Critical Race Theory

[AUFAN78 3,894]

Like Michael Knowles or not, this is a real clip showing an example of CRT in action. I know several have come out recently in support and several against. Well here is a quick look inside the instruction. Change your mind?

 

[CoffeeTiger 5,088]

I don't agree with the woman in this video and I don't necessarily have strong opinions about CRT one way or the other, but I do believe that Republicans are propagandizing it and using CRT as a scare tactic to try and convince supporters that CRT is being taught in public schools (it's not), and that our children are being taught to hate America and hate white people (they aren't). CRT has been all over Conservative media, Fox, NationalReview, etc.  for months with commentators ranting and raving about how evil it is, and is one of the biggest issues (along with trying to prove fraud in the 2020 election) that Republicans are focused on right now. Many states have already pushed forward bills to try and outlaw CRT from being taught in schools, when in a majority of cases the Republican representative proposing it doesn't even know what CRT is and can't give any examples of it. They just know they saw Tucker Carlson talk about it on FOX, and they want to ban it. 

Teaching about slavery and racism in America isn't CRT.

[caleb1633 1,418]

1 minute ago, CoffeeTiger said:

I don't agree with the woman in this video and I don't necessarily have strong opinions about CRT one way or the other, but I do believe that Republicans are propagandizing it and using CRT as a scare tactic to try and convince supporters that CRT is being taught in public schools (it's not), and that our children are being taught to hate America and hate white people (they aren't). CRT has been all over Conservative media, Fox, NationalReview, etc.  for months with commentators ranting and raving about how evil it is, and is one of the biggest issues (along with trying to prove fraud in the 2020 election) that Republicans are focused on right now. Many states have already pushed forward bills to try and outlaw CRT from being taught in schools, when in a majority of cases the Republican representative proposing it doesn't even know what CRT is and can't give any examples of it. They just know they saw Tucker Carlson talk about it on FOX, and they want to ban it. 

Teaching about slavery and racism in America isn't CRT.

Wrong. CRT is absolutely being taught in schools and it is teaching students to hate America and others based on race.

 

There are multiple BS responses the far left is providing such as, "You don't even know what CRT is!" Or "This isn't really CRT!" Or "CRT is just an analytical tool." Or they'll flat out lie and say that they're trying to prevent racism and slavery from being taught in schools. This isn't about not teaching slavery and racism. It's about not teaching students distorted histories that are proven to be factually incorrect in order to perpetuate a narrative that America is a fundamentally, irredeemably racist nation (e.g., The 1619 Project) and that all white people are guilty of racism and continue perpetuating it unknowingly.

 

https://www.city-journal.org/racial-equity-programs-seattle-schools

 

https://www.city-journal.org/radicalism-in-san-diego-schools

 

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/20459636/oppression-matrix.pdf

 

https://thepostmillennial.com/fifth-graders-in-philadelphia-forced-to-celebrate-black-communism-simulate-black-power-rally-to-free-angela-davis-from-prison

 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/nypost.com/2021/02/24/buffalo-students-told-all-white-people-play-a-part-in-systemic-racism/amp/

 

https://www.thecollegefix.com/california-county-teacher-training-u-s-a-parasitic-system-due-to-invasion-of-white-men/

[AUFAN78 3,894]

6 minutes ago, CoffeeTiger said:

I don't agree with the woman in this video and I don't necessarily have strong opinions about CRT one way or the other, but I do believe that Republicans are propagandizing it and using CRT as a scare tactic to try and convince supporters that CRT is being taught in public schools (it's not), and that our children are being taught to hate America and hate white people (they aren't). CRT has been all over Conservative media, Fox, NationalReview, etc.  for months with commentators ranting and raving about how evil it is, and is one of the biggest issues (along with trying to prove fraud in the 2020 election) that Republicans are focused on right now. Many states have already pushed forward bills to try and outlaw CRT from being taught in schools, when in a majority of cases the Republican representative proposing it doesn't even know what CRT is and can't give any examples of it. They just know they saw Tucker Carlson talk about it on FOX, and they want to ban it. 

Teaching about slavery and racism in America isn't CRT.

There are plenty of similar videos out there. Some from school aged children speaking openly and honestly. This is real. Your eyes did not trick you. 

I cannot recall anyone complaining about the teachings of slavery nor racism. It's history and has always been taught. That's merely a liberal distraction to avoid the topic of CRT and how it is being taught.  Again, your eyes did not deceive you. 

[autigeremt 6,590]

Segregation is the end goal. Firmly believe it.

[homersapien 11,357]

"This sorry sight is unsurprising given that Republicans have all but given up on the notion of governance. At the national level, they consume themselves with race-baiting (e.g., scaring Americans about immigration and critical race theory), assailing private companies (e.g., corporations that defend voting rights, social media platforms, book publishers) and perpetrating the most ludicrous and dangerous lie in memory — that the 2020 election was stolen."

 

From:

Why so many Republicans talk about nonsense

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/20/why-so-many-republicans-talk-about-nonsense/

[homersapien 11,357]

What Is Critical Race Theory, and Why Is It Under Attack?

https://www.edweek.org/leadership/what-is-critical-race-theory-and-why-is-it-under-attack/2021/05

(emphasis mine)

Is “critical race theory” a way of understanding how American racism has shaped public policy, or a divisive discourse that pits people of color against white people? Liberals and conservatives are in sharp disagreement.

The topic has exploded in the public arena this spring—especially in K-12, where numerous state legislatures are debating bills seeking to ban its use in the classroom.

In truth, the divides are not nearly as neat as they may seem. The events of the last decade have increased public awareness about things like housing segregation, the impacts of criminal justice policy in the 1990s, and the legacy of enslavement on Black Americans. But there is much less consensus on what the government’s role should be in righting these past wrongs. Add children and schooling into the mix and the debate becomes especially volatile.

School boards, superintendents, even principals and teachers are already facing questions about critical race theory, and there are significant disagreements even among experts about its precise definition as well as how its tenets should inform K-12 policy and practice. This explainer is meant only as a starting point to help educators grasp core aspects of the current debate.

Just what is critical race theory anyway?

Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that racism is a social construct, and that it is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.

The basic tenets of critical race theory, or CRT, emerged out of a framework for legal analysis in the late 1970s and early 1980s created by legal scholars Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado, among others.

A good example is when, in the 1930s, government officials literally drew lines around areas deemed poor financial risks, often explicitly due to the racial composition of inhabitants. Banks subsequently refused to offer mortgages to Black people in those areas.

Today, those same patterns of discrimination live on through facially race-blind policies, like single-family zoning that prevents the building of affordable housing in advantaged, majority-white neighborhoods and, thus, stymies racial desegregation efforts.

CRT also has ties to other intellectual currents, including the work of sociologists and literary theorists who studied links between political power, social organization, and language. And its ideas have since informed other fields, like the humanities, the social sciences, and teacher education.

This academic understanding of critical race theory differs from representation in recent popular books and, especially, from its portrayal by critics—often, though not exclusively, conservative Republicans. Critics charge that the theory leads to negative dynamics, such as a focus on group identity over universal, shared traits; divides people into “oppressed” and “oppressor” groups; and urges intolerance.

Thus, there is a good deal of confusion over what CRT means, as well as its relationship to other terms, like “anti-racism” and “social justice,” with which it is often conflated.

To an extent, the term “critical race theory” is now cited as the basis of all diversity and inclusion efforts regardless of how much it’s actually informed those programs.

One conservative organization, the Heritage Foundation, recently attributed a whole host of issues to CRT, including the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, LGBTQ clubs in schools, diversity training in federal agencies and organizations, California’s recent ethnic studies model curriculum, the free-speech debate on college campuses, and alternatives to exclusionary discipline—such as the Promise program in Broward County, Fla., that some parents blame for the Parkland school shootings. “When followed to its logical conclusion, CRT is destructive and rejects the fundamental ideas on which our constitutional republic is based,” the organization claimed.

(A good parallel here is how popular ideas of the common core learning standards grew to encompass far more than what those standards said on paper.)

Does critical race theory say all white people are racist? Isn’t that racist, too?

The theory says that racism is part of everyday life, so people—white or nonwhite—who don’t intend to be racist can nevertheless make choices that fuel racism.

Some critics claim that the theory advocates discriminating against white people in order to achieve equity. They mainly aim those accusations at theorists who advocate for policies that explicitly take race into account. (The writer Ibram X. Kendi, whose recent popular book How to Be An Antiracist suggests that discrimination that creates equity can be considered anti-racist, is often cited in this context.)

Fundamentally, though, the disagreement springs from different conceptions of racism. CRT thus puts an emphasis on outcomes, not merely on individuals’ own beliefs, and it calls on these outcomes to be examined and rectified. Among lawyers, teachers, policymakers, and the general public, there are many disagreements about how precisely to do those things, and to what extent race should be explicitly appealed to or referred to in the process.

Here’s a helpful illustration to keep in mind in understanding this complex idea. In a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court school-assignment case on whether race could be a factor in maintaining diversity in K-12 schools, Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion famously concluded: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” But during oral arguments, then-justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said: “It’s very hard for me to see how you can have a racial objective but a nonracial means to get there.”

All these different ideas grow out of longstanding, tenacious intellectual debates. Critical race theory emerged out of postmodernist thought, which tends to be skeptical of the idea of universal values, objective knowledge, individual merit, Enlightenment rationalism, and liberalism—tenets that conservatives tend to hold dear.

What does any of this have to do with K-12 education?

Scholars who study critical race theory in education look at how policies and practices in K-12 education contribute to persistent racial inequalities in education, and advocate for ways to change them. Among the topics they’ve studied: racially segregated schools, the underfunding of majority-Black and Latino school districts, disproportionate disciplining of Black students, barriers to gifted programs and selective-admission high schools, and curricula that reinforce racist ideas.

Critical race theory is not a synonym for culturally relevant teaching, which emerged in the 1990s. This teaching approach seeks to affirm students’ ethnic and racial backgrounds and is intellectually rigorous. But it’s related in that one of its aims is to help students identify and critique the causes of social inequality in their own lives.

Many educators support, to one degree or another, culturally relevant teaching and other strategies to make schools feel safe and supportive for Black students and other underserved populations. (Students of color make up the majority of school-aged children.) But they don’t necessarily identify these activities as CRT-related.

As one teacher-educator put it: “The way we usually see any of this in a classroom is: ‘Have I thought about how my Black kids feel? And made a space for them, so that they can be successful?’ That is the level I think it stays at, for most teachers.” Like others interviewed for this explainer, the teacher-educator did not want to be named out of fear of online harassment.

An emerging subtext among some critics is that curricular excellence can’t coexist alongside culturally responsive teaching or anti-racist work. Their argument goes that efforts to change grading practices or make the curriculum less Eurocentric will ultimately harm Black students, or hold them to a less high standard.

As with CRT in general, its popular representation in schools has been far less nuanced. A recent poll by the advocacy group Parents Defending Education claimed some schools were teaching that “white people are inherently privileged, while Black and other people of color are inherently oppressed and victimized”; that “achieving racial justice and equality between racial groups requires discriminating against people based on their whiteness”; and that “the United States was founded on racism.”

Thus much of the current debate appears to spring not from the academic texts, but from fear among critics that students—especially white students—will be exposed to supposedly damaging or self-demoralizing ideas.

While some district officials have issued mission statements, resolutions, or spoken about changes in their policies using some of the discourse of CRT, it’s not clear to what degree educators are explicitly teaching the concepts, or even using curriculum materials or other methods that implicitly draw on them. For one thing, scholars say, much scholarship on CRT is written in academic language or published in journals not easily accessible to K-12 teachers.

What is going on with these proposals to ban critical race theory in schools?

As of mid-May, legislation purporting to outlaw CRT in schools has passed in Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Tennessee and have been proposed in various other statehouses.

The bills are so vaguely written that it’s unclear what they will affirmatively cover.

Could a teacher who wants to talk about a factual instance of state-sponsored racism—like the establishment of Jim Crow, the series of laws that prevented Black Americans from voting or holding office and separated them from white people in public spaces—be considered in violation of these laws?

It’s also unclear whether these new bills are constitutional, or whether they impermissibly restrict free speech.

It would be extremely difficult, in any case, to police what goes on inside hundreds of thousands of classrooms. But social studies educators fear that such laws could have a chilling effect on teachers who might self-censor their own lessons out of concern for parent or administrator complaints.

As English teacher Mike Stein told Chalkbeat Tennessee about the new law: “History teachers can not adequately teach about the Trail of Tears, the Civil War, and the civil rights movement. English teachers will have to avoid teaching almost any text by an African American author because many of them mention racism to various extents.”

The laws could also become a tool to attack other pieces of the curriculum, including ethnic studies and “action civics”—an approach to civics education that asks students to research local civic problems and propose solutions.

How is this related to other debates over what’s taught in the classroom amid K-12 culture wars?

The charge that schools are indoctrinating students in a harmful theory or political mindset is a longstanding one, historians note. CRT appears to be the latest salvo in this ongoing debate.

In the early and mid-20th century, the concern was about socialism or Marxism. The conservative American Legion, beginning in the 1930s, sought to rid schools of progressive-minded textbooks that encouraged students to consider economic inequality; two decades later the John Birch Society raised similar criticisms about school materials. As with CRT criticisms, the fear was that students would be somehow harmed by exposure to these ideas.

As the school-aged population became more diverse, these debates have been inflected through the lens of race and ethnic representation, including disagreements over multiculturalism and ethnic studies, the ongoing “canon wars” over which texts should make up the English curriculum, and the so-called “ebonics” debates over the status of Black vernacular English in schools.

In history, the debates have focused on the balance among patriotism and American exceptionalism, on one hand, and the country’s history of exclusion and violence towards Indigenous people and the enslavement of African Americans on the other—between its ideals and its practices. Those tensions led to the implosion of a 1994 attempt to set national history standards.

A current example that has fueled much of the recent round of CRT criticism is the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which sought to put the history and effects of enslavement—as well as Black Americans’ contributions to democratic reforms—at the center of American history.

The culture wars are always, at some level, battled out within schools, historians say.

“It’s because they’re nervous about broad social things, but they’re talking in the language of school and school curriculum,” said one historian of education. “That’s the vocabulary, but the actual grammar is anxiety about shifting social power relations.”

Stephen Sawchuk

Associate Editor,  Education Week

Stephen Sawchuk covers district leadership and management, school safety, and civics education for Education Week.

[homersapien 11,357]

Understanding The Republican Opposition To Critical Race Theory

NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro and Barbara Sprunt break down the Republican led efforts in the U.S. to discourage educators from teaching critical race theory in grade-level schools.

LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:

It may be time for summer break. Schools are closing, but there's a lot of agita still about textbooks and lesson plans. Here's some tape from Fox News.

(SOUNDBITE OF FOX NEWS MONTAGE)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Critical race theory is racist.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: These theories that are not based in fact.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: CRT is racist. It is abusive.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Critical race theory is the newest manufactured wedge issue, and it's following a pattern we've seen with others recently. A cultural squall pops up, gets amplified on cable news and turns into a political storm. NPR's Barbara Sprunt is going to take us through how an obscure academic theory now has parents laying siege to school board meetings. And she joins us now. Hi, Barbara.

BARBARA SPRUNT, BYLINE: Good morning.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: We need to start with what critical race theory is and what it is not.

SPRUNT: Because they are very different things. In the late '70s, early '80s, legal scholars developed an academic approach that examines American institutions and laws through the lens of race and racism. So it's been around for decades, and it's used in postgraduate studies. But many Republicans and right-wing media have co-opted this term, and they're using it as a catch-all way of describing basically any conversation about race or racism that makes white people uncomfortable. So conversations about white privilege, having dialogues about anti-racism - these have all been branded falsely as critical race theory.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: In September of 2020, President Trump issued the executive order on combating race and sex stereotyping, which President Biden has rescinded. Trump's EO didn't actually mention critical race theory then, even in the sections specifying what shouldn't be taught in the armed forces or at federal agencies. It has been mentioned a lot on Fox, though.

(SOUNDBITE OF FOX NEWS BROADCAST)

CHRISTOPHER RUFO: It's absolutely astonishing how critical race theory has pervaded every institution in the federal government. And what I've discovered is that critical race theory has become, in essence, the default ideology of the federal bureaucracy and is now being weaponized against the American people.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Now, that's Christopher Rufo on September 2, 2020. Talk to us about his role in all this.

SPRUNT: Yeah. So Rufo is a central player in this. He's a former documentarian, and he's the one who called on Trump to issue that executive order you just mentioned. And this all started in July of 2020. A Seattle city employee sent Rufo an antibias training that they did at work, and Rufo essentially saw it as a political opportunity to manufacture a culture war issue. And he's been transparent about that. I mean, he tweeted in March of this year that, quote, "the goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think critical race theory."

And he added that he's rebranding the theory and driving up negative perceptions to turn it toxic. And, I mean, it's worked. I mean, you can go on Twitter and type in critical race theory, and you'll see videos of hundreds of parents at school board meetings with signs saying, stop critical race theory, even as the superintendents are saying, hey, this is not something that we teach. Saying critical race theory is being taught in schools is like saying electrical engineering is being taught in K-12. It's just not happening.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: But when you talk to conservative lawmakers, what are they saying?

SPRUNT: Well, the overall argument is that talking about race and racism leads to more division in an already very divided country. Byron Donalds is a Republican congressman from Florida, and he told me recently that, look. It's important to teach the full history of the country, but he thinks that the approach just further divides Americans.

BYRON DONALDS: As a Black man, I think our history has actually been quite awful. I mean, that's without question. But you also have to take into account the progression of our country, especially over the last 60 to 70 years.

SPRUNT: You'll also hear some Republican lawmakers and media outlets say, you know, this theory is unpatriotic. It tells white people that they're racist, you know, just for being white, when, of course, the actual theory itself is about institutions, not individuals.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Right. It's about the systems that are in play and how that has actually created more difficulties for Black and brown people. But there is an actual legislative movement on this. It's not just people talking about critical race theory. They're actually legislating about it now, right?

SPRUNT: That's right. I mean, this is something where perception has led to actual movement in legislatures. Republican lawmakers in nearly two dozen states have proposed legislation that would limit how teachers can talk about race and racism in the classroom. Now, just like you pointed out earlier, that Trump's executive order on this didn't actually mention critical race theory, that's the same thing that you're seeing here on the state level. Only a handful of these bills explicitly mention critical race theory, but they're moving forward regardless.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: As we've discussed, critical race theory is a technical term. It's sort of a framework for graduate programs. So money isn't being spent on it in public grade schools, you know, teaching it to young people. But that doesn't seem to stop people getting upset.

SPRUNT: Exactly. I mean, this is a perfect culture war issue. Unlike issues like taxes or foreign policy, this is something that strikes people at their very identity. And that's what makes it an effective political strategy, to be honest. I spoke with Christine Matthews. She's the president of Bellwether Research and a public opinion pollster, and she says there's evidence that Republican voters have been responding much more to culture issues and that this issue could impact turnout in next year's midterm elections.

CHRISTINE MATTHEWS: I think it's just one more addition to the culture war that the Republicans really want to fight. And Republicans are wanting to make this about othering the Democrats and making them seem as extreme and threatening to white culture as possible.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: And I guess that brings us right back to the right-wing media ecosystem because it's easier to conflate anything related to race with critical race theory, especially if you don't understand what it is.

SPRUNT: Exactly. And from a messaging perspective, critical race theory is easy to use and is being used as an umbrella term to cover all sorts of white grievances about how society is talking about anti-racism, you know, particularly in the year following the murder of George Floyd. And Matthews says that talk news can really keep this issue top of mind for voters, even though the midterms are over a year away.

MATTHEWS: That's the job of Fox News - is to keep these cultural, polarizing topics front of mind. And so for the base and for the people that, say, Fox News reaches, they can keep it alive if they want to.

SPRUNT: And it seems like they want to. A study from Media Matters, a left-leaning nonprofit, recently found that nearly 1,300 mentions of critical race theory were on Fox News over a 3 1/2-month period.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Wow.

SPRUNT: Another, you know, important factor in this is the role of social media. Experts I spoke with said this is just another prime example of something that gets posted on Facebook and just takes on a life of its own. And if that's where people are getting their information, their news, they're going to be getting a lot of misinformation.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: That's NPR's Barbara Sprunt. Thank you very much.

SPRUNT: Thank you.

https://www.npr.org/2021/06/20/1008449181/understanding-the-republican-opposition-to-critical-race-theory

 

 

[woodford 3,655]

All part of the psy op. Nothing to see here. 

[AUFAN78 3,894]

1 hour ago, homersapien said:

"This sorry sight is unsurprising given that Republicans have all but given up on the notion of governance. At the national level, they consume themselves with race-baiting (e.g., scaring Americans about immigration and critical race theory), assailing private companies (e.g., corporations that defend voting rights, social media platforms, book publishers) and perpetrating the most ludicrous and dangerous lie in memory — that the 2020 election was stolen."

 

From:

Why so many Republicans talk about nonsense

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/20/why-so-many-republicans-talk-about-nonsense/

WAPO accuses Republicans of exactly what Democrats are guilty of. Nothing new, it's their daily playbook. They only fool fools. 

[AUFAN78 3,894]

1 hour ago, homersapien said:

What Is Critical Race Theory, and Why Is It Under Attack?

https://www.edweek.org/leadership/what-is-critical-race-theory-and-why-is-it-under-attack/2021/05

(emphasis mine)

Is “critical race theory” a way of understanding how American racism has shaped public policy, or a divisive discourse that pits people of color against white people? Liberals and conservatives are in sharp disagreement.

The topic has exploded in the public arena this spring—especially in K-12, where numerous state legislatures are debating bills seeking to ban its use in the classroom.

In truth, the divides are not nearly as neat as they may seem. The events of the last decade have increased public awareness about things like housing segregation, the impacts of criminal justice policy in the 1990s, and the legacy of enslavement on Black Americans. But there is much less consensus on what the government’s role should be in righting these past wrongs. Add children and schooling into the mix and the debate becomes especially volatile.

School boards, superintendents, even principals and teachers are already facing questions about critical race theory, and there are significant disagreements even among experts about its precise definition as well as how its tenets should inform K-12 policy and practice. This explainer is meant only as a starting point to help educators grasp core aspects of the current debate.

Just what is critical race theory anyway?

Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that racism is a social construct, and that it is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.

The basic tenets of critical race theory, or CRT, emerged out of a framework for legal analysis in the late 1970s and early 1980s created by legal scholars Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado, among others.

A good example is when, in the 1930s, government officials literally drew lines around areas deemed poor financial risks, often explicitly due to the racial composition of inhabitants. Banks subsequently refused to offer mortgages to Black people in those areas.

Today, those same patterns of discrimination live on through facially race-blind policies, like single-family zoning that prevents the building of affordable housing in advantaged, majority-white neighborhoods and, thus, stymies racial desegregation efforts.

CRT also has ties to other intellectual currents, including the work of sociologists and literary theorists who studied links between political power, social organization, and language. And its ideas have since informed other fields, like the humanities, the social sciences, and teacher education.

This academic understanding of critical race theory differs from representation in recent popular books and, especially, from its portrayal by critics—often, though not exclusively, conservative Republicans. Critics charge that the theory leads to negative dynamics, such as a focus on group identity over universal, shared traits; divides people into “oppressed” and “oppressor” groups; and urges intolerance.

Thus, there is a good deal of confusion over what CRT means, as well as its relationship to other terms, like “anti-racism” and “social justice,” with which it is often conflated.

To an extent, the term “critical race theory” is now cited as the basis of all diversity and inclusion efforts regardless of how much it’s actually informed those programs.

One conservative organization, the Heritage Foundation, recently attributed a whole host of issues to CRT, including the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, LGBTQ clubs in schools, diversity training in federal agencies and organizations, California’s recent ethnic studies model curriculum, the free-speech debate on college campuses, and alternatives to exclusionary discipline—such as the Promise program in Broward County, Fla., that some parents blame for the Parkland school shootings. “When followed to its logical conclusion, CRT is destructive and rejects the fundamental ideas on which our constitutional republic is based,” the organization claimed.

(A good parallel here is how popular ideas of the common core learning standards grew to encompass far more than what those standards said on paper.)

Does critical race theory say all white people are racist? Isn’t that racist, too?

The theory says that racism is part of everyday life, so people—white or nonwhite—who don’t intend to be racist can nevertheless make choices that fuel racism.

Some critics claim that the theory advocates discriminating against white people in order to achieve equity. They mainly aim those accusations at theorists who advocate for policies that explicitly take race into account. (The writer Ibram X. Kendi, whose recent popular book How to Be An Antiracist suggests that discrimination that creates equity can be considered anti-racist, is often cited in this context.)

Fundamentally, though, the disagreement springs from different conceptions of racism. CRT thus puts an emphasis on outcomes, not merely on individuals’ own beliefs, and it calls on these outcomes to be examined and rectified. Among lawyers, teachers, policymakers, and the general public, there are many disagreements about how precisely to do those things, and to what extent race should be explicitly appealed to or referred to in the process.

Here’s a helpful illustration to keep in mind in understanding this complex idea. In a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court school-assignment case on whether race could be a factor in maintaining diversity in K-12 schools, Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion famously concluded: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” But during oral arguments, then-justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said: “It’s very hard for me to see how you can have a racial objective but a nonracial means to get there.”

All these different ideas grow out of longstanding, tenacious intellectual debates. Critical race theory emerged out of postmodernist thought, which tends to be skeptical of the idea of universal values, objective knowledge, individual merit, Enlightenment rationalism, and liberalism—tenets that conservatives tend to hold dear.

What does any of this have to do with K-12 education?

Scholars who study critical race theory in education look at how policies and practices in K-12 education contribute to persistent racial inequalities in education, and advocate for ways to change them. Among the topics they’ve studied: racially segregated schools, the underfunding of majority-Black and Latino school districts, disproportionate disciplining of Black students, barriers to gifted programs and selective-admission high schools, and curricula that reinforce racist ideas.

Critical race theory is not a synonym for culturally relevant teaching, which emerged in the 1990s. This teaching approach seeks to affirm students’ ethnic and racial backgrounds and is intellectually rigorous. But it’s related in that one of its aims is to help students identify and critique the causes of social inequality in their own lives.

Many educators support, to one degree or another, culturally relevant teaching and other strategies to make schools feel safe and supportive for Black students and other underserved populations. (Students of color make up the majority of school-aged children.) But they don’t necessarily identify these activities as CRT-related.

As one teacher-educator put it: “The way we usually see any of this in a classroom is: ‘Have I thought about how my Black kids feel? And made a space for them, so that they can be successful?’ That is the level I think it stays at, for most teachers.” Like others interviewed for this explainer, the teacher-educator did not want to be named out of fear of online harassment.

An emerging subtext among some critics is that curricular excellence can’t coexist alongside culturally responsive teaching or anti-racist work. Their argument goes that efforts to change grading practices or make the curriculum less Eurocentric will ultimately harm Black students, or hold them to a less high standard.

As with CRT in general, its popular representation in schools has been far less nuanced. A recent poll by the advocacy group Parents Defending Education claimed some schools were teaching that “white people are inherently privileged, while Black and other people of color are inherently oppressed and victimized”; that “achieving racial justice and equality between racial groups requires discriminating against people based on their whiteness”; and that “the United States was founded on racism.”

Thus much of the current debate appears to spring not from the academic texts, but from fear among critics that students—especially white students—will be exposed to supposedly damaging or self-demoralizing ideas.

While some district officials have issued mission statements, resolutions, or spoken about changes in their policies using some of the discourse of CRT, it’s not clear to what degree educators are explicitly teaching the concepts, or even using curriculum materials or other methods that implicitly draw on them. For one thing, scholars say, much scholarship on CRT is written in academic language or published in journals not easily accessible to K-12 teachers.

What is going on with these proposals to ban critical race theory in schools?

As of mid-May, legislation purporting to outlaw CRT in schools has passed in Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Tennessee and have been proposed in various other statehouses.

The bills are so vaguely written that it’s unclear what they will affirmatively cover.

Could a teacher who wants to talk about a factual instance of state-sponsored racism—like the establishment of Jim Crow, the series of laws that prevented Black Americans from voting or holding office and separated them from white people in public spaces—be considered in violation of these laws?

It’s also unclear whether these new bills are constitutional, or whether they impermissibly restrict free speech.

It would be extremely difficult, in any case, to police what goes on inside hundreds of thousands of classrooms. But social studies educators fear that such laws could have a chilling effect on teachers who might self-censor their own lessons out of concern for parent or administrator complaints.

As English teacher Mike Stein told Chalkbeat Tennessee about the new law: “History teachers can not adequately teach about the Trail of Tears, the Civil War, and the civil rights movement. English teachers will have to avoid teaching almost any text by an African American author because many of them mention racism to various extents.”

The laws could also become a tool to attack other pieces of the curriculum, including ethnic studies and “action civics”—an approach to civics education that asks students to research local civic problems and propose solutions.

How is this related to other debates over what’s taught in the classroom amid K-12 culture wars?

The charge that schools are indoctrinating students in a harmful theory or political mindset is a longstanding one, historians note. CRT appears to be the latest salvo in this ongoing debate.

In the early and mid-20th century, the concern was about socialism or Marxism. The conservative American Legion, beginning in the 1930s, sought to rid schools of progressive-minded textbooks that encouraged students to consider economic inequality; two decades later the John Birch Society raised similar criticisms about school materials. As with CRT criticisms, the fear was that students would be somehow harmed by exposure to these ideas.

As the school-aged population became more diverse, these debates have been inflected through the lens of race and ethnic representation, including disagreements over multiculturalism and ethnic studies, the ongoing “canon wars” over which texts should make up the English curriculum, and the so-called “ebonics” debates over the status of Black vernacular English in schools.

In history, the debates have focused on the balance among patriotism and American exceptionalism, on one hand, and the country’s history of exclusion and violence towards Indigenous people and the enslavement of African Americans on the other—between its ideals and its practices. Those tensions led to the implosion of a 1994 attempt to set national history standards.

A current example that has fueled much of the recent round of CRT criticism is the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which sought to put the history and effects of enslavement—as well as Black Americans’ contributions to democratic reforms—at the center of American history.

The culture wars are always, at some level, battled out within schools, historians say.

“It’s because they’re nervous about broad social things, but they’re talking in the language of school and school curriculum,” said one historian of education. “That’s the vocabulary, but the actual grammar is anxiety about shifting social power relations.”

Stephen Sawchuk

Associate Editor,  Education Week

Stephen Sawchuk covers district leadership and management, school safety, and civics education for Education Week.

Believe Sawchuk or you own eyes? Your choice. I will gladly share more video's like this one if needed to assist you homey. 

 

[AUFAN78 3,894]

3 hours ago, caleb1633 said:

This isn't about not teaching slavery and racism. It's about not teaching students distorted histories that are proven to be factually incorrect in order to perpetuate a narrative that America is a fundamentally, irredeemably racist nation (e.g., The 1619 Project) and that all white people are guilty of racism and continue perpetuating it unknowingly.

bump

[TexasTiger 12,828]

CRT seeks to replace the current orthodoxy (liberal and conservative) regarding the First Amendment. While I understand the criticisms of the current approach, I haven’t seen a viable replacement framework.

https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1254/critical-race-theory

[homersapien 11,357]

Good primer on Critical Race Theory by the American Bar Association:

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/civil-rights-reimagining-policing/a-lesson-on-critical-race-theory/

[CoffeeTiger 5,088]

https://morningshots.thebulwark.com/p/why-ban-only-critical-race-theory

Why Ban Only Critical Race Theory?

Why not Marxism? Feminism? Critical Legal Theory?

Welcome to the Summer Solstice, and our season of endless Kulturkampf.

Much of our ongoing struggle now centers on the push to ban the teaching of “critical race theory,” which is an interesting exercise, given that few of the legislators or media critics seem to know exactly what the term means.

But precision is not the point. CRT has come to stand for virtually any discussion of race that annoys, provokes, or offends. As anti-CRT activist has Christopher Rufo has explained:

So they are playing a (race) card, not making an actual argument. They may not understand what it means, but they know that this is a way for them to push back (and shut down) debates about racial injustice. Any concerns about the history of racism or police violence can be simply dismissed: “See, what you're doing is Critical Race Theory.”

I regret to inform you that this includes simply making s*** up.

Some of the allegations Rufo laid out… are not supported by the evidence he produces, and others are stretched beyond the facts.

But it is one thing to push memes on Twitter, quite another to draft legislative bans on ideas or theories (think evolution and the Scopes Monkey trial). Even some of CRT’s fiercest critics are skeptical of the legislative offensive.

Andrew Sullivan, in particular, has been relentless in his criticism of the ideology behind race theory. As our colleague, Jim Swift, noted last week, Sullivan recently highlighted an incident in which an Illinois high school that was apparently teaching students that the question “What does it mean to be white?” can be answered with “segregation,” “individualism,” and “focus on intentions over impact.”

Andrew Sullivan @sullydish

This is not the teaching of vital history previously white-washed. This is an indoctrination into racism. It’s a direct assault on the core epistemology of liberalism and the West. https://t.co/wTdYiF8LVb

June 13th 2021

102 Retweets378 Likes

But, the attempt to write legislation banning this sort of thing, Sullivan writes, has been a fiasco.

Many of the bills attempting to ban CRT in public schools are well-intentioned and do not, in fact, ban CRT. But they contain wording to constrain the kind of teaching that is built on CRT that is far too vague, could constrain speech in countless unforeseen ways, and are pretty close to unenforceable. (When people are proposing body-cameras for teachers, you know they’ve gone off the edge.) Most of these bills, to make things worse, strike me as unconstitutional. And they cede the higher ground.

In Tennessee, for instance (as David French points out), legislation bans “Promoting division between, or resentment of, a race, sex, religion, creed, nonviolent political affiliation, social class, or class of people.”

This is vague to the point of incoherence, but gives a taste of the difficulty of crafting this sort of legislation.

Sullivan suggests an alternative to the blunt instrument of government suppression:

Insist that you are not attempting to ban CRT but to allow it to be taught as one idea among many in a liberal education. And do not conflate CRT with honest, painful accounts of our history, which can be taught just as well within a liberal context.

But that is not what the GOP wants right now.

Instead, as Jacqueline Alemany writes this morning, Republicans have seized on CRT “to fire up the outrage machine powering the GOP's culture wars.”

Which brings me to a serious question: Why ban just CRT? And why just now?

**

With more than a touch of defensiveness, Ted Cruz is insisting that he understands what critical race theory is all about. Over the weekend, he recounted his answer to a reporter who asked him to define CRT. “I explained to him, I said it’s a theory that derives from Marxism. Karl Marx viewed the entire world as a conflict between classes, between the owners of capital and the working men and women, the proletariat,” said Cruz. “Critical race theory takes that same Marxist concept, except it replaces class with race.”

Marco Rubio also tried his hand at a definition. “Critical race theory at its core is a theory that teaches that Americans are divided between oppressors and the oppressed,” he explained.

But if we are banning this sort of thing, why stop there? If CRT derives from Marxism, why not ban Marxism too? (Or would that smack too obviously of censorship, cancel culture, and the attack on free speech?)

If critical race theory is beyond the pale, where are the bills banning or restricting all of the other criticals, like critical social theory and critical legal theory (or anything developed by the Frankfurt School)?

If conservatives really want to take on political correctness in education, why not also ban post-modernism, deconstructionism, moral relativism, and anything written by Jacques Derrida?

If we are really worried about anything suggesting that there is oppression, why not also ban the teaching of “intersectionality,” which is “the theory that the overlap of various social identities, as race, gender, sexuality, and class, contributes to the specific type of systemic oppression and discrimination.”

And since Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are so concerned about Oppression Studies, where is the legislative push to ban Radical Feminism, including arguments that science is deeply aligned with “sexist, racist, classist, and imperialist social projects”?

This is hardly a new issue. Feminist educators have challenged “masculinist distinctions,” such as “objectivity vs. subjectivity . . . reason vs. emotion, mind vs. body.” One writer from this school of thought refers to Newton’s Laws as “Newton’s rape manual.”

So why aren’t GOP legislators banning this sort of thing? Yes, I know this is a trick question.

If the concern was really simply political correctness, their agenda would be far wider, wouldn’t it? But by focusing solely on critical race theory, they sort of give away the game, don’t they?

[autigeremt 6,590]

Never ending cycle of an end to basic common sense, mutual respect and mutual dignity. Our days are numbered.

Instead let us replace all that with a theology. 

[CoffeeTiger 5,088]

 

EDIT: we’re at 5 ‘thumbs down’ votes now. I know there’s still a few conservatives left that haven’t shown up yet. Can we get to 10? 

Edited June 23, 2021 by CoffeeTiger

[caleb1633 1,418]

16 hours ago, CoffeeTiger said:

https://morningshots.thebulwark.com/p/why-ban-only-critical-race-theory

Why Ban Only Critical Race Theory?

Why not Marxism? Feminism? Critical Legal Theory?

Welcome to the Summer Solstice, and our season of endless Kulturkampf.

Much of our ongoing struggle now centers on the push to ban the teaching of “critical race theory,” which is an interesting exercise, given that few of the legislators or media critics seem to know exactly what the term means.

But precision is not the point. CRT has come to stand for virtually any discussion of race that annoys, provokes, or offends. As anti-CRT activist has Christopher Rufo has explained:

So they are playing a (race) card, not making an actual argument. They may not understand what it means, but they know that this is a way for them to push back (and shut down) debates about racial injustice. Any concerns about the history of racism or police violence can be simply dismissed: “See, what you're doing is Critical Race Theory.”

I regret to inform you that this includes simply making s*** up.

Some of the allegations Rufo laid out… are not supported by the evidence he produces, and others are stretched beyond the facts.

But it is one thing to push memes on Twitter, quite another to draft legislative bans on ideas or theories (think evolution and the Scopes Monkey trial). Even some of CRT’s fiercest critics are skeptical of the legislative offensive.

Andrew Sullivan, in particular, has been relentless in his criticism of the ideology behind race theory. As our colleague, Jim Swift, noted last week, Sullivan recently highlighted an incident in which an Illinois high school that was apparently teaching students that the question “What does it mean to be white?” can be answered with “segregation,” “individualism,” and “focus on intentions over impact.”

Andrew Sullivan @sullydish

This is not the teaching of vital history previously white-washed. This is an indoctrination into racism. It’s a direct assault on the core epistemology of liberalism and the West. https://t.co/wTdYiF8LVb

June 13th 2021

102 Retweets378 Likes

But, the attempt to write legislation banning this sort of thing, Sullivan writes, has been a fiasco.

Many of the bills attempting to ban CRT in public schools are well-intentioned and do not, in fact, ban CRT. But they contain wording to constrain the kind of teaching that is built on CRT that is far too vague, could constrain speech in countless unforeseen ways, and are pretty close to unenforceable. (When people are proposing body-cameras for teachers, you know they’ve gone off the edge.) Most of these bills, to make things worse, strike me as unconstitutional. And they cede the higher ground.

In Tennessee, for instance (as David French points out), legislation bans “Promoting division between, or resentment of, a race, sex, religion, creed, nonviolent political affiliation, social class, or class of people.”

This is vague to the point of incoherence, but gives a taste of the difficulty of crafting this sort of legislation.

Sullivan suggests an alternative to the blunt instrument of government suppression:

Insist that you are not attempting to ban CRT but to allow it to be taught as one idea among many in a liberal education. And do not conflate CRT with honest, painful accounts of our history, which can be taught just as well within a liberal context.

But that is not what the GOP wants right now.

Instead, as Jacqueline Alemany writes this morning, Republicans have seized on CRT “to fire up the outrage machine powering the GOP's culture wars.”

Which brings me to a serious question: Why ban just CRT? And why just now?

**

With more than a touch of defensiveness, Ted Cruz is insisting that he understands what critical race theory is all about. Over the weekend, he recounted his answer to a reporter who asked him to define CRT. “I explained to him, I said it’s a theory that derives from Marxism. Karl Marx viewed the entire world as a conflict between classes, between the owners of capital and the working men and women, the proletariat,” said Cruz. “Critical race theory takes that same Marxist concept, except it replaces class with race.”

Marco Rubio also tried his hand at a definition. “Critical race theory at its core is a theory that teaches that Americans are divided between oppressors and the oppressed,” he explained.

But if we are banning this sort of thing, why stop there? If CRT derives from Marxism, why not ban Marxism too? (Or would that smack too obviously of censorship, cancel culture, and the attack on free speech?)

If critical race theory is beyond the pale, where are the bills banning or restricting all of the other criticals, like critical social theory and critical legal theory (or anything developed by the Frankfurt School)?

If conservatives really want to take on political correctness in education, why not also ban post-modernism, deconstructionism, moral relativism, and anything written by Jacques Derrida?

If we are really worried about anything suggesting that there is oppression, why not also ban the teaching of “intersectionality,” which is “the theory that the overlap of various social identities, as race, gender, sexuality, and class, contributes to the specific type of systemic oppression and discrimination.”

And since Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are so concerned about Oppression Studies, where is the legislative push to ban Radical Feminism, including arguments that science is deeply aligned with “sexist, racist, classist, and imperialist social projects”?

This is hardly a new issue. Feminist educators have challenged “masculinist distinctions,” such as “objectivity vs. subjectivity . . . reason vs. emotion, mind vs. body.” One writer from this school of thought refers to Newton’s Laws as “Newton’s rape manual.”

So why aren’t GOP legislators banning this sort of thing? Yes, I know this is a trick question.

If the concern was really simply political correctness, their agenda would be far wider, wouldn’t it? But by focusing solely on critical race theory, they sort of give away the game, don’t they?

"RePuBlIcAnS cAnT eVeN dEfInE iT!!" I guess the left is gonna milk that dick dance for all its worth. This logical fallacy is called a "Fallacy Fallacy": Presumption that because a claim has been poorly argued (allegedly, though plenty have been spot on), or a fallacy has been made, that the claim itself must be wrong. It is entirely possible to make a claim that is false but still argue with the logical coherency of that claim, just as it is possible to make a claim that is true and justify it with various fallacies and poor arguments. This is an avoidance technique by the left to negate having to address the actual merit of whether the various tenants of CRT should be taught or not. There is no definition a Republican could give that would be good enough for the left.

 

Why not ban teaching Marxism or Post-Modernism as well? Because it's the application of the principles associated with the two schools of thought in the form of Identity Politics that has been so divisive. Ever tried reading Post-Modernist literature? Good luck. It's incredibly difficult to follow. Zealots in academia who used Post-Modern tools and Critical Theory to shape various disciplines, such as CRT, and make them more palatable is what enabled the ideas to go mainstream.

 

Also, in terms of the bills introduced, they mostly say things along the lines of:

- Don't teach that any particular identity group is superior or inferior

- Don't treat individuals adversely based on sex, race, ethnicity, etc.

- Don't scape goat

- Don't teach revisionist history (e.g., The 1619 Project)

 

What about those do you have any problem with?

[caleb1633 1,418]

17 hours ago, TexasTiger said:

CRT seeks to replace the current orthodoxy (liberal and conservative) regarding the First Amendment. While I understand the criticisms of the current approach, I haven’t seen a viable replacement framework.

https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1254/critical-race-theory

The framework of liberalism that CRT attempts to undermine is what we should stick to. It's what was put forth by MLK Jr., and it's what has enabled us to make the incredible racial progress we've seen over the past 60 years. You don't abandon the vehicle that got you there just because a bunch of grifters say it doesn't work.

[TexasTiger 12,828]

1 hour ago, caleb1633 said:

The framework of liberalism that CRT attempts to undermine is what we should stick to. It's what was put forth by MLK Jr., and it's what has enabled us to make the incredible racial progress we've seen over the past 60 years. You don't abandon the vehicle that got you there just because a bunch of grifters say it doesn't work.

This isn’t directly responsive to my post about CRT’s approach to free speech. It’s tempting to make a “hate speech” exception, but then you’re leaving it up to the government to decide what “hate speech” is. Why would one think allowing elected officials to decide that will protect marginalized people? 

[AUDub 11,141]

2 minutes ago, TexasTiger said:

This isn’t directly responsive to my post about CRT’s approach to free speech. It’s tempting to make a “hate speech” exception, but then you’re leaving it up to the government to decide what “hate speech” is. Why would one think allowing elected officials to decide that will protect marginalized people? 

This is my main sticking point. I absolutely sympathize regarding hate speech but the solution has to be better. Criminalizing nebulous "hate speech" is incredibly regressive and will do far more harm than good in the long run. 

[homersapien 11,357]

 

[caleb1633 1,418]

1 hour ago, AUDub said:

This is my main sticking point. I absolutely sympathize regarding hate speech but the solution has to be better. Criminalizing nebulous "hate speech" is incredibly regressive and will do far more harm than good in the long run. 

Well, I think that's where a distinction must be made. Public schools are funded and run by the state, and therefore they can decide on what curriculum they want their students to be taught. I also wouldn't want my kids to be taught creationism as the truth, or have it mandated that schools lead their students in prayer every day, but I have no issues with people who believe in creationism or who pray. In a normal forum I veer strongly libertarian on not censoring what people say even if it does constitute "hate speech", but publicly funded education should be scrutinized to ensure what is being taught is most valuable to the students.

[caleb1633 1,418]

26 minutes ago, homersapien said:

 

OK, Strawman

[TexasTiger 12,828]

1 hour ago, AUDub said:

This is my main sticking point. I absolutely sympathize regarding hate speech but the solution has to be better. Criminalizing nebulous "hate speech" is incredibly regressive and will do far more harm than good in the long run. 

As an approach, Critical Race Theory originated in this type of legal analysis. Beyond all the current hoopla and those on the right who equate it with any recognition of systematic racism which they don’t want to recognize, applying many of the underlying premises of CRT to how an appreciation for inclusion and diversity is presented requires far more thoughtful analysis than is coming from either side of the issue. 
Across the globe, forces on the right are weakening the fundamental pillars of western style liberal democratic (small d) governments while many forces on the left are focusing almost exclusively on the flaws of those systems while not recognizing they’ve ushered in more social progress (though far from perfect) than any other alternative in history.    Undercutting certain pillars under cuts a structure that allows for progress, even when it’s slower than we would like it to be.