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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...

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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.

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I have to concede that you raise some valid points here. A portion of backlash against CRT undoubtedly is coming from racist place, and the fight against it from the right.

But I've also seen some measured criticisms of CRT and specifically how to teach the concept of racism to children that I think is being done with an open mind, specifically some of the work that Connor Friedersdorf is doing at The Atlantic.

Highlighting Jelani Cobbs tweets here does seem to me to be consistent with the illiberal concerns as these tweets leave no room for nuance, reflection, or criticism. The tweets suggest that anyone willing to debate the topic is not coming from a place worth debating.

To that extent, this article doesn't read as a defence of CRT but, moreso as an anti-anti-CRT piece. I'm not sure if anti-anti pieces are the best way out of the time of monsters.

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Love the Simpsons clip. It always pops up in the back of my head whenever I hear anyone invoke protectionist ideologies.

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