Critical Race Theory

[caleb1633 1,418]

59 minutes ago, TexasTiger said:

Interesting thread:

 

This whole theology (a more appropriate term than "theory") may label itself as "anti-racist", but it's actually incredibly racist towards everyone. For instance, the Smithsonian put out a poster last year stating various aspects that encompass "White culture." Things such as: self reliance, objective and rational linear thinking, hard work, progress is always best, and being on time. As if though these things are bad and other races aren't capable of doing such things.

Then we have other instances where segregation is making a comeback. Example: Columbia University had segregated graduations based on race. 

The irony of calling yourself "anti-racist" by advocating for a return to segregation and infantilizing minorities.

[TexasTiger 12,848]

A rare example of reasoned discourse on social media:

 

[caleb1633 1,418]

https://ra.nea.org/business-item/2021-nbi-039/

The nation's largest teachers union has approved a plan to promote Critical Race Theory in all 50 states and in 14,000 local school districts.

Can we stop denying the fact that CRT is being taught in K-12?

[Bottomfeeder 244]

All of this stuff is just communism plain and simple.

https://www.ntd.com/china-in-focus-july-3-the-ccp-has-infiltrated-every-level-of-american-education-trevor-loudon_636960.html

[caleb1633 1,418]

15 hours ago, Bottomfeeder said:

All of this stuff is just communism plain and simple.

https://www.ntd.com/china-in-focus-july-3-the-ccp-has-infiltrated-every-level-of-american-education-trevor-loudon_636960.html

Some very bold statements, and I'd like to see what evidence he has to support it. I do know he's not the first person to say this, and I can speak from experience that the CCP are launching an assault on pretty much every non-kinetic front in order to undermine our position in the world. For instance, when I was stationed in Okinawa, some of the bases had protests by locals in front of the gates on a daily basis. It was a well known fact that they were paid by the Chinese to do this.

While I haven't been fully sold on Loudon's claims, the Neo-Marxist influence associated with CRT is absolutely undeniable. The ideology is heavily rooted in Critical Theory (essentially "Cultural Marxism" for lack of a better term) and many of the individuals surrounding it are self-proclaimed Marxists and Communists. I hate that the Republicans cried wolf about socialism/communism/Marxism for so long, because I think it's made many hesitant to believe it now.

[CoffeeTiger 5,107]

1 hour ago, caleb1633 said:

Some very bold statements, and I'd like to see what evidence he has to support it.. I do know he's not the first person to say this

That's the rub, isn't it? What evidence..?

All I know is that NTD is associated with the Falun Gong, which is the same organization that runs The Epoch Times, which is a known conspiracy and propagandizing source. 

I have no love for China, but just because a news source is anti-China doesn't automatically make it trustworthy.    

[caleb1633 1,418]

12 minutes ago, CoffeeTiger said:

That's the rub, isn't it? What evidence..?

All I know is that NTD is associated with the Falun Gong, which is the same organization that runs The Epoch Times, which is a known conspiracy and propagandizing source. 

I have no love for China, but just because a news source is anti-China doesn't automatically make it trustworthy.    

Agreed completely. It wouldn't surprise me if they've infiltrated much of our institutions, and I know of instances where they have infiltrated our institutions, but to say it's as deep as he says is a strong assertion; and strong statements require strong evidence.

[Bottomfeeder 244]

While stationed in South Korea, propaganda leaflets dropped on US military camps/bases were commonplace. I believe we were fighting the Red China in both the Korean and Vietnam wars. Communism is a direct threat to our republic, and has surfaced in many areas of national security interests.

While finishing my military hitch in the US army (1984), I competed for and won medic of the quarter at the 3rd Brigade HQ (WAR EAGLE BRIGADE). One of the questions was about real threats to our country, and they expected me to say Muslim world, but I answered with Red China. Of course I had to explain my position, but that was easy. 

My cousin is self-proclaimed communist/socialist/liberal who has written at least five books and teaches (chair) political theory at a private college in New York state. Comrades! She has some skewed views IMHO.

I believe they have infiltrated and installed all of the planks of the communist manifesto. What's their next move? Weaken the west's financial and military capabilities by releasing a virus? The virus made me mad enough, but to threaten us militarily is something quite extraordinary. I just don't see the CRT being more than just a distraction from the real threats.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/ted-cruz-blasts-cori-bushs-stolen-land-tweet-as-divisive-lies

Edited July 6, 2021 by Bottomfeeder

[caleb1633 1,418]

1 hour ago, Bottomfeeder said:

While stationed in South Korea, propaganda leaflets dropped on US military camps/bases were commonplace. I believe we were fighting the Red China in both the Korean and Vietnam wars. Communism is a direct threat to our republic, and has surfaced in many areas of national security interests.

While finishing my military hitch in the US army (1984), I competed for and won medic of the quarter at the 3rd Brigade HQ (WAR EAGLE BRIGADE). One of the questions was about real threats to our country, and they expected me to say Muslim world, but I answered with Red China. Of course I had to explain my position, but that was easy. 

My cousin is self-proclaimed communist/socialist/liberal who has written at least five books and teaches (chair) political theory at a private college in New York state. Comrades! She has some skewed views IMHO.

I believe they have infiltrated and installed all of the planks of the communist manifesto. What's their next move? Weaken the west's financial and military capabilities by releasing a virus? The virus made me mad enough, but to threaten us militarily is something quite extraordinary. I just don't see the CRT being more than just a distraction from the real threats.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/ted-cruz-blasts-cori-bushs-stolen-land-tweet-as-divisive-lies

I've yet to see any reliable evidence to support the hypothesis of an intentional release. If you're looking to intentionally leak a virus on the world, you don't do it right on the doorsteps of your own country at one of the only virology institutes in the world that studies Coronaviruses. Logically, the way it occurred makes me believe it was an accidental leak, and the growing evidence emerging suggests that as well. CRT is part of our own culture war and has distracted us from focusing on China, though we do need to resolve our own internal conflicts if we want to effectively fight one that is external.

[Bottomfeeder 244]

7 minutes ago, caleb1633 said:

I've yet to see any reliable evidence to support the hypothesis of an intentional release. If you're looking to intentionally leak a virus on the world, you don't do it right on the doorsteps of your own country at one of the only virology institutes in the world that studies Coronaviruses. Logically, the way it occurred makes me believe it was an accidental leak, and the growing evidence emerging suggests that as well. CRT is part of our own culture war and has distracted us from focusing on China, though we do need to resolve our own internal conflicts if we want to effectively fight one that is external.

It goes back and forth on Twitter. The consensus is between an accidental leak and that of vaccine for SARS-CoV-1 gone awry. Regardless, we funded it (if was a leak). Papers are now coming out from China supporting a natural origin. Propaganda? I don't know, and no one else knows except the Chinese and they aren't telling anyone. I don't think we have time for the CRT before China releases, accidentally, another pandemic. 

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.05.451089v1

[AUFAN78 3,894]

Interesting article on CRT:

https://amac.us/the-graph-that-shatters-crt-july-4-1776-set-slavery-on-the-path-to-worldwide-extinction/

[caleb1633 1,418]

https://www.google.com/amp/s/californianewstimes.com/national-geographic-tweets-that-july-4-fireworks-are-racist-smoke-targets-communities-of-color/426732/%3famp

 

And now fireworks are racist. Thanks Nat Geo for more explemplary journalism. 

"An asteroid is headed towards earth! Here's why women and minorities will be impacted the most! #AsteroidsAreRacist"

 

It all goes back to CRT and the belief that racism is in everything, like the force in Star Wars or something.

The Iron Law of Woke Projection remains unbroken.

[AUDub 11,147]

1 hour ago, caleb1633 said:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/californianewstimes.com/national-geographic-tweets-that-july-4-fireworks-are-racist-smoke-targets-communities-of-color/426732/%3famp

 

And now fireworks are racist. Thanks Nat Geo for more explemplary journalism. 

"An asteroid is headed towards earth! Here's why women and minorities will be impacted the most! #AsteroidsAreRacist"

 

It all goes back to CRT and the belief that racism is in everything, like the force in Star Wars or something.

The Iron Law of Woke Projection remains unbroken.

You are way too online for your own good. 

Edited July 8, 2021 by AUDub

[homersapien 11,370]

There Is No Debate Over Critical Race Theory

Pundits and politicians have created their own definition for the term, and then set about attacking it.

By Ibram X. Kendi

The United States is not in the midst of a “culture war” over race and racism. The animating force of our current conflict is not our differing values, beliefs, moral codes, or practices. The American people aren’t divided. The American people are being divided.

Republican operatives have buried the actual definition of critical race theory: “a way of looking at law’s role platforming, facilitating, producing, and even insulating racial inequality in our country,” as the law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who helped coin the term, recently defined it. Instead, the attacks on critical race theory are based on made-up definitions and descriptors. “Critical race theory says every white person is a racist,” Senator Ted Cruz has said. “It basically teaches that certain children are inherently bad people because of the color of their skin,” said the Alabama state legislator Chris Pringle.

There are differing points of view about race and racism. But what we are seeing and hearing on news shows, in school-district meetings, in op-ed pages, in legislative halls, and in social-media feeds aren’t multiple sides with differing points of view. There’s only one side in our so-called culture war right now.

Conor Friedersdorf: Critical race theory is making both parties flip-flop

The Republican operatives, who dismiss the expositions of critical race theorists and anti-racists in order to define critical race theory and anti-racism, and then attack those definitions, are effectively debating themselves. They have conjured an imagined monster to scare the American people and project themselves as the nation’s defenders from that fictional monster.

The evangelist Pat Robertson recently called critical race theory “a monstrous evil.” And over the past year, that “monstrous evil” has supposedly been growing many legs. First, Republicans pointed to Black Lives Matter demonstrators. Three days after George Floyd’s murder last year, President Donald Trump recast the largely peaceful demonstrators as violent and dishonorable “THUGS.” By the end of July, Trump had framed them as “anarchists who hate our country.”

Then “cancel culture” was targeted. At the Republican National Convention in August, Trump blasted “cancel culture” as seeking to coerce Americans “into saying what you know to be false and scare you out of saying what you know to be true.”

Next came attacks on the 1619 Project and American history. “Despite the virtues and accomplishments of this Nation, many students are now taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but rather villains,” read Trump’s executive order on November 2, establishing the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission.

And now the Black Lives Matter demonstrators, cancel culture, the 1619 Project, American history, and anti-racist education are presented to the public as the many legs of the “monstrous evil” of critical race theory that’s purportedly coming to harm white children. The language echoes the rhetoric used to demonize desegregation after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, in 1954.

In the 1950s and ’60s, the conservators of racism organized to keep Black kids out of all-white schools. Today, they are trying to get critical race theory out of American schools. “Instead of helping young people discover that America is the greatest, most tolerant, and most generous nation in history, [critical race theory] teaches them that America is systemically evil and that the hearts of our people are full of hatred and malice,” Trump wrote in an op-ed on June 18.

After it was cited 132 times on Fox News shows in 2020, critical race theory became a conservative obsession this year. Its mentions on Fox News practically doubled month after month: It was referred to 51 times in February, 139 times in March, 314 times in April, 589 times in May, and 737 times in just the first three weeks of June. As of June 29, 26 states had introduced legislation or other state-level actions to “restrict teaching critical race theory or limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism,” according to Education Week, and nine had implemented such bans.

I have been called the father of critical race theory, although I was born in 1982, and critical race theory was born in 1981. Over the past few months, I have seldom stopped to answer the critiques of critical race theory or of my own work, because the more I’ve studied these critiques, the more I’ve concluded that these critics aren’t arguing against me. They aren’t arguing against anti-racist thinkers. They aren’t arguing against critical race theorists. These critics are arguing against themselves.

Read: The GOP’s ‘critical race theory’ obsession

What happens when a politician falsely proclaims what you think, and then criticizes that proclamation? Is she really critiquing your ideas—or her own? If a writer decides what both sides of an argument are stating, is he really engaging in an argument with another writer, or is he engaging in an argument with himself?

Take the journalist Matthew Yglesias. In February, in The Washington Post, he wrote that I think that “any racial gap simply is racist by definition; any policy that maintains such a gap is a racist policy; and—most debatably—any intellectual explanation of its existence (sociological, cultural and so on) is also racist.” But nowhere have I written that the racial gap is racist: The policies and practices causing the racial gap are racist. Nowhere have I stated that any intellectual explanation of the existence of a racial gap is racist. Only intellectual explanations of a racial gap that point to the superiority or inferiority of a racial group are racist.

Was Yglesias really arguing against me, or was he arguing against himself? What about the columnist Ross Douthat? In a recent op-ed in The New York Times, he did what GOP thinkers keep doing to Americans striving to construct an equitable and just society: re-create us as extremists, as monsters to be feared for speaking out against racism. Douthat accused me of “ideological extremism that embarrasses clever liberals,” comparing me to the late Rush Limbaugh. I’ve spent my career writing evidence-based historical scholarship and demonstrating my willingness to be vulnerable; Limbaugh had no interest in being self-critical, and for decades attacked truth and facts and evidence.

Douthat claimed that I have a “Manichaean vision of public policy, in which all policymaking is either racist or antiracist, all racial disparities are the result of racism—and the measurement of any outcome short of perfect ‘equity’ may be a form of structural racism itself.”

Where did he get perfect equity? In How to Be an Antiracist, I define racial equity as a state “when two or more racial groups are standing on a relatively equal footing.” I proposed that an example of racial equity would be “if there were relatively equitable percentages” of racial groups “living in owner-occupied homes in the forties, seventies, or, better, nineties.” By contrast, in 2014, 71 percent of white families lived in owner-occupied homes, compared with 45 percent of Latino families and 41 percent of Black families. That’s racial inequity.

What we write doesn’t matter to the people arguing with themselves. It doesn’t matter that I consistently challenge Manichaean racial visions of inherently good or evil people or policy making. It doesn’t matter that I don’t write about policy making being good or evil, or that I write about the equitable or inequitable outcome of policies. It doesn’t matter that I’ve urged us toward relative equity, and not toward perfect equity.

If you want to understand why I’ve made these arguments, you first need to recognize that for decades, right-wing thinkers and judges have argued that policies that lead to racial inequities are “not racist” or are “race neutral.” That was the position of the conservative Supreme Court justices who recently upheld Arizona’s voting-restriction policies. Those who wish to conserve racial inequity want us to focus on intent—which is hard to prove—rather than the outcome of inequity, which is rather easy to prove. Case in point: GOP state legislators are claiming that the 28 laws they’ve enacted in 17 states as of June 21 are about election security, even though voter fraud is a practically nonexistent problem. They claim that these laws aren’t intended to make it harder for Black voters or members of other minority groups to cast ballots, even as experts find that’s precisely what such laws have done in the past, and predict that’s likely what these new laws will do as well.

Jarvis R. Givens: What’s missing from the discourse about anti-racist teaching

These critics aren’t just making up their claims as they go along. They are making up the sources of their criticism as they go along. Douthat argues that work like mine “extends structural analysis beyond what it can reasonably bear, into territory where white supremacy supposedly explains Asian American success on the SAT.” Who is giving this explanation other than Douthat? I’m surely not. I point to other explanations, including the history of highly educated Asian immigrants and the concentration of score-boosting test-prep companies in Asian (and white) neighborhoods.

White supremacy does explain why more than three-quarters of the perpetrators of anti-Asian hate crimes and incidents before and during the pandemic have been white. Asian American success as measured by test scores, education, and income should not erase the impact of structural racism on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. This group now has the highest income inequality of any racial group in the United States. Asian Americans in New York experienced the highest surge of unemployment of any racial group during the pandemic. Do the critics of critical race theory want us to think of the AAPI community as not just a “model minority,” but a model monolith? Showcasing AAPIs to maintain the fiction of a postracial society ends up erasing Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

Critical race theory has been falsely labeled as anti-Asian. Helen Raleigh, an Asian American entrepreneur, defined critical race theory as a “divisive discriminatory ideology that judges people on the basis of their skin color” in Newsweek. “It is my practice to ignore critics who have not read the work and who are not interested in honest exchange,” responded one of the three Asian American founders of critical race theory, Mari Matsuda, a law professor at the University of Hawaii. “But I do want to say this for the record: Asian Americans are at the center of CRT analysis and have been from the start.”

How should thinkers respond to monstrous lies? Should we mostly ignore the critics as Matsuda has, as I have? Because restating facts over and over again gets old. Reciting your own work over and over again to critics who either haven’t read what they are criticizing or are purposefully distorting it gets old. And talking with people who have created a monologue with two points of view, theirs and what they impute to you, gets old.

But democracy needs dialogue. And dialogue necessitates seeking to know what a person is saying in order to offer informed critiques.

As a scholar, I know that nothing is more useful than criticism to improve my scholarship. As a human being, I know that nothing is more constructive than criticism to improve my humanity. I’ve chronicled how criticism and critics have been a driving force on my journey to be anti-racist, to confront my own racist, sexist, homophobic, and classist ideas—and their intersections. Constructive criticism often hurts, but like painful medical treatments, it can be lifesaving; it can be nation-saving.

But what’s happening now is something entirely different and destructive—not constructive. This isn’t a “culture war.” This isn’t even an “argument.” This isn’t even “criticism.” This is critics arguing with themselves.

 

 

Ibram X. Kendi is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and the director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. He is the author of several books, including the National Book Award–winning Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America and How to Be an Antiracist.

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/07/opponents-critical-race-theory-are-arguing-themselves/619391/

Edited July 9, 2021 by homersapien

[AUFAN78 3,894]

27 minutes ago, homersapien said:

The United States is not in the midst of a “culture war” over race and racism. The animating force of our current conflict is not our differing values, beliefs, moral codes, or practices. The American people aren’t divided. The American people are being divided.

Give credit where due. First paragraph was accurate. 

Beyond that Kendi dismisses examples of how CRT is being taught with his interpretation. Just another boring fiction.

[caleb1633 1,418]

3 hours ago, homersapien said:

There Is No Debate Over Critical Race Theory

Pundits and politicians have created their own definition for the term, and then set about attacking it.

By Ibram X. Kendi

The United States is not in the midst of a “culture war” over race and racism. The animating force of our current conflict is not our differing values, beliefs, moral codes, or practices. The American people aren’t divided. The American people are being divided.

Republican operatives have buried the actual definition of critical race theory: “a way of looking at law’s role platforming, facilitating, producing, and even insulating racial inequality in our country,” as the law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who helped coin the term, recently defined it. Instead, the attacks on critical race theory are based on made-up definitions and descriptors. “Critical race theory says every white person is a racist,” Senator Ted Cruz has said. “It basically teaches that certain children are inherently bad people because of the color of their skin,” said the Alabama state legislator Chris Pringle.

There are differing points of view about race and racism. But what we are seeing and hearing on news shows, in school-district meetings, in op-ed pages, in legislative halls, and in social-media feeds aren’t multiple sides with differing points of view. There’s only one side in our so-called culture war right now.

Conor Friedersdorf: Critical race theory is making both parties flip-flop

The Republican operatives, who dismiss the expositions of critical race theorists and anti-racists in order to define critical race theory and anti-racism, and then attack those definitions, are effectively debating themselves. They have conjured an imagined monster to scare the American people and project themselves as the nation’s defenders from that fictional monster.

The evangelist Pat Robertson recently called critical race theory “a monstrous evil.” And over the past year, that “monstrous evil” has supposedly been growing many legs. First, Republicans pointed to Black Lives Matter demonstrators. Three days after George Floyd’s murder last year, President Donald Trump recast the largely peaceful demonstrators as violent and dishonorable “THUGS.” By the end of July, Trump had framed them as “anarchists who hate our country.”

Then “cancel culture” was targeted. At the Republican National Convention in August, Trump blasted “cancel culture” as seeking to coerce Americans “into saying what you know to be false and scare you out of saying what you know to be true.”

Next came attacks on the 1619 Project and American history. “Despite the virtues and accomplishments of this Nation, many students are now taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but rather villains,” read Trump’s executive order on November 2, establishing the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission.

And now the Black Lives Matter demonstrators, cancel culture, the 1619 Project, American history, and anti-racist education are presented to the public as the many legs of the “monstrous evil” of critical race theory that’s purportedly coming to harm white children. The language echoes the rhetoric used to demonize desegregation after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, in 1954.

In the 1950s and ’60s, the conservators of racism organized to keep Black kids out of all-white schools. Today, they are trying to get critical race theory out of American schools. “Instead of helping young people discover that America is the greatest, most tolerant, and most generous nation in history, [critical race theory] teaches them that America is systemically evil and that the hearts of our people are full of hatred and malice,” Trump wrote in an op-ed on June 18.

After it was cited 132 times on Fox News shows in 2020, critical race theory became a conservative obsession this year. Its mentions on Fox News practically doubled month after month: It was referred to 51 times in February, 139 times in March, 314 times in April, 589 times in May, and 737 times in just the first three weeks of June. As of June 29, 26 states had introduced legislation or other state-level actions to “restrict teaching critical race theory or limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism,” according to Education Week, and nine had implemented such bans.

I have been called the father of critical race theory, although I was born in 1982, and critical race theory was born in 1981. Over the past few months, I have seldom stopped to answer the critiques of critical race theory or of my own work, because the more I’ve studied these critiques, the more I’ve concluded that these critics aren’t arguing against me. They aren’t arguing against anti-racist thinkers. They aren’t arguing against critical race theorists. These critics are arguing against themselves.

Read: The GOP’s ‘critical race theory’ obsession

What happens when a politician falsely proclaims what you think, and then criticizes that proclamation? Is she really critiquing your ideas—or her own? If a writer decides what both sides of an argument are stating, is he really engaging in an argument with another writer, or is he engaging in an argument with himself?

Take the journalist Matthew Yglesias. In February, in The Washington Post, he wrote that I think that “any racial gap simply is racist by definition; any policy that maintains such a gap is a racist policy; and—most debatably—any intellectual explanation of its existence (sociological, cultural and so on) is also racist.” But nowhere have I written that the racial gap is racist: The policies and practices causing the racial gap are racist. Nowhere have I stated that any intellectual explanation of the existence of a racial gap is racist. Only intellectual explanations of a racial gap that point to the superiority or inferiority of a racial group are racist.

Was Yglesias really arguing against me, or was he arguing against himself? What about the columnist Ross Douthat? In a recent op-ed in The New York Times, he did what GOP thinkers keep doing to Americans striving to construct an equitable and just society: re-create us as extremists, as monsters to be feared for speaking out against racism. Douthat accused me of “ideological extremism that embarrasses clever liberals,” comparing me to the late Rush Limbaugh. I’ve spent my career writing evidence-based historical scholarship and demonstrating my willingness to be vulnerable; Limbaugh had no interest in being self-critical, and for decades attacked truth and facts and evidence.

Douthat claimed that I have a “Manichaean vision of public policy, in which all policymaking is either racist or antiracist, all racial disparities are the result of racism—and the measurement of any outcome short of perfect ‘equity’ may be a form of structural racism itself.”

Where did he get perfect equity? In How to Be an Antiracist, I define racial equity as a state “when two or more racial groups are standing on a relatively equal footing.” I proposed that an example of racial equity would be “if there were relatively equitable percentages” of racial groups “living in owner-occupied homes in the forties, seventies, or, better, nineties.” By contrast, in 2014, 71 percent of white families lived in owner-occupied homes, compared with 45 percent of Latino families and 41 percent of Black families. That’s racial inequity.

What we write doesn’t matter to the people arguing with themselves. It doesn’t matter that I consistently challenge Manichaean racial visions of inherently good or evil people or policy making. It doesn’t matter that I don’t write about policy making being good or evil, or that I write about the equitable or inequitable outcome of policies. It doesn’t matter that I’ve urged us toward relative equity, and not toward perfect equity.

If you want to understand why I’ve made these arguments, you first need to recognize that for decades, right-wing thinkers and judges have argued that policies that lead to racial inequities are “not racist” or are “race neutral.” That was the position of the conservative Supreme Court justices who recently upheld Arizona’s voting-restriction policies. Those who wish to conserve racial inequity want us to focus on intent—which is hard to prove—rather than the outcome of inequity, which is rather easy to prove. Case in point: GOP state legislators are claiming that the 28 laws they’ve enacted in 17 states as of June 21 are about election security, even though voter fraud is a practically nonexistent problem. They claim that these laws aren’t intended to make it harder for Black voters or members of other minority groups to cast ballots, even as experts find that’s precisely what such laws have done in the past, and predict that’s likely what these new laws will do as well.

Jarvis R. Givens: What’s missing from the discourse about anti-racist teaching

These critics aren’t just making up their claims as they go along. They are making up the sources of their criticism as they go along. Douthat argues that work like mine “extends structural analysis beyond what it can reasonably bear, into territory where white supremacy supposedly explains Asian American success on the SAT.” Who is giving this explanation other than Douthat? I’m surely not. I point to other explanations, including the history of highly educated Asian immigrants and the concentration of score-boosting test-prep companies in Asian (and white) neighborhoods.

White supremacy does explain why more than three-quarters of the perpetrators of anti-Asian hate crimes and incidents before and during the pandemic have been white. Asian American success as measured by test scores, education, and income should not erase the impact of structural racism on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. This group now has the highest income inequality of any racial group in the United States. Asian Americans in New York experienced the highest surge of unemployment of any racial group during the pandemic. Do the critics of critical race theory want us to think of the AAPI community as not just a “model minority,” but a model monolith? Showcasing AAPIs to maintain the fiction of a postracial society ends up erasing Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

Critical race theory has been falsely labeled as anti-Asian. Helen Raleigh, an Asian American entrepreneur, defined critical race theory as a “divisive discriminatory ideology that judges people on the basis of their skin color” in Newsweek. “It is my practice to ignore critics who have not read the work and who are not interested in honest exchange,” responded one of the three Asian American founders of critical race theory, Mari Matsuda, a law professor at the University of Hawaii. “But I do want to say this for the record: Asian Americans are at the center of CRT analysis and have been from the start.”

How should thinkers respond to monstrous lies? Should we mostly ignore the critics as Matsuda has, as I have? Because restating facts over and over again gets old. Reciting your own work over and over again to critics who either haven’t read what they are criticizing or are purposefully distorting it gets old. And talking with people who have created a monologue with two points of view, theirs and what they impute to you, gets old.

But democracy needs dialogue. And dialogue necessitates seeking to know what a person is saying in order to offer informed critiques.

As a scholar, I know that nothing is more useful than criticism to improve my scholarship. As a human being, I know that nothing is more constructive than criticism to improve my humanity. I’ve chronicled how criticism and critics have been a driving force on my journey to be anti-racist, to confront my own racist, sexist, homophobic, and classist ideas—and their intersections. Constructive criticism often hurts, but like painful medical treatments, it can be lifesaving; it can be nation-saving.

But what’s happening now is something entirely different and destructive—not constructive. This isn’t a “culture war.” This isn’t even an “argument.” This isn’t even “criticism.” This is critics arguing with themselves.

 

 

Ibram X. Kendi is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and the director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. He is the author of several books, including the National Book Award–winning Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America and How to Be an Antiracist.

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/07/opponents-critical-race-theory-are-arguing-themselves/619391/

Yeah, we can really expect a fair analysis on this from one of the great grifters of our time. Let's trust the guy who said, "In order to truly be anti-racist, you also have to truly be anti-capitalist…. And in order to truly be anti-capitalist, you have to be antiracist, because they’re interrelated.” —Angela Davis said something like this almost verbatim. Let's trust the guy who said, "The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination." Let's trust the guy who, in this article, talks about accepting constructive criticism, but refuses to engage in any sort of debate about his ideas—John McWhorter, Coleman Hughes, and Bret Weinstein have tried to debate him on this multiple times, but he refuses to even answer. Let's trust the guy whose world view is so simplistic that he thinks racism is literally at the heart of everything (sounds like the first principle of CRT to me), and that you're either a racist or an anti-racist. How about sometimes things happen that have literally nothing to do with race? Or it might play only a meniscule factor and society is far more complex than this black and white paradigm of "racist or anti-racist." Let's trust the guy who can't even define racism. His definition of racism is literally, "Racism is a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities." (p. 17-18, How to Be an Antiracist). You can't use a term in order to define a term.

I'm sorry, but this article is just full of lies. It could power downtown San Diego for over a year with all the Gaslighting. CRT is being taught in schools, even if it doesn't go by that name. It is the praxis (theory in practice) of CRT. It didn't just stay in law school. The literature even says so itself. CRT is divisive and it is rooted in Marxism. Name one country in history that has benefited from Marxism and its derivatives.

[caleb1633 1,418]

5 hours ago, homersapien said:

White supremacy does explain why more than three-quarters of the perpetrators of anti-Asian hate crimes and incidents before and during the pandemic have been white.

I'll just go ahead and dispel that myth as well. Bureau of Justice Statistics:  https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv18.pdf

Scroll to Table 14 and you'll see the following information: 

24.5% of crimes against Asian Americans are by whites, 27.5% are by blacks, 7.0% are by Hispanics, 24.1% are by other Asian-Americans, and 14% are by other ethnic groups. The dude just lies. To be fair, he does say, "and during the pandemic", but it's dubious to think that it went from 24% to over 75% in two years.

Edited July 9, 2021 by caleb1633

[AUFAN78 3,894]

 

[homersapien 11,370]

19 hours ago, caleb1633 said:

I'll just go ahead and dispel that myth as well. Bureau of Justice Statistics:  https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv18.pdf

Scroll to Table 14 and you'll see the following information: 

24.5% of crimes against Asian Americans are by whites, 27.5% are by blacks, 7.0% are by Hispanics, 24.1% are by other Asian-Americans, and 14% are by other ethnic groups. The dude just lies. To be fair, he does say, "and during the pandemic", but it's dubious to think that it went from 24% to over 75% in two years.

That's it?  That's all you've got?

What does that have to do with Critical Race Theory - what it is and what it isn't?

That's a pretty long article.  Can't you find something in it about CRT to dispute?

Edited July 10, 2021 by homersapien

[caleb1633 1,418]

On 7/9/2021 at 11:24 AM, homersapien said:

There Is No Debate Over Critical Race Theory

Pundits and politicians have created their own definition for the term, and then set about attacking it.

By Ibram X. Kendi

The United States is not in the midst of a “culture war” over race and racism. The animating force of our current conflict is not our differing values, beliefs, moral codes, or practices. The American people aren’t divided. The American people are being divided.

No argument there! As Mohomad Safa once said, "Our world is not divided by race, color, gender, or religion. Our world is divided into wise people and fools. And fools divide themselves by race, color, gender, or religion." Ibram Khendi is one of those fools. Republicans and the anti-Woke aren't trying to prevent racism from being taught. They're trying to prevent schools from engaging in it.

Republican operatives have buried the actual definition of critical race theory: “a way of looking at law’s role platforming, facilitating, producing, and even insulating racial inequality in our country,” as the law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who helped coin the term, recently defined it.

"Although CRT began as a movement in the law, it has rapidly spread beyond that discipline." Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (p. 3)

Instead, the attacks on critical race theory are based on made-up definitions and descriptors. “Critical race theory says every white person is a racist,” Senator Ted Cruz has said. “It basically teaches that certain children are inherently bad people because of the color of their skin,” said the Alabama state legislator Chris Pringle.

Those don't sound like definitions at all, but rather they are solely descriptors, and they aren't made up. As "Critical Race Theory: An Introduction" also states, “Many critical race theorists and social scientists alike hold that racism is pervasive, systemic, and deeply ingrained. If we take this perspective, then no white member of society seems quite so innocent.” But I wouldn't expect Khendi to understand what a definition is, considering he wrote a book on being an "Anti-racist" but fails to give a somewhat cogent definition of what racism is. "RaCiSm Is RaCiSt PeOpLe DoInG rAcIsT tHiNgS tHaT rEsUlT iN rAcIsM." [Paraphrased]

There are differing points of view about race and racism. But what we are seeing and hearing on news shows, in school-district meetings, in op-ed pages, in legislative halls, and in social-media feeds aren’t multiple sides with differing points of view. There’s only one side in our so-called culture war right now.

Perhaps because we've all heard and seen plenty of the Neo-Marxist, Post-Modernist views on race, racism, and power for several years now (particularly the last year), and it's time that it's exposed for what it really is. As a matter of fact, until recently, you couldn't argue about racism at all with any of the CRT inspired activists without simply being stonewalled with, "That's because you're a racist!" or whatever other insult of the day was popular. Only one side? That's laughable.

Conor Friedersdorf: Critical race theory is making both parties flip-flop

The Republican operatives, who dismiss the expositions of critical race theorists and anti-racists in order to define critical race theory and anti-racism, and then attack those definitions, are effectively debating themselves. They have conjured an imagined monster to scare the American people and project themselves as the nation’s defenders from that fictional monster.

Nice straw man to attack a steel man, Khendi. The criticism against CRT is beyond warranted, even if it is those damned Republicans that are the primary ones making it. There's plenty of liberals and progressives who are arguing against it as well, myself included. I fundamentally disagree with Republicans and conservatives on many things, but I agree with them taking a stance against CRT and all things Woke. Pretty much anyone who's not of the Woke left or completely in the dark on what's at the heart of this secular religion tend to disagree with it.

The evangelist Pat Robertson recently called critical race theory “a monstrous evil.” And over the past year, that “monstrous evil” has supposedly been growing many legs. First, Republicans pointed to Black Lives Matter demonstrators. Three days after George Floyd’s murder last year, President Donald Trump recast the largely peaceful demonstrators as violent and dishonorable “THUGS.” By the end of July, Trump had framed them as “anarchists who hate our country.”

"Largely peaceful." War is also 93% peaceful. FYI, that 93% peaceful stat us dubious at best. The Meme Policeman completely exposed that fallacious report (I can link to it if necessary). Many of the demonstrators from both BLM and Antifa (the primary groups involved in the protests last summer) absolutely were/are anarchists who do hate our country. In a recent instance, the Black Lives Matter Utah Chapter tweeted about the American flag on July 4th weekend, "When we Black Americans see this flag, we know the person is a racist. When we see this flag we know that the person flying it lives in a different America than we do. When we see this flag, we question your intelligence. We know to avoid you. It is a symbol of hatred." That's just one of many many many examples.

Then “cancel culture” was targeted. At the Republican National Convention in August, Trump blasted “cancel culture” as seeking to coerce Americans “into saying what you know to be false and scare you out of saying what you know to be true.”

Again, this is all a Red Herring. He's trying to make this out to be a case of Republicans just attacking whatever the left puts out rather than addressing the actual argument about CRT, which I'm not really sure what he's trying to say about it since he spends all his time just trying to attack Republicans.

Next came attacks on the 1619 Project and American history. “Despite the virtues and accomplishments of this Nation, many students are now taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but rather villains,” read Trump’s executive order on November 2, establishing the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission.

Okay, are you going to defend the 1619 Project or just say, "Republicans just wanna attack us! Wah!"?

And now the Black Lives Matter demonstrators, cancel culture, the 1619 Project, American history, and anti-racist education are presented to the public as the many legs of the “monstrous evil” of critical race theory that’s purportedly coming to harm white children. The language echoes the rhetoric used to demonize desegregation after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, in 1954.

CRT is harmful to all children, not just white children. It's the bigotry of low expectations. It's the bigotry of making non-white kids feel like they're victims in this world, who won't succeed because the whole country is against them. Also funny that he mentions and defends the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, because Derek Bell and the other founders of CRT openly criticized that decision themselves. Nonetheless, this is yet another Red Herring.

In the 1950s and ’60s, the conservators of racism organized to keep Black kids out of all-white schools. Today, they are trying to get critical race theory out of American schools. “Instead of helping young people discover that America is the greatest, most tolerant, and most generous nation in history, [critical race theory] teaches them that America is systemically evil and that the hearts of our people are full of hatred and malice,” Trump wrote in an op-ed on June 18.

False equivalency. Trying to prevent an ideology rooted in Neo-Marxism from being taught in public schools is not in any way comparable to trying to segregate schools. What a stupid argument.

After it was cited 132 times on Fox News shows in 2020, critical race theory became a conservative obsession this year. Its mentions on Fox News practically doubled month after month: It was referred to 51 times in February, 139 times in March, 314 times in April, 589 times in May, and 737 times in just the first three weeks of June. As of June 29, 26 states had introduced legislation or other state-level actions to “restrict teaching critical race theory or limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism,” according to Education Week, and nine had implemented such bans.

Red Herring. Can this guy even make an argument based on any kind of merit?

I have been called the father of critical race theory, although I was born in 1982, and critical race theory was born in 1981. Over the past few months, I have seldom stopped to answer the critiques of critical race theory or of my own work, because the more I’ve studied these critiques, the more I’ve concluded that these critics aren’t arguing against me. They aren’t arguing against anti-racist thinkers. They aren’t arguing against critical race theorists. These critics are arguing against themselves.

He isn't the father of CRT, so he actually got one point there, but he's definitely one of its zealots. The conclusion he comes to based off this is just stupid, "ThEyRe ArGuInG aGaInSt ThEmSeLvEs." What does that even mean?? Again, misleading or distracting from the relevant topic.

Read: The GOP’s ‘critical race theory’ obsession

What happens when a politician falsely proclaims what you think, and then criticizes that proclamation? Is she really critiquing your ideas—or her own? If a writer decides what both sides of an argument are stating, is he really engaging in an argument with another writer, or is he engaging in an argument with himself?

You can quite easily conclude what the praxis of CRT is stating. It's in books and literature all over the place. If I read your book and address it, isn't that me engaging with what your argument is? Also, he hasn't engaged the argument once himself in this article. He's just said stuff like, "Republicans are just obsessed with this and it's like the Brown v. Board of Education." Blah blah blah. Perhaps he needs to debate Coleman Hughes, John McWhorter, Bret Weinstein, or James Lindsey on this topic, but he won't. He refuses. Until then, don't lecture us on engaging arguments.

Take the journalist Matthew Yglesias. In February, in The Washington Post, he wrote that I think that “any racial gap simply is racist by definition; any policy that maintains such a gap is a racist policy; and—most debatably—any intellectual explanation of its existence (sociological, cultural and so on) is also racist.” But nowhere have I written that the racial gap is racist: The policies and practices causing the racial gap are racist. Nowhere have I stated that any intellectual explanation of the existence of a racial gap is racist. Only intellectual explanations of a racial gap that point to the superiority or inferiority of a racial group are racist.

Semantics. I've already stated that Khendi's zero sum views on "Racist vs Anti-Racist" are simplistic and ridiculous. Nonetheless, what argument is he trying to make here that isn't ad hominem or a deflection?

Was Yglesias really arguing against me, or was he arguing against himself? What about the columnist Ross Douthat? In a recent op-ed in The New York Times, he did what GOP thinkers keep doing to Americans striving to construct an equitable and just society: re-create us as extremists, as monsters to be feared for speaking out against racism. Douthat accused me of “ideological extremism that embarrasses clever liberals,” comparing me to the late Rush Limbaugh. I’ve spent my career writing evidence-based historical scholarship and demonstrating my willingness to be vulnerable; Limbaugh had no interest in being self-critical, and for decades attacked truth and facts and evidence.

More of the same arguments. Defend what is being taught, Khendi. Seriously.

Douthat claimed that I have a “Manichaean vision of public policy, in which all policymaking is either racist or antiracist, all racial disparities are the result of racism—and the measurement of any outcome short of perfect ‘equity’ may be a form of structural racism itself.”

Where did he get perfect equity? In How to Be an Antiracist, I define racial equity as a state “when two or more racial groups are standing on a relatively equal footing.” I proposed that an example of racial equity would be “if there were relatively equitable percentages” of racial groups “living in owner-occupied homes in the forties, seventies, or, better, nineties.” By contrast, in 2014, 71 percent of white families lived in owner-occupied homes, compared with 45 percent of Latino families and 41 percent of Black families. That’s racial inequity.

Oh, man, he threw in "perfect" before equity, so that whole argument is bunk. Now, let me defend my book rather than addressing CRT! At least Khendi is somewhat addressing an argument here by stating what his actual position is. The way he gets to this "relatively equal footing" is essentially through ethno-communism though, so he once again scores no points. I also doubt Khendi and the deranged Wokies of the world would be content with "relatively equal footing." They will never be satisfied, no matter how many concessions we make to their mob.

What we write doesn’t matter to the people arguing with themselves. It doesn’t matter that I consistently challenge Manichaean racial visions of inherently good or evil people or policy making. It doesn’t matter that I don’t write about policy making being good or evil, or that I write about the equitable or inequitable outcome of policies. It doesn’t matter that I’ve urged us toward relative equity, and not toward perfect equity.

Just the dichotomous view that EVERY policy is either "racist or anti-racist" and that people should never be just a "non-racist." So if racism is evil, and the only other path to being "good" is being an "anti-racist", wouldn't that be looking at the world through the Manichaean lense of "good or evil people or policy making"? Perhaps not entirely as simplistic, since you can be a lukewarm "non-racist", but it's still such a CRT argument to believe that racism is central to everything in our society.

If you want to understand why I’ve made these arguments, you first need to recognize that for decades, right-wing thinkers and judges have argued that policies that lead to racial inequities are “not racist” or are “race neutral.” That was the position of the conservative Supreme Court justices who recently upheld Arizona’s voting-restriction policies. Those who wish to conserve racial inequity want us to focus on intent—which is hard to prove—rather than the outcome of inequity, which is rather easy to prove. Case in point: GOP state legislators are claiming that the 28 laws they’ve enacted in 17 states as of June 21 are about election security, even though voter fraud is a practically nonexistent problem. They claim that these laws aren’t intended to make it harder for Black voters or members of other minority groups to cast ballots, even as experts find that’s precisely what such laws have done in the past, and predict that’s likely what these new laws will do as well.

So, let's assume intent because of the results, without even realizing that even intentionally benevolent policies have been pernicious to the black community arguably as much as policies that are enacted with colorblindbess. "Now, let me attack Republicans again!" This guy would make an incredible goalie with all his deflections.

Jarvis R. Givens: What’s missing from the discourse about anti-racist teaching

These critics aren’t just making up their claims as they go along. They are making up the sources of their criticism as they go along. Douthat argues that work like mine “extends structural analysis beyond what it can reasonably bear, into territory where white supremacy supposedly explains Asian American success on the SAT.” Who is giving this explanation other than Douthat? I’m surely not. I point to other explanations, including the history of highly educated Asian immigrants and the concentration of score-boosting test-prep companies in Asian (and white) neighborhoods.

White supremacy does explain why more than three-quarters of the perpetrators of anti-Asian hate crimes and incidents before and during the pandemic have been white. Asian American success as measured by test scores, education, and income should not erase the impact of structural racism on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. This group now has the highest income inequality of any racial group in the United States. Asian Americans in New York experienced the highest surge of unemployment of any racial group during the pandemic. Do the critics of critical race theory want us to think of the AAPI community as not just a “model minority,” but a model monolith? Showcasing AAPIs to maintain the fiction of a postracial society ends up erasing Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

Already addressed this, and I'm getting tired of addressing his pathetic arguments laced with logical fallacies.

Critical race theory has been falsely labeled as anti-Asian. Helen Raleigh, an Asian American entrepreneur, defined critical race theory as a “divisive discriminatory ideology that judges people on the basis of their skin color” in Newsweek. “It is my practice to ignore critics who have not read the work and who are not interested in honest exchange,” responded one of the three Asian American founders of critical race theory, Mari Matsuda, a law professor at the University of Hawaii. “But I do want to say this for the record: Asian Americans are at the center of CRT analysis and have been from the start.”

I will agree that anti-Asian racism isn't a tenant shared across all who fall under the CRT umbrella, even if there have been examples of anti-Asian racism by CRT proponents. The Washington Post had a article in 2014 titled, "How the Asians Became White", and in 2019 a New York City DOE-sponsored panel designed to combat racism told parents that Asian-American students “benefit from white supremacy” and “proximity to white privilege.” There are many other examples, so the sentiment has definitely been widely expressed. Bottom line though: the Woke only care about Asians or any other minority group when it benefits them. They wield race as a tool to obtain power. 

How should thinkers respond to monstrous lies? Should we mostly ignore the critics as Matsuda has, as I have? Because restating facts over and over again gets old. Reciting your own work over and over again to critics who either haven’t read what they are criticizing or are purposefully distorting it gets old. And talking with people who have created a monologue with two points of view, theirs and what they impute to you, gets old.

Projection and deflection. The criticism of CRT is well-deserved, even if some Republicans get some of the details wrong. There have been some inaccuracies in the criticisms, but the critics of CRT are mostly correct in their objections. I also don't see any "monstrous lies." At most, it's differing semantics.

But democracy needs dialogue. And dialogue necessitates seeking to know what a person is saying in order to offer informed critiques.

As a scholar, I know that nothing is more useful than criticism to improve my scholarship. As a human being, I know that nothing is more constructive than criticism to improve my humanity. I’ve chronicled how criticism and critics have been a driving force on my journey to be anti-racist, to confront my own racist, sexist, homophobic, and classist ideas—and their intersections. Constructive criticism often hurts, but like painful medical treatments, it can be lifesaving; it can be nation-saving.

But what’s happening now is something entirely different and destructive—not constructive. This isn’t a “culture war.” This isn’t even an “argument.” This isn’t even “criticism.” This is critics arguing with themselves.

 

So, Khendi, how do you justify the Critical Theory of Race and its praxis being taught in schools? Why is it okay to have kids indoctrinated with principles derived from Neo-Marxism? He never once answers that. Just a bunch of drivel about how Republicans only want to attack CRT and highlighting some of the details they might get wrong, or deflecting with Red Herrings. Khendi isn't the father of CRT, but he's definitely one of its Cardinals. It's like posting an article written by a Catholic Priest on why Catholicism is being unfairly attacked.

 

I'm all for a discussion on how to solve some of the issues that still manifest themselves in our country due to its racist past, but advertising CRT as the solution is a hard "No" from me. Almost anything else would be better. Staring at the wall would be a better way of solving these problems.

 

Ibram X. Kendi is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and the director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. He is the author of several books, including the National Book Award–winning Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America and How to Be an Antiracist.

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/07/opponents-critical-race-theory-are-arguing-themselves/619391/

 

[TitanTiger 20,479]

 

Stop falling for the grift.

https://religionnews.com/2021/05/18/james-lindsay-southern-baptists-crt-al-mohler-hoax-new-discourses-beth-moorerace-ofallon/

[caleb1633 1,418]

1 hour ago, TitanTiger said:

 

Stop falling for the grift.

https://religionnews.com/2021/05/18/james-lindsay-southern-baptists-crt-al-mohler-hoax-new-discourses-beth-moorerace-ofallon/

The assessment of James Lindsay as a general hoaxster is specious. He contrived a hoax that was purposeful and brought to light something that needed to be exposed. Stetson Kennedy pranked the KKK in the 1940s and played a significant role in marginalizing their influence. To stonewall the merits of Lindsay's work because he's an atheist, a mathematician, former massage therapist, or because he a played a hoax on academic journals to convey a point is a weak attempt at defamation. If anything, it shows how shoddy the academics who write for these journals are; that a mathematician could produce papers that were better than many of those who are trained Critical Theorists.

 

As far as the SBC, the resolution specifically states, "Critical race theory and intersectionality alone are insufficient to diagnose and redress the root causes of the social ills that they identify, which result from sin, yet these analytical tools can aid in evaluating a variety of human experiences." So they endorse using CRT, so long as there is no "misuse of the insights gained from critical race theory, intersectionality, and any unbiblical ideologies that can emerge from their use when absolutized as a worldview." 

 

Okay, I will be fair in this. The SBC is not endorsing all of CRT, just the "good" parts of it; however, that doesn't provide a lot of CRT that can actually be utilized. There are *some* kernels of truth and valuable insights that can be gleaned from CRT—particularly in its original form when some of the problems it identified were more accurate of the state of society in the 1970s—but those insights run out pretty quickly before becoming a destructive tool; and the school of thought certainly doesn't match up with Andre E. Johnson's statement in the article that there are "no contradictions between the study of critical theory and Christianity, despite claims by critics that CRT conflicts with the Christian gospel."

 

Antonio Gramsci, a prominent Critical Theorist himself wrote, “Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. … In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches, and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.”

 

Yeah.... Not anti-Christian at all. Critical Theory in general does not hold the church or Christianity in high regard. There are a million things that are anti-Christian about Critical Theory and CRT. The rest of the stuff Johnson said in that article about Critical Theory and CRT was either dishonest or distorted. The author is also guilty of appealing to authority by automatically crediting Christian scholars who study Critical Theory as the beacons of truth on this topic.

 

There are a lot better means of secular analysis available to the church than CRT. Critical Theory and Christianity do not merely exist in tension towards one another: they are directly at odds in almost every facet possible. Endorsing the use of CRT at all by the SBC is essentially playing with fire.

[tomcat 569]

On 6/24/2021 at 9:06 AM, caleb1633 said:

CRT is ABSOLUTELY mainstream! Now, is CRT in its original form that was taught in law schools decades ago mainstream? Not so much (writers at the New York Times probably don’t have a Kimberle Crenshaw poster at their desk); however, CRT is a *movement* (literally said in the first paragraph in “Critical Race Theory: An Introduction”). It is a movement of “activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power.” As all movements do, CRT expanded, and added more activists and scholars who were intent on studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power.

Anyone who uses the tools of Critical Theory and Post-Modernism to deconstruct race is furthering the CRT movement. This includes Barbara Applebaum, who wrote “Being White, Being Good: Complicity, White Moral Responsibility, and Social Justice Pedagogy.” This includes Carol Anderson, who wrote “White Rage”, a book I happened to see as a centerpiece at Barnes and Noble. This includes Ibram X. Khendi. This includes Peggy McIntosh, who first coined the term, “White Privilege” in her three-page paper from 1989 that didn’t have a single citation, reference, or actual data to support her claims.

This includes many other professors and authors who teach these things on college campuses and are paid to teach “Diversity” training to employees of companies. Students who learn these things in college go into the “real world” and spread this ideology into their workplaces. A new job entitled “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer” has emerged. These are also not fringe jobs. They are, unsurprisingly, particularly concentrated within higher education, where, according to some reports in the United States, diversity officers are rapidly increasing in number and earn three times as much as the average American and more than the academic faculty. “Bias response teams” now exist at many colleges in the U.S. STEM is even being impacted. One 2015 paper proposes that an engineer should “demonstrate competence in the provision of sociotechnological services that are sensitive to dynamics of difference, power, and privilege among people and cultural groups.” “Dynamics of difference, power, and privilege”… All concepts that came directly from the CRT movement.

The most visible manifestations of CRT is in Social Justice activism. Antifa has pretty much destroyed Portland and downtown Seattle. Phrases such as “cultural appropriation” are said with frequency online, along with telling people to “check their privilege.” Google, the BBC, and Asda have fired employees on the bases of complaints couched in Social Justice terms and brought wider attention via social media. Dr. Seuss was cancelled because, like CRT always does, it intends to solve racism by seeing racism everywhere, which is the first tenant of CRT: “racism is ordinary, not aberrational”, and because it draws influence from the Post-Modernist belief in the power of language and knowledge, it believes that society will never be free of racism if children read certain Dr. Seuss books.

Conservatives have every reason to be outraged and alarmed by the Woke, and in my opinion, so do liberals. CRT denounces liberal values. Identity politics and intersectionality place the ultimate value in group identity and rejects the concept of the individual. This is stated verbatim by Ozlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo in their Critical Theory education manual, “Is Everyone Really Equal?”:

            “[Critical] movements initially advocated for a type of liberal humanism (individualism, freedom, and peace), but quickly turned to a rejection of liberal humanism. The ideal of individual autonomy that underlies liberal humanism (the idea that people are free to make independent rational decisions that determine their own fate) was viewed as a mechanism for keeping the marginalized in their place by obscuring larger structural systems of inequality. In other words, it fooled people into believing that they had more freedom and choice than societal structures allow.”

All of this traces back directly to CRT in its purest form and to CRT’s roots in the Neo-Marxist thought that came out of the Frankfurt School. Derek Bell, one of CRT’s founders stated: “Progress in American race relations is largely a mirage obscuring the fact that whites continue, consciously or unconsciously, to do all in their power to ensure their dominion and maintain their control.” And in terms of this being based in Critical Theory, Karl Marx believed that we were all living in a “False Consciousness.” That the ruling class had fooled people into believing they could be happy in their state of affairs. The Frankfurt School reified the work of Marx and asserted that to arise from this “False Consciousness” that had been created, not by the economic ruling elites, but by the powerful in order to retain their cultural hegemony, that one had to develop a “Critical Consciousness”, hence the term “Woke.”

True liberals and conservatives alike should be alarmed by this attack on American values.

Caleb, stop hogging the joint man! If you let me have a few tokes I might get on…..naawww

[tomcat 569]

Just now, tomcat said:

Caleb, stop hogging the joint man! If you let me have a few tokes I might get on…..naawww

 

Just now, tomcat said:

Caleb, stop hogging the joint man! If you let me have a few tokes I might get on…..naawww

 

Just now, tomcat said:

Caleb, stop hogging the joint man! If you let me have a few tokes I might get on…..naawww

Just mess’n with ya, bud! You put much thought and key strokes into that. Thank you! All perspectives welcome for consideration…as they should be in the classroom.

[caleb1633 1,418]

1 hour ago, tomcat said:

Caleb, stop hogging the joint man! If you let me have a few tokes I might get on…..naawww

Haha would love to hear your inputs, @tomcat! War Eagle!