See also: the Illuminati
Ah yes the old “crypto” ploy. They’re hiding so we can’t detect them but we know they’re there! We totally know. We know for certain. Even though they’re hiding.
Tip Jar
Ah yes the old “crypto” ploy. They’re hiding so we can’t detect them but we know they’re there! We totally know. We know for certain. Even though they’re hiding.
Marcus has an excellent layman’s summary of the whole CRT thing. A very enjoyable read. Marcus is always an “enjoyable” read, if unrelenting bleakness and destruction of any vestiges of patriotism is enjoyable. :)
https://freethoughtblogs.com/stderr/2021/06/21/some-notes-on-critical-race-theory/
Another way is to start of registry of political viewpoints of professors and students:
https://www.salon.com/2021/06/23/desantis-signs-bill-requiring-florida-students-professors-to-register-political-views-with-state/
Viewpoint policing: it’s not just for liberals anymore. (It never was.)
(Why do people tweet screenshots of tweets instead of retweeting? Always makes me think they don’t want you to click through. I’m just going to assume Sullivan’s article isn’t as bad as they’re claiming then.)
I’m with John McWhorter on this one. There is some insane stuff going on in schools that is completely inappropriate, so quibbling over whether it’s actually CRT is beside the point, especially when a solid case that there is a lineage from it to the current events can be made.
Regardless of whether society is perfect (we all know it’s not), kids should be taught to treat each as equals. We don’t need to saddle 6-year-olds with a bunch of historical baggage and make them feel like oppressors or the oppressed based on their skin color. Let them be 6-year-olds. Conservatives may be crazy in many (most?) ways, but they’re right to ask what is wrong with the people pushing this stuff.
Skeletor: Is that really what is happening in general, though? I don’t consider myself really an “oppressor” but to ignore the realities of American history IS ignorant. How many six year olds are being taught this anyway? I think it is as likely that “conservatives” are really pushing a whitewashed view of history that ignores certain realities. That is unhealthy to me.
Killing the myth of American Exceptionalism and the American Dream would go a long way without having to deal with whatever CRT actually is. I still don’t know what it is (I used to think I did) and I’ve actually read some Derrick Bell and Kimberle Krenshaw.
Because tweets disappear or become inaccessible. That’s happened several times here, where a posted tweet stopped showing after the tweet itself was removed or hidden.
No, “quibbling over whether it’s actually CRT” is not beside the point, any more than it’s beside the point to say the Democratic Party is not socialist or communist, or to say that radical feminists are not trying to genocide trans people, or to say that Jews are not drinking the blood of Christian infants, and so on. It’s not “quibbling,” either. (Also coming from you that’s rich – you quibble over everything.) The understanding of the US history with race is a massively important subject, and of course it’s worth trying to counter the stupid lies about teaching theory to kindergarten children.
It’s futile saying any of this because you’re a hit-and-run commenter, but you’re horribly good at goading me into responding to your bullshit.
Because not everyone is on twitter.
Because not everyone can see every tweet or retweet.
Because some of us (me) are currently in twitter jail for daring to defend women against the TRA narrative.
And finally, because it’s Ophelia’s blog and as such she gets to post how and what she likes, without asking your permission.
Are you an over entitled man child? Askin’ for a friend.
Heh. Thank you Roj.
I suggest that, before parroting any more right-wing talking-points, Skeletor should read the numerous articles readily available on web-sites, including conservative ones like the Bulwark, about the misrepresentation of CRT, and watch both General Milley’s response to the execrable Matt Gaetz and Joy Reid’s take-down on MSNBC of Christopher Rufo, his pretensions to expertise, his cynicism and dishonesty.
My experience of observing kids (I have none of my own, so I am not blinded by how wonderful my own are) is that at very young age they are generally pretty oblivious to matters like sex, race and socioeconomic status. That ends abruptly at the point they start soaking up their parents and other adults world view. Then they become little squawk boxes parroting every bit of racist, sexist, classist, homophobic bullshit they’ve heard, all without a shred of understanding.
I can see the value in getting in early creating awareness and reinforcing empathy, before it becomes irretrievably atrophied. None of that involves making kids feel like oppressors.
I can see the academic elements of CRT having strong application in both New Zealand and Australia. Both countries had, and still have, laws on the books that were explicitly created to control and disadvantage indigenous people. These were often created and framed in a ‘protective’ way using the prevailing paternalistic views of the time; but actually created decades of economic and therefore social disadvantage for the affected peoples. Even as late as the early 1980’s, New Zealand passed a law that stripped older Samoans of the opportunity to become NZ citizens – a law that is still on our books. This was in the context of the oil induced economic shocks of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, when cheap Pacifika labour was no longer wanted and it became convenient to crack down on those who had overstayed their visas. Dawn raids and punitive racist laws and policies ensued. All despite the fact that by far the majority of overstayers were British, American and European white people.
let’s have less prattling pretence that all is fine and a bit more honest and rather confronting recognition that the underlying structure of our societies is warped.
You can’t build a tall building on a bad foundation.
In order to criticize current trends in K-12 education, Rufo (and others) realised that it needed to be named. For better or worse, “CRT” is the name being applied. Those replying “but it’s not CRT” are effectively trying to thwart criticism by preventing the problem being named.
So superficially it’s a semantic issue, but behind that is a power struggle. There’s a good thread on all of this here: https://twitter.com/wokal_distance/status/1407887891888369665
I think the critics have it right, CRT (or whatever you want to call it) in K-12 education is not just teaching an honest history of race and racism and pointing at the role of institutions and structures, it goes far beyond that into a radical, divisive and harmful ideology.
#7:
Of course they are not “teaching theory” to young children, but they are indeed implementing that theory in how they teach young children, including that “whiteness” is intrinsically oppressive, that whites are inevitably oppressors, that blacks are inevitably oppressed, and all the rest of it.
Maybe they should just call it “White Fragility” because (I think?) that’s what we’re all really concerned about.
Rob, one of the difficulties is that wokism is all of a bunch. I am happy for my kids to be told in school that inequality exists, and that systemic racism continues to be a problem, and that nobody should be mean to gay people… but it goes on from there. It goes on to where girls in elementary school feel they need to declare that they are lesbians because they really lurv their besties.
Complicated ideas get dumbed down so elementary school teachers (some of whom are remarkably poorly educated themselves) can teach them in short sentences and simple words to children. And then children’s minds grab upon the matters discussed in unpredictable ways.
I remember my brother used to love to crochet when he was in first grade. He was bullied for it by other kids and the teacher. Then he learned to say “male chauvinist pig,” and things got more fun. In his case, I think the diagnosis was correct.
But I am not sure my ten year old daughter needs to have a drama about whether she should tell her grandparents she’s a lesbian.
Are they really? I remain skeptical. Do we have an epidemic of leftist, cultural marxists running our kindergartens leading kids in a “two minute hate” of white people just before nap time?
I warmly agree with Papito’s point about certain elementary-school teachers, who in my experience of them hundreds of years ago, were in some cases not only poorly educated but remarkably stupid, particularly when it came to instilling what they supposed to be morals in us. To be fair, there were some good ones as well.
Without Ophelia’s screen shots I would never see them, as I don’t go to Twiitter if I can avoid it.
And as Roj said,
I wouldn’t refer to her as “people” any more than I would call her “they”.
To be fair to Skeletor:
Ophelia posted a link to Lindsay Beyerstein’s tweet, which WordPress rendered as a link with an image. If you click on the image, it takes you to the tweet. Ophelia did not post a screenshot.
Lindsay Beyerstein’s tweet referenced another tweet. The reference was a screenshot of the other tweet, rather than a retweet or reply.
Skeletor was questioning Beyerstein’s actions, not Ophelia’s.
Beyerstein perhaps used a screenshot because she thought the tweet she was referring to might disappear. Or perhaps to avoid giving the tweet author a mention. Or perhaps because she likes to do it that way.
Athel and Roj, you’re confused.
Ophelia did not post a screenshot of a tweet; She embedded the linked to tweet.
It is the linked tweet by Lindsay Beyerstein that contains a screenshot of a tweet by Andrew Sullivan instead of linking to it, and it is that practice which Skeletor is complaining about (and “people like Lindsay Beyerstein” I suppose).
Tim, when I was a kid I thought of teachers as children who hadn’t reached escape velocity.
But I don’t just want to bust on teachers. Some are great, even ones who can’t spell.
I only want to point out the inevitable process where, when something complicated is condensed to the point it can be communicated to the lowest common denominator in elementary school, it will be built back up in weird ways by imaginative children on the other side of the pedagogical choke point.
Papito, I completely agree about that ‘inevitable process’. And I also agree that some teachers are great, even when they can’t spell.
Coel @ 12 –
Suddenly agency disappears in the second sentence. Rufo (and others) realised that it needed to be named, and then somehow, perhaps via a miracle, “CRT” is the name being applied. Why didn’t Rufo and others come up with a better name? A new name, that didn’t already have a meaning that had nothing to do with current trends in K-12 education? And no I’m not trying to thwart criticism by preventing the problem being named, “effectively” or otherwise.
What’s with this pretense that it doesn’t matter what we call things? How can we have any kind of intelligent or useful discussion if we adopt inaccurate names for what we’re talking about?
It’s just ordinary, everyday, commonplace critical thinking and skepticism and How To Argue Properly and so on that it’s important to be clear, which entails getting the terms right. I didn’t make that up, and it’s not a pretext for something else.
Ophelia: #22
Because these trends in K-12 do derive from the CRT that was first developed in university departments, initially in law departments. Thus the label seems to me to be sufficiently appropriate. CRT first took over university social-science departments and from there took over teacher education and is now strongly influencing K-12 pedagogy and curricula.
Indeed, for a decade or more activists openly promoted CRT. Then, rather recently, conservatives led by Rufo adopted anti-CRT as a rallying call, and the response is now that this is not CRT.
But if we all called it “Critical Whiteness Studies” instead then ok. (Indeed, CWS is a subset of CRT, which itself is a subset of “Critical Social Justice”, where CSJ has other branches including “Queer Theory”.)
I will say that, while we don’t necessarily present CRT in our college classes (I assume the appropriate ones do, but cannot speak to that), we are expected to utilize certain things that come from the current thinking, whether it is CRT or not. Our students come into the school with certain assumptions they have been given from kindergarten, and in the past few years, I have seen those assumptions change. The assumption of toxic whiteness is being taught, not only to students but to faculty, who are made to feel that if we are white, we shouldn’t even be there, but since we are and they can’t get rid of us, we’ll just have to recognize that we are not good people and adjust accordingly. We are taught that allowing our wedding picture to show in our remote classes is microaggression against LGB people. We are taught that we hate Hispanic students, even if we don’t realize it, and treat them the same as others. We are taught about a lot of things in our mandatory inservices, and way too many of the faculty are internalizing messages such as the evils of western thought, including objectivity, mathematics, science, and critical thinking. Western religions are seen as intrinsically bad (I don’t actually disagree with that) while eastern religions are intrinsically good. They are taught the noble savage, to the point that I cannot get my students to realize that Native Americans actively managed the system to keep the prairies in the shape they were in when we arrived.
Environmental Science has been taken over by Sustainability (which has morphed into little more than a subset of Economics, and is often just neoliberal politics and economics with no science). Gender studies is taken over by trans. Young white kids are purporting to stand up for black kids by spotting microaggressions the black kids might not think are microaggressions. Kids think memes and YouTube videos equal arguments and evidence.
I have no beef with the core of CRT, since I have seen tons of evidence that our system is racist at the core, and I would like to see that changed. But what is being taught to teachers, who then carry that into their pedagogy, is destructive and frightening.
See that’s a whole basket of things. Critical HR Theory? Or more like Uncritical HR Theory? Ed School Bollocks? Managerspeak?
What are mandatory inservices exactly?
There are different target audiences and consumers in play here. The actual law school CRT is presumably for lawyers and legislators, and people who can reform institutions. HR stuff is a whole different thing. It is, in general, a lot more stupid. Education schools are another branch, and they’re notoriously prone to grabbing and mangling the latest New Ideas.
A mandatory inservice is a day when all teachers are required to attend a meeting for various purposes, usually listen to speakers who aren’t teaching students tell teachers who are teaching students the correct way to teach students.
The main focus on in-service in recent years has been diversity and microaggressions. I suspect one reason is that kids are coming in to college with expectations that the teachers will genuflect before them, and that the white teachers will recognize what racist shits they are. They are given a lot of what is being debated here as CRT (whether it is or not) in the K-12, and they buy into the idea of white women’s tears and white fragility because they imbibed in in their schools. Of course, in Nebraska (and I assume everywhere in varying numbers), we have the opposite phenomenon that often outweighs: the racist kids who are taught at home that everything the teacher says is wrong and bad, and they are superior, especially if said teacher is woman or person of color.
Well, inklast, I find that appalling, though I confess it doesn’t surprise me – it accords all too well with what I have heard of the ever greater powers given to ‘management’, always anxious to latch on to the latest fashions, over teaching-staff, and the general disrespect for teachers that seems to have been fostered in Anglo-Saxondom.