory - "CRT is based on the claim that an insidious, pervasive, but invisible force inhabits all Americans and American institutions. This invisible force exists outside the conscious experience of those who harbor it. Those purveyors of systemic racism are its hapless servants who believe in their own innocence as much as poor Sarah Good did when she got her chance to testify at the Salem trials. (“I’m no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life God will give you blood to drink,” said Sarah when found guilty—the detail around which Nathaniel Hawthorne constructed The House of the Seven Gables.) Denying one’s complicity in witchcraft, of course, was expected of witches. Their denials meant nothing in the ensuing trials. But in some ways the courts in Salem were less inclined to impetuous judgments than many of the advocates of today’s critical race theory. Cotton Mather, consulted after the first wave of Salem executions (Tituba, Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Bridget Bishop) warned that “there is need of a very critical and exquisite caution, lest by too much credulity for things received only upon the Devil’s authority, there be a door opened for a long train of miserable consequences, and Satan get an advantage over us.” Cotton Mather was, however, still in favor of “the speedy and vigorous prosecution of such as have rendered themselves obnoxious.” His view lay not far from how Ibram X. Kendi views systemic racism: “one of the fastest-spreading and most fatal cancers humanity has ever known . . . There is nothing I see in the world today, in our history, giving me hope that one day antiracists will win the fight, that one day the flag of antiracism will fly over the world of equity.” Kendi’s perspective, consistent with Puritan theology, is that this world has been given over to the corruptions of the infernal powers. No doubt enough ink has been spilled and pixels deployed by critics of Kendian “antiracism” to establish the circularity of his reasoning. Failure to endorse his edicts, in Kendi’s views, is itself racist. His message has been redoubled by Robin DiAngelo, and a host of others who seem to believe that they have been handed a profound insight into how our world works. Superficially this is a sociological insight, but to the extent that sociology is a real discipline dependent upon careful and critical analysis of empirical evidence, “systemic racism” is not a sociological theory. It is theology, or more precisely it is a demonology: a theory of witchcraft. It has no proof that “systemic racism” exists in modern American society. All it has is a Salem-esque panic based on the pseudo-authoritative declaration that it exists. We cannot, of course, prove that systemic racism does not exist, any more than we can prove that witches don’t exist... Systemic racism, by contrast, serves perfectly well as a realistic description of some societies, such as the antebellum states in which slavery was permitted. But today’s theorists of antiracism are faced with the difficulty that real systemic racism has disappeared from America. Individual racists can be spotted, i.e. people who loathe or at least dislike other people on the basis of race and behave towards those people with prejudice. But “systemic racism,” involving the complicity of law, the approval of society, the power of economics, and the reinforcement of culture is just gone. It was officially undone generations ago and we have since vigorously cleaned out its vestiges. That leaves the proponents of systemic racism chasing after spectral evidence. They may not be able to see systemic racism with ordinary human eyes, but they “know” it is there and they have special magical eyes to see through its myriad disguises to the ugly truth beneath. William Stoughton and Cotton Mather would be proud of them. The rise and widespread acceptance within elite institutions of the theory of systemic racism may surprise many Americans who pride themselves on their secular rationality... “Climate change” is perhaps one part science to 10 parts hysteria. The COVID-19 pandemic was real but was bundled and rebundled in lies, rumors, hocus-pocus, medical myth-making, and statistical illiteracy. There are probably very few widely attested beliefs among Americans that are not, in some significant ways, grounded in shared illusions. Few of those illusions, however, are as destructive as systemic racism, which invites America down a path of social division that makes old-fashioned witch trials look like the wholesome models of judicial restraint. I put Americans at the center of that last paragraph, but as an anthropologist who has read broadly in world ethnography, I will gladly forfeit any idea of American exceptionalism when it comes to readiness to credit the existence of witch-like malevolent powers. The power of invisible forces to torment mankind is a cultural universal. The exact forms of witchcraft accusations, protections against the hidden powers of undisclosed enemies, methods of discovery, punishments, and reprisals vary among sub-Saharan African societies, Inuits, Amazonians, Sri Lankans, and so on, but not the suspicion that sinister powers are at work. Atheistic societies are far from immune. Stalin and Mao had their equivalent imaginary categories of unseen wreckers and cultural traitors. Thus folks like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo are tapping into something very old and very human: our seemingly limitless capacity to project our fears onto monsters in the dark—monsters that wear the faces of our family members, friends, and neighbors—and worst of all, our own faces in the mirror. Perhaps that last element owes something to the legacy of Sigmund Freud, who warned us to beware the beast that lurks within. But even that idea has plenty of folk precedents in the ideas about possession by demons and the involuntary transformation of men into werewolves and the like. Kendi has given us the up-to-date theory of American werewolvery, with white people, one and all, cast as Canis lupus... Systemic racism allures because it grants an all-purpose excuse for the failures, disappointments, and unhappiness of American blacks, and it allures whites who long for the rewards of contriteness and penitence, which are no less real. Nor should we forget the opportunists of all races who see the chances of financial gain, social status, and political influence that come from indulging the new cult. Witchcraft crazes never end well—not for the accused, seldom for the accusers, and certainly not for the society that has permitted this temporary descent into madness. Where today is our William Phips, the governor who had the sense to put a stop to the orgy of hangings in a 17th-century New England village when the leading intellectual authorities would not? He has not stepped forward yet, but we can be confident he will."
Do No Harm: Critical Race Theory and Medicine
Weird. We keep being told that CRT is only about the law. Yet it pops up in the medical system too. And we have previously seen how it's invoked where schools are concerned too
Is "Critical Race Theory" the Wrong Term? - "Some time ago, the word came down in media circles that we should begin capitalizing the “B” in “black.”... Less than a month after these pieces, the Washington Post came out with, “Why ‘White’ should be capitalized, too,” arguing: “No longer should white people be allowed the comfort of this racial invisibility; they should have to see themselves as raced.” In a flash the bulk of the business dropped their righteous reservations about using Stormfront style guide, and began employing capital Ws all over. I’ve since gone back to lower-casing everyone. People just make these things up on the fly, reveling in the overthrow of prevailing attitudes, even if the overturned standards are ones they themselves set ten minutes ago. It’s fashion, not politics... The Republicans’ inability to define their target is a problem because conventional wisdom’s official position on “critical race theory” is that it doesn’t exist. The nebulous academic concept is said to be just a phantasm, a fascist fantasy... There are two mainstream poses on this topic. One shrugs in would-be bewilderment, as if not understanding what conservatives could be upset about. The other points an accusatory finger back and insists Republicans cooked up the term as a stalking horse to prevent teachers from telling the truth about American racism. “Critical race theory,” said the Washington Post’s Colbert King, “is simple truth-telling.”... writer Wesley Yang penned a series of tweets about the “new language of power throughout the non-profit sphere,” giving it a name: the “Successor Ideology.” The author of The Souls of Yellow Folk created an umbrella term to explain everything from whatever the hideous moniker “cancel culture” means to purges of classics and STEM disciplines in universities, to the new move toward segregated “affinity spaces,” to “intent doesn’t matter,” to the spread of workforce training sessions that ask white employees in both the public and private sectors to focus on things like “undoing your own whiteness,” to a dozen other things. What Yang went on to describe in a series of articles and appearances isn’t narrowly about race, or trans issues, or feminism, or American history, but a much wider concept that argues that our foundational notions about everything are wrong and need to be overturned... Attempts by conservatives or even critics on the left to question any of this are usually described in news accounts as efforts to clamp down on something uncontroversially right and necessary, e.g. “educational discussions about race.” This ignores the fact that the movement seems also to be about things like ending blind auditions for orchestra applicants, or redefining mathematics to discourage a focus on “getting the right answer,” to classics teachers canceling the classics, and many other bizarre things... In some instances it pleases intellectuals to argue that all of these things are and must be connected — that the opponent of police brutality must also stand in opposition to everything from the Harper’s Letter to the young adult novels of Amélie Zhao and EE Charlton-Trujillo. Sometimes, as in the case of the response to latest Republican backlash, the argument is not only that none of these things are connected, but that there’s nothing to connect."
The woke are obsessed with constantly-changing terminology because it's a way to signal their status - not everyone is up-to-date with the latest approved vocabulary
Weird how the left believe so many mutually exclusive things about CRT
Black father tells board CRT keeps racism on 'life support', moments later they vote to ban it - ""I am a direct descendant of the North American slave trade. Both my parents are black. All four of my grandparents are black, all eight of my great grandparents, and all 16 of my great greats. On my mother's side, my ancestors were enslaved in Alabama. On my father's side, we were enslaved in Texas," father Derrick Wilburn said during a board meeting last week. "I am not oppressed. I'm not oppressed and I'm not a victim. Wilburn went on to say that "racism in America would by and large be dead today if it were not for certain people and institutions keeping it on life support." "Sadly, one of those institutions is the American education system." The father of three went on to say that he "can think of nothing more damaging to a society than to tell a baby born today, that she has grievances against another baby born today, simply because of what their ancestors may have done two centuries ago."... Wilburn went on to say in the video that his three children "are not oppressed, either, though they are victims." "I taught my children they are victims of three things: Their own ignorance, their own laziness and their own poor decision making. That is all," he said."
Kansas math teacher resigns over CRT training and renewed mask mandates, gets fined - "A Kansas elementary school teacher resigned from his job following a mask requirement for unvaccinated teachers, coupled with its recent critical race theory push, and was subsequently fined by the district. "That was my final straw," Josiah Enyart said, referring to the Shawnee Mission School District sending an email renewing its mask mandate for all students and unvaccinated teachers on July 25... In 2014, the school announced a $20 million technology update that gave every student Ipads or Macbooks, which had Enyart questioning, "Why do we need all of this?" Then, the district implemented the Deep Equity critical race theory training for teachers. The district spent $400,000 on the training, which told teachers to "reject and resist any parents who disagree with" critical race theory, the Sentinel reported. "It’s all critical race theory stuff," Enyart said. "That was kind of the start where I realized, they’re really trying to bring this in and make it something." "I can’t believe the lack of transparency with curriculums, teacher trainings, in class activities based on the trainings, and top-down regulations used as indoctrination tools"... "As a teacher, I can see these things, but after talking to hundreds of parents, they can’t. Why wouldn’t the public school system want the parents to know everything that their child is being exposed to? Why aren’t the parents being asked before these decisions are being made? And when they do, why do the board decisions not match the data on the surveys? As a district that prides itself on being ‘data driven,’ they do not seem to be following any real data on any of the issues." He also voiced displeasure with how the school handled teaching students during the pandemic, lamenting that while teaching remotely, "district leaders did not give parents or teachers a sense of control or accountability where we could help students succeed." "I couldn’t do anything but give them no grade," Enyart said. "What a 12th grader has to know and get done to graduate is what a 5th grader had to do 40 years ago," he added."
Ban Critical Race Theory Now - "When Paul Rossi, a high school teacher at Manhattan's Grace Church School, objected to CRT at his school, the lead teacher admitted: "We're demonizing white people for being born." Robin DiAngelo, author of the bestselling White Fragility, argues that all whites are inherently racist. Bettina Love, an education professor, has written in Education Week that "white teachers need a particular type of therapy" to address their "white emotionalities" and to undo "whiteness" in education. Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of The New York Times' CRT-infused "1619 Project," has plainly stated that her project's deepest ambition is "to get white Americans to stop being white." Anyone who doesn't immediately understand how morally abhorrent this all is need only swap the races and/or epithets used in these statements. Can you imagine if school leaders admitted that they were demonizing children for being born black? If bestselling authors insisted that all blacks are inherently vicious and must work on their Black Instability? If teacher magazines suggested that black teachers need therapy to address "black emotionalities?" If curriculum designers explained that their goal was to get black kids to stop being black?... CRT, however, defines itself explicitly against traditional civil rights. According to Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, CRT is "unlike traditional civil rights discourse" in that it "questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism and neutral principles of constitutional law."... Robin DiAngelo has declared that it is "dangerous" to say that you try to treat people equally, regardless of race. Teacher magazines like Educational Leadership insist that teachers must "challenge racial 'colorblindness.'" Teacher support books recommended by the Department of Education declare that when teachers try to be color-blind, they are actually creating an "unsafe environment" for students. Indeed, Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist and arguably the most influential CRT public intellectual, has issued a clarion call on behalf of racial discrimination... In the context of education, this is a call for teachers to racially discriminate against white children as a supposed remedy for past racial discrimination against black children. It's no wonder, then, that CRT practices are the mirror images of some historic practices that horrified us when we learned about them in school (or, for many older Americans, witnessed them firsthand). For instance, in Evanston, Illinois, a school separated staff by race for training, offered racially segregated "affinity groups" for students and parents, told teachers to treat students differently based on race and publicly shamed white students based on their race. This is all obviously illegal, and the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights had declared it, properly, to be so—that is, until the Biden administration officially suspended that decision, suggesting that all of this might be totally acceptable. No one could possibly doubt that if a school district shamed black students based on their race, told teachers in writing to discipline black students more severely or offered "whites-only" professional development opportunities, that Biden's Office for Civil Rights would force them to stop. Unfortunately, the Biden Department of Education has clearly gone "woke." When Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona was Connecticut's commissioner of education, he declared, "We need teachers behind this wave of our curriculum becoming more 'woke.'" When Deputy Education Secretary-nominee Cindy Marten was superintendent of the San Diego Unified School District, she oversaw training that told white teachers that they were "spirit murdering" black students. And last month, the Department of Education issued a proposed regulation for federal civics grants that name-checked the "1619 Project," Ibram X. Kendi and a book by education professors advocating against "colorblindness." State-sanctioned racism is, of course, not a new phenomenon in America. It is only the group being intentionally victimized and the institutions endorsing (or even enforcing) racism that have changed... today, it is becoming clear that, when it comes to education, the federal government is not exercising its authority to protect all students. Therefore, it is time for state legislatures to step forward and ensure that the Civil Rights Act is vigorously enforced. Critics of proposed state laws addressing CRT in schools contend that these proposals constitute "censorship." While the details of these proposed laws vary—and matter greatly—this charge is, by and large, bogus. No teacher today is free to say things like "black students are ignorant and therefore I decenter, disrupt and dismantle blackness in the classroom." Such rank bigotry is (properly) illegal under the Civil Rights Act. Only by abandoning Enlightenment rationalism and the avowed neutral principles of the rule of law—as CRT affirmatively encourages its adherents to do—could one argue that stopping what is obviously "illegal discrimination" when applied to one race becomes "un-American censorship" when another race is the target instead. Anyone arguing in good faith against state laws addressing CRT in schools must argue against what these proposed laws actually say. For example, Idaho's recently passed bill to ban CRT in the classroom declares that no educational institution "shall direct or otherwise compel students to personally affirm" that "any sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color or national origin is inherently superior or inferior [and/or] that individuals should be adversely treated on the basis of their sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color or national origin." Therefore, the Idaho law's critics must argue that schools actually should tell students that certain races are inherently superior or inferior, and that individuals should be treated differently based on their race. This, as we have seen, may well be what leading CRT activists actually believe. But it is not what everyday critics of such laws typically contend. They'll make arguments about censorship or the First Amendment, or claim that these laws will hurt efforts "intended" to address racism"
