Critical Race Theory And "The Children"
The current controversy belongs to a larger pattern of right-wing mobilization based on narratives of threatened innocence.
The argument about teaching so-called “critical race theory” (CRT) in public schools and universities have moved from being a political controversy to becoming a full-bloom moral panic. As AP reports from Reno, Nevada: “People wore MAGA hats and waved signs outside a packed school board meeting this week in Reno, while trustees considered expanding K-5 curriculum to include more teaching about equity, diversity and racism…A conservative group even suggested outfitting teachers with body cameras to ensure they aren’t indoctrinating children with such lessons.”
I have previously argued CRT functions as a bogeyman. But perhaps a bit more can be said about the particular tradition of scaremongering it belongs to. CRT is the latest example of a pattern going back more than a century of the political right using fear of innocent (implicitly white) children being corrupted in schools.
As Jelani Cobb tweeted:
Cobb is exactly right in locating the CRT moral panic in the Black Lives Moment backlash and underscoring the starring role (white) children play in this morality play the right has constructed.
This is an old script, one where the name of the bogeyman changes but the basic storyline is always the same: sinister, alien forces are trying to corrupt children. We’ve seen this before in the battles over teaching evolution, over prayer in the schoolroom, over LGBTQ teachers, over sex ed, over trans students, over bathrooms, among others.
Nor have liberals been exempt from such panics: in the past some liberals have joined in battles against comic books, rap music, and video games.
At the outer extreme of these child endangerment fantasies are the 1980s panic over Satanic ritual abuse at daycare or the more recent QAnon mythology about Satanic pedophile rings controlling the government. It’s noteworthy that the CRT panic took off at precisely the moment QAnon is going into abeyance.
The recurrence of these battles make perfect sense when we consider how important childhood education and entertainment is passing on cultural values and maintaining cultural power. But beyond that, these battles stir up the innermost lizard brain, the irrational fear-driven creature inside of us that becomes enraged at the thought of children in danger.
All of this suggests that these battles need to be engaged not just on the level of rational argument (the CRT narrative is easily refuted) but also more fundamentally on an emotional level. What such an emotional reckoning would be like is difficult to imagine. One could begin by pointing out that not all children are white. Another early step is to note that the CRT moral panic itself is harmful because without an honest confrontation with racism, we will pass on a blighted inheritance.
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A big problem with political discourse today is that we are increasingly incapable of extending an assumption of good faith to our political opponents. Of course there are people on the right for whom this is simply the next cultural flashpoint. There are always people who cynically weaponize education issues to drum up moral panic. But there are also many decent, measured parents who have good faith concerns about a strange new form of racial essentialism being taught to their children.
It has been labeled CRT, to which many Critical Theory scholars understandably object, because it is the crudest, most reductive version of the difficult legal theories that CRT proposes. CRT proposes that racism is embedded into the fabric of our society, and that “neutral” principles in theory like objectivity, free speech, equal protection, etc. function in practice to uphold white supremacy. This all feels a bit advanced for grade schoolers, but I’m happy for it to be taught to high schoolers and argued on the merits. I think it gets some things right and some things wrong. Fine.
But that’s not what good faith parents are objecting to. Neither are they objecting to children being educated in depth about the history of slavery and racism in this country. What they are objecting to are exercises where kids as young as seven are split up into “oppressed” and “oppressor” categories based on their racial and sexual identities. What they are objecting to is the abandonment of MLK’s vision of a colorblind society. What they are objecting to are practices like “collective racial guilt”, or the habit that educators have of locating massive systemic problems in individuals, as kids are being taught that “all white people uphold white supremacy.”
Yes, this is all actually happening. So why not engage with these concerns?What do you have to lose? It’s not like these things will stop being reported if you ignore them...
The CRT movement could be easily renamed "inclusion of minority perspectives and factual acknowledgements", which tends to run counter to the Uncle Remus stereotype of how wonderful slavery and Jim Crow were for those colored negroes who would have been worse off if not for the gentle Noblesse oblige of the white man's antebellum job creation program.
Nowadays instead of picking cotton and shining shoes, the descendants of those who were subjugated because of a bizarre racial classification system dreamed up by cultural imperialists that became de facto law for over 200 years are flipping burgers, vacuuming office towers and "fulfilling wishes" at Amazon.
How dare anyone question the white man's generosity!!! Education is bad because it created the expectation that these disparities are historical and best remedied though "social justice" ...like equal educational access, anti-nepotism laws, meritocratic ethics, and the taxing of "self-made" megazillionaires.
The preferred narrative of the 21st century is that racial disparities are due to an innate inability to learn the 3 R's, which is the preferred (but unspoken in polite company) white narrative in the Age of Genetics, IQ psychometrics and the scariest bête noire of all: racial miscegenation.