Meet the CRT burghers - The Spectator World - "The defenders of critical race theory frequently create a maze of distinctions... Marc Lamont Hill, host of UpFront on Al Jazeera English, and Joy Reid, MSNBC national correspondent, have been the most conspicuous figures in the left’s effort to diffuse public ire against CRT by drawing opportunistic distinctions among the various embodiments of the basic creed. Both have had CRT’s most celebrated critic Christopher Rufo on their shows in efforts to cut him down to size. The don’t-let-him-get-a word-in-edgeways style of interview has pleased CRT partisans but only further infuriated the general public. That public fully understands that the basic message of CRT is that America is ‘systemically racist’, that white people hoarding their privileges is the engine of systemic racism and that nothing short of a total transformation of American society can bring about ‘racial justice’. The 1619 Project, anti-racism and DEI are just euphemistic variations on this theme. When someone like Simon Campbell summons the US Constitution and the First Amendment to his side of the table, he has a point. CRT and its progeny are a doctrine aimed at delegitimizing America. These doctrines aim to unseat the US Constitution as a racist document. They see the First Amendment as protecting white supremacy by giving white people exclusive control over public speech. And they treat the whole dynamic of the county as a contest over ‘power’. In that contest, censorship by the proponents of CRT is fully warranted, since they are battling the unfair advantages of the white racist regime. It is an open question how deeply members of the K-12 educational establishment understand this nonsense. America’s school teachers and school administrators are not exactly the cream of the intellectual crop. Most of them have been through those indoctrination mills called schools of education where John Dewey mingles with Paulo Freire and retired terrorist (‘guilty as hell, free as a bird’) Bill Ayers. All they know about education is that it is supposed to be ‘transformational’. The question ‘transformed from what to what?’ gets answered with the all-purpose progressive catechism, ‘from oppressed to free’, which serves as a license to destroy any claims of culture, civilization, tradition, moral order, or knowledge that stand in the way. With legions of teachers and school administrators imbued with this outlook, it is little surprise that CRT looks like a fine new pedagogical instrument. It is yet another hammer for battering the pillars that uphold the ideal of America as a society committed to those unevenly yoked goals of liberty and equality. Why not just replace them with ‘diversity’ and ‘equity’? The reasons why not may be invisible to today’s educators, but fortunately not to the parents who show up at the school board meetings... We know pretty much what ‘DEIA training’ looks like. It is remarkably similar to systematic bullying and intimidation combined with censorship of any and all dissenting opinions. We owe the schools a debt of gratitude for teaching the public in advance how critical race theory plays out in the lives of real people. We may owe something as well to the military’s rapid deployment of this ideological warfare. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, in a busily incoherent word salad, explained to the House Armed Services Committee on June 24, why he supports critical race theory in military training, i.e. he wants to ‘understand white rage’. This came on top of the chief of naval operations Admiral Michael Gilday refusing to explain to the House Armed Services Committee on June 15 why he recommended that all US sailors read Ibram X. Kendi’s book, How To Be An Antiracist and declining to say whether he personally upheld Kendi’s quixotic views that ‘white people are another breed’ and that they ‘invented Aids’. We can weigh these remarks against secretary of defense Lloyd Austin’s declaration that ‘We do not teach critical race theory. We don’t embrace critical race theory and I think that’s a spurious conversation… We are focused on extremist behaviors and not ideology, not people’s thoughts, not people’s political orientations. Behaviors are what we are focused on.’ Against this we have the testimony of former Space Force commander, Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Lohmeier, whose book Irresistible Revolution: Marxism’s Goal of Conquest & The Unmaking of the American Military sums up the criticisms that resulted in his being relieved of his command. We also now have a public letter signed by Allen West more than thousand former members of the military who take issue with ‘the politicization and ideological purging of our military’, and who declare, ‘The focus of our military should be on training, readiness and defense of our Nation, not leftist cultural “wokeness”.’ DEIA training as a comprehensive government-wide policy may prove popular with parts of President Biden’s base, but Americans in general are likely to choke on this menu"
Claire Lehmann on Twitter - "I dislike the terms “critical theory” & “critical race theory”. The label “theory” shouldn’t be applied to a set of axioms that have a level of sophistication surpassed by many kindergarteners.
It should really be called “Uncritical Dogma”. Describing its explanatory framework as anything other than a set of conclusions in search of evidence (however weak) just gives it too much credit."
What Is Happening to Our Apolitical Military? - The Atlantic - "Milley voiced support for military reading lists, including books about the hot-button political issue of critical race theory. “I’ve read Mao Zedong. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin,” Milley said. “That doesn’t make me a communist.” It was a good line, witty and wise. And if he’d left off there, he’d have scored a victory. But he went on to connect racism to the attack on the Capitol: “I want to understand white rage … What is it that made thousands of people assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America?” And that turned his testimony into a political judgment, the latest step in the continued erosion of America’s relations with its military, which has been pulled further and further into the political arena. Milley may have been attempting to protect the military by wrapping himself in the flag and virtuously defending the Constitution, but the effect of his words has been to join the broader political fight about racial issues... Politics is ostensibly anathema in the force. Leaders proudly proclaim themselves to be apolitical, and some even decline to vote so as not to prejudice themselves against prospective commanders in chief... Americans have begun to see our military the way we see the Supreme Court: apolitical when it supports our policy preferences, shamefully partisan when it does not."
Of course, it's clear that he's right and if you disagree you're the problem
Someone claimed to me that the military was the furthest thing from leftist and saying they had been ideologically compromised showed one was deluded
The Parental Revolution Is Bigger Than Critical Race Theory - " “Voters will tolerate a certain level of woke bulls--- in their lives,” Jeff Roe, one of Youngkin’s main strategists, told me Monday, “but draw the line when it screws with their kids.” “If they opened up the schools in the fall of 2020, Terry McAuliffe wins,” said Rory Cooper, a Republican strategist who lives in Northern Virginia and has been a persistent public voice on these issues. “Democrats always have underestimated how many Democrats were mad at the school closures. In my very blue neighborhood, there were first-time Republican voters this cycle, which you would normally think is nuts a year out of Trump. But they were voting in their self-interest, which is what voters typically do, and their self-interest includes their kids,” Cooper added. “I think that you could sum up the entire election with: The schools aren’t working.”... “Public school has transformed in the past 18 months, and denying this is a surefire way to alienate voters,” Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, the author of Classroom Wars, wrote in a piece last week in the Washington Post. “The Democrats,” she told me Monday, “really failed in not acknowledging the frustration that a lot of people who would usually be on their side were feeling with schools.”"
Elementary Schools Go Woke | City Journal - "The contemporary obsession with identity has made its way into elementary school policy, curricula, and standards approved by state boards. While we continue to see poor reading and math scores, schools spend money and time confusing and shaming other people’s children... Sometimes the source is a rogue teacher whom the principal and superintendent admit they are trying to rein in; but increasingly, it is simply public officials implementing approved policies... While most Americans may not consider gender an essential component of ethnic studies, the Oregon Department of Education does... In Rockwood, Missouri, a fifth-grade teacher recently gave students a handout with written excerpts by Alicia Garza, co-founder of Black Lives Matter. The writings included the claim that “Michael Brown was murdered just steps from his mother’s home in Ferguson, Missouri.” (They did not mention Attorney General Eric Holder’s conclusion that “the facts did not support the filing of criminal charges against Officer Darren Wilson.”) The handout goes on: “Disruption is the new world order. It is the way in which those denied power assert power. And in the context of a larger strategy for how to contend for power, disruption is an important way to surface new possibilities.”... Some parents may agree with such content. But public institutions funded with public dollars do not exist to groom activists for particular causes, shame children for their immutable traits, or deny them their agency or their childhood. We are talking about eight- and nine-year-old kids who believe in Santa Claus, hide their lost teeth under their pillow for the tooth fairy, and curl up in their parents’ laps for comfort and love. It is immoral—at least—to reduce them to confected racial and gender categories and to teach them to do the same to others. Parents around the country need to understand what is happening in a growing number of elementary classrooms."
The Selfish Fallacy - "The Selfish Fallacy is where you’ve adopted a political view or set of views out of the previously-mentioned social necessity (or, increasingly, professional survival) but aspects of that view are unpalatable to you for various reasons, so you define the view in a way that is unusual or internally inconsistent or otherwise engineered to avoid conflicting with your other views, social world, or prior commitments. You then act as though that motivated definition is the plain truth about the view or set of views... I have fairly regularly interacted with people who champion the Nation of Islam as a revolutionary Black power organization. But in fact, as I write in the linked piece, the NOI is first and foremost a bizarre religious cult defined by social conservatism and a truly deranged mythology which has had remarkably little political impact despite its prominence and, at one time, resources... “I think there are important insights within critical race theory, but its rejection of the legitimacy of basic democratic rights isn’t helpful,” is not the Selfish Fallacy. “CRT just says we should teach children that slavery is bad and racism still exists” is the Selfish Fallacy because it’s a convenient ignorance that allows the people saying it (and people do say stuff like that) to fulfill the social mandate to support CRT without prompting any cognitive dissonance... the debate about critical race theory is filled with the Selfish Fallacy. CRT is now a completely floating signifier thanks to the motivated reasoning of those who defend it. Conventional center-left liberals feel compelled to defend CRT because conservatives attack it, but some aspects of that academic field are sufficiently extreme to make advocacy for them unpalatable, so the definition of CRT simply morphs to fit their boundaries for legitimate opinion. For many or most of the people defending critical race theory today, the tradition is just a vague assertion of the prevalence of racism, dressed up in a little academic jargon - because this conception is far more convenient for them than grappling with what CRT actually is. Which is funny because these liberal defenders act like they alone know what critical race theory really means. A lot of liberals suddenly find themselves not just defending CRT and pretending that they have read deeply in the field but also pretending that they always have known what it means. (This stems from one of the most deeply-ingrained aspects of progressive culture, the addiction to knowingness - the imperative to not only have an opinion on everything but to act like you have always had this opinion because everything is obvious and banal to you.)... a big part of CRT involves a skepticism towards, or an out-and-out rejection of, some elementary aspects of liberal society. This is part of a broader academic left tendency; certainly when I was in academia in the humanities a half-decade ago it was considered terribly embarrassing to believe in individual rights and the Enlightenment etc. But a lot of ordinary everyday progressives still embrace that tradition. Rather than let their social need to defend CRT conflict with that attachment, they simply invent an imaginary CRT in their heads so there’s no conflict. And this is the Selfish Fallacy. People are going to the mattresses for a fairly obscure set of theories from legal education that they didn’t know existed last year, and so there are bound to be people passionately advocating for CRT on Twitter when many of its precepts would be very challenging to their broader politics. People want to believe that their political culture is normal and the other side is crazy, so they sand away the edges of the philosophies they’re espousing. But there genuinely is some wild-ass shit in CRT stuff and the broader “antiracism” movement, such as the idea that math is racist. Because it’s 2021 and culture war reigns in all things, liberals who defend CRT don’t want to accept that such wild shit exists. So they go on Twitter and express performative outrage at conservative ignorance about CRT while remaining entirely ignorant of what CRT is themselves in order to avoid having the nasty feeling of being pretty much conventional center-left Dems who suddenly believe, for example, that free speech is not just undesirable but has always been a tool for maintaining white supremacy... now respectability in mainstream liberal circles requires elaborate and showy deference to anything that labels itself a part of the Black social justice movement, even while those respectable mainstream liberals continue to maintain a generally bloodless approach to politics where the most radical things on offer are, like, tweaking the Earned Income Tax Credit. This combination of deference to certain kinds of radical ideas with an existentially milquetoast party is, obviously, not sustainable. The way it played out last year was that the radicalism in substance was dropped while the radical posturing endured. We didn’t Defund the Police, but we did spend a lot of political capital convincing people that the Democrat were anti-cop. This does not seem ideal for anyone. Jeet Heer is emblematic of a sea of liberal cope on this issue. I’ve been digging around his tweets on CRT and it’s a mess. He simultaneously wants to argue that a) conservative critics of CRT don’t know anything about CRT and are attacking it completely cynically, and b) that most defenders of CRT aren’t defending the anti-liberal attitudes summarized in the passage Yglesias highlighted, which he dismisses as a “fairly esoteric scholarly body of thought.” Hey Jeet, buddy: critical race theory itself is a fairly esoteric scholarly body of thought. It’s an approach to legal education first, and one that was until very recently not very popular even among legal educators. It has seen an explosion of interest in the past year because the kind of soggy liberals who teach at law schools have decided that they need to look busy when it comes to race or risk losing their cush gigs... The Democratic intelligentsia must appear to accept Black radicalism even while their base rejects it and they know that there are electoral advantages to distancing themselves from it"
What Happened To You? - "“What happened to you?” It’s a question I get a lot on Twitter. “When did you become so far right?” “Why have you become a white supremacist, transphobic, misogynistic eugenicist?” Or, of course: “See! I told you who he really was! Just take the hood off, Sully!” It’s trolling, mainly. And it’s a weapon for some in the elite to wield against others in the kind of emotional blackmail spiral that was first pioneered on elite college campuses. But it’s worth answering, a year after I was booted from New York Magazine for my unacceptable politics. Because it seems to me that the dynamic should really be the other way round. The real question is: what happened to you?... Take a big step back. Observe what has happened in our discourse since around 2015... What is it? It is, I’d argue, the sudden, rapid, stunning shift in the belief system of the American elites. It has sent the whole society into a profound cultural dislocation. It is, in essence, an ongoing moral panic against the specter of “white supremacy,” which is now bizarrely regarded as an accurate description of the largest, freest, most successful multiracial democracy in human history. We all know it’s happened. The elites, increasingly sequestered within one political party and one media monoculture, educated by colleges and private schools that have become hermetically sealed against any non-left dissent, have had a “social justice reckoning” these past few years. And they have been ideologically transformed, with countless cascading consequences. Take it from a NYT woke star, Kara Swisher, who celebrated this week that “the country’s social justice movement is reshaping how we talk about, well, everything.” She’s right — and certainly about the NYT and all mainstream journalism. This is the media hub of the “social justice movement.” And the core point of that movement, its essential point, is that liberalism is no longer enough. Not just not enough, but itself a means to perpetuate “white supremacy,” designed to oppress, harm and terrorize minorities and women, and in dire need of dismantling. That’s a huge deal. And it explains a lot. The reason “critical race theory” is a decent approximation for this new orthodoxy is that it was precisely this exasperation with liberalism’s seeming inability to end racial inequality in a generation that prompted Derrick Bell et al. to come up with the term in the first place, and Kimberlé Crenshaw to subsequently universalize it beyond race to every other possible dimension of human identity (“intersectionality”). A specter of invisible and unfalsifiable “systems” and “structures” and “internal biases” arrived to hover over the world. Some of this critique was specific and helpful: the legacy of redlining, the depth of the wealth gap. But much was tendentious post-modern theorizing. The popular breakthrough was Ta-Nehisi Coates’ essay on reparations in the Atlantic and his subsequent, gut-wrenching memoir, “Between The World And Me.” He combined the worldview and vocabulary of CRT with the vivid lived experience of his own biography. He is a beautifully gifted writer, and I am not surprised he had such an emotional impact, even if, in my view, the power of his prose blinded many to the radical implications of the ideology he surrendered to, in what many of his blog readers called his “blue period.” The movement is much broader than race — as anyone who is dealing with matters of sex and gender will tell you. The best moniker I’ve read to describe this mishmash of postmodern thought and therapy culture ascendant among liberal white elites is Wesley Yang’s coinage: “the successor ideology.”... In the successor ideology, there is no escape, no refuge, from the ongoing nightmare of oppression and violence — and you are either fighting this and “on the right side of history,” or you are against it and abetting evil. There is no neutrality. No space for skepticism. No room for debate. No space even for staying silent. (Silence, remember, is violence — perhaps the most profoundly anti-liberal slogan ever invented.) And that tells you about the will to power behind it. Liberalism leaves you alone. The successor ideology will never let go of you. Liberalism is only concerned with your actions. The successor ideology is concerned with your mind, your psyche, and the deepest recesses of your soul. Liberalism will let you do your job, and let you keep your politics private. S.I. will force you into a struggle session as a condition for employment... I have exactly the same principles and support most of the same policies I did under Barack Obama. In fact, I’ve moved left on economic and foreign policy since then. It’s Democrats who have taken a sudden, giant swerve away from their recent past...
'“That was a great celebration of African-American history.” To which Obama said he replied: “No, no, no, no, no. That was not a great celebration of African-American history. That was a celebration of American history.”'
How much further can you get from the ideology of the 1619 Project — that rejects any notion of white contributions to black freedom?... A plank of successor ideology, for example, is that the only and exclusive reason for racial inequality is “white supremacy.” Culture, economics, poverty, criminality, family structure: all are irrelevant, unless seen as mere emanations of white control. Even discussing these complicated factors is racist, according to Ibram X Kendi...
'It means taking full responsibility for own lives'...
To say this today would evoke instant accusations of being a white supremacist and racist. That’s how far the left has moved: Obama as an enabler of white supremacy...
Look how far the left’s war on liberalism has gone. Due process? If you’re a male on campus, gone. Privacy? Stripped away — by anonymous rape accusations, exposure of private emails, violence against people’s private homes, screaming at folks in restaurants, sordid exposés of sexual encounters, eagerly published by woke mags. Non-violence? Exceptions are available if you want to “punch a fascist.” Free speech? Only if you don’t mind being fired and ostracized as a righteous consequence. Free association? You’ve got to be kidding. Religious freedom? Illegitimate bigotry. Equality? Only group equity counts now, and individuals of the wrong identity can and must be discriminated against. Color-blindness? Another word for racism. Mercy? Not for oppressors. Intent? Irrelevant. Objectivity? A racist lie. Science? A manifestation of white supremacy. Biological sex? Replaced by socially constructed gender so that women have penises and men have periods. The rule of law? Not for migrants or looters. Borders? Racist. Viewpoint diversity? A form of violence against the oppressed... We are going through the greatest radicalization of the elites since the 1960s. This isn’t coming from the ground up. It’s being imposed ruthlessly from above, marshaled with a fusillade of constant MSM propaganda, and its victims are often the poor and the black and the brown... Biden has also aided and abetted and justified this radicalism"
Risk-Free Racism: Whiteness and So-Called “Free Speech” - "White people are free to engage in speculation about the nature of intelligence, without risk to themselves, in a situation where the costs are borne entirely by minoritized groups. These debates continually reinstate the possibility of a race/educability link (despite its debunking in the natural and social sciences) and reinforce common racist stereotypes that can be seen at work in the racial disparities associated with hierarchical educational grouping practices (such as tracking in the United States and England’s “gifted and talented” initiative) which systematically advantage White young people while disadvantaging their African-American and Black-British counterparts... I conclude with a critical race perspective on the operation of so called “free speech” and the problems that arise as a result of the majority White population’s power to define what is viewed as “rational” and “acceptable.”... White people do not generally risk demonization and stereotyping as a result of criminal or other negative acts by other White individuals. In addition, Whiteness operates to invest speech with different degrees of legitimacy, such that already debunked racist beliefs can enjoy repeated public airings where they are lauded as scientific and rational by many White listeners, who simultaneously define as irrational, emotional, or exaggerated the opposing views of people of color."
Weird. I thought CRT was only about the law
Strange how teaching accurate history is about limiting free speech
Of course, it is taken for granted that white collar crime is more dangerous than violent crime and that people of colour do not have "irrational, emotional, or exaggerated" views (their actual views and words are barely mentioned, and no attempt is made to refute the claims)
Meme - Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias: "- 64 percent say they've heard at least "a little" about Critical Race Theory
- Of them 54 percent (i.e. 35% of the total) say they know what it is
- Of them it's 38/58 favorable/unfavorable split
Of course obviously there is no way that many people know what Critical Race Theory is, but Delgado & Stefancic provide a quick definition right at the beginning of Critical Race Theory: An Introduction if you want to join The Discourse.
A. What Is Critical Race Theory?
The critical race theory (CRT) movement is a collection of activists and scholars engaged in studying and transforming the relation- ship among race, racism, and power. The movement considers many of the same issues that conventional civil rights and ethnic stud- ies discourses take up but places them in a broader perspective that includes economics, history, setting, group and self-interest, and emotions and the unconscious. Unlike trad- itional civil rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foun-
The weird thing about Twitter is that lots of people who I know perfectly well embrace incrementalism, step by step progress, the liberal order, and traditional civil rights discourse will say you shouldn't criticize this because The Bad are against it."
Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis on Twitter - "If critical race theory threatens your Christianity, you may be worshipping whiteness."
CRT is about treating different races differently so it's no wonder it threatens Christianity. Then again, race blindness is whiteness too, so that figures
- "The new standards require instruction for middle school students to include “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit,” a document listing the standards and posted in the Florida Department of Education website said. When high school students learn about events such as the 1920 Ocoee massacre, the new rules require that instruction include “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.”... “How can our students ever be equipped for the future if they don’t have a full, honest picture of where we’ve come from? Florida’s students deserve a world-class education that equips them to be successful adults who can help heal our nation’s divisions rather than deepen them,” Andrew Spar, the association’s president, said in a statement. “Gov. DeSantis is pursuing a political agenda guaranteed to set good people against one another, and in the process he’s cheating our kids. They deserve the full truth of American history, the good and the bad,” Spar added."
The ‘anti-racism’ movement is sowing deeper divisions | The Spectator - "Have you ever claimed to be ‘not racist’? If so, sorry, but you’re a bigot. Should this seem incoherent, then you’re clearly not well versed in critical race theory: a once niche academic field that has gone mainstream and popularised concepts such as ‘white privilege’, ‘white fragility’ and ‘systemic racism’. According to Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Anti-Racist, ‘the claim of “not racist” neutrality is a mask for racism’. Alana Lentin, author of Why Race Still Matters, takes it a step further, arguing that to be ‘not racist’ is ‘a form of discursive racist violence’. If you declare yourself not racist, it’s an unequivocal sign you’re an unrepentant white supremacist. Confused yet? It gets worse. To be truly committed to racial equality, theorists argue, one must be ‘anti-racist’. Of course, no civilised person would be in favour of racism, so ‘anti-racism’ sounds a wonderful idea. However, it does not mean, as one might presume, ‘to be opposed to racism’. Rather, it is a core tenet of critical race theory which presupposes that racism permeates all human interaction. In other words, failure to observe racism does not mean that it is absent, but rather that one has not successfully detected it. As Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay put it in their book Cynical Theories, the question is not ‘Did racism take place?’ but ‘How did racism manifest in that situation?’ Those trained in critical race theory are apparently uniquely qualified to make such determinations; the rest of us have to take them on faith. Across the country, institutions and businesses are falling over themselves to assert their credentials in line with this new trend... The most damaging aspect of this mindset is that it renders impossible the task of rooting out racism. Falsely assuming that racism is everywhere, and insisting that people fundamentally opposed to discrimination are nonetheless complicit in white supremacy, is guaranteed to engender resentment and sow racial division. Moreover, it provides cover for genuine bigots who are able to claim a degree of support they simply do not have. When Richardson appeals to ‘lived experience’ in lieu of data, he is making the case that anecdotal evidence somehow provides a secure basis for analysis. Worse, he is disregarding the experiences of those who do not share his worldview. In short, ‘lived experience’ seems to matter only if it conforms to certain preconceptions. A Guardian investigation into racism at UK universities last year demonstrates how research can be interpreted to prove the opposite of what it reveals. Statistics from 131 universities found that from 2014 to 2019 there were 996 formal complaints of racism, of which 367 were upheld. On average, therefore, there were only 1.5 formal complaints each year in any given institution, with only 73 upheld among a university population running into the millions. The Guardian’s front-page headline told a different story: ‘Revealed: the scale of racism at universities’. According to the article, the data constitutes ‘widespread evidence of discrimination’ and shows racism in higher education is ‘endemic’. When journalists, academics and politicians advance a worldview in direct opposition to the observable truth, they risk creating what’s known as a ‘legitimation crisis’ by which trust in figures of authority is irreparably depleted."
When liberals hate teaching more facts rather than less and are opposed to nuance, because all that threatens their race-baiting narrative. The duplicity and doublespeak are so transparent
Clearly those who don't trust the "Experts" are the problem
