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...
Hard to credit people with good faith if they complaining about something that is not happening (CRT being taught in school) and they can't be bothered to learn distinctions between different forms of anti-racism. And hard to believe people are committed to the ideal of a color blind society when schooling and housing remains massively segregated in the north and south. Nor is it hard to credit good faith to political movements and outlets (Fox) that pushed Birtherism and Donald Trump. You're asking people to ignore the evidence of their own eyes and experience.
Understood. It is hard. Fox News is the most unscrupulous purveyor of bad faith in modern America. But there still exist people who are not purely cynical, politically motivated actors. I think it’s worthwhile to address their honest concerns, and that by doing so may we in fact be able to undercut some of the potency of Fox News’ toxic culture war rhetoric. Ignoring real concerns plays right into their hands I’m afraid. Maybe I’m wrong, but I genuinely believe it won’t help. Tucker Carlson has the highest rated cable news show for the last three years... we can’t wish that away.
You: 'What they are objecting to is the abandonment of MLK’s vision of a colorblind society.'
MLK Jr.'s vision was aspirational, like a vision of a society free of disease or cancer. He never claimed in his writings that a colorblind society could be founded right here, right now, if we just wanted it hard enough.
Instead, just like treating cancer may require counter-intuitive and toxic treatments like radiation or chemotherapy, fighting racism might (according to MLK Jr in his later writings) require temporary racial preferences.
Having said that, I would like to see secondary and higher ed ditch the highly-paid outside consultants who market anti-racism packages. Instead, such programs need *much* more local buy-in to work.
Whenever people insist MLK was being purely aspirational and did not think a post-racial society was possible on any kind of earthly timeline, I think of the way he signed off his Birmingham letter: "Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty." His writings are overwhelmingly progress-oriented. The man had a real, Earthly mission to shift hearts and minds on both sides of the divide and convince people to see each other as people, not enemies. 3 generations later seems like it would have been a reasonable expectation on his part.
I agree with Brad. I spent a long time being so sure that conservatives were "the problem" and we just needed to convert them, shame them, or suppress them until they were sufficiently outnumbered and powerless. I had a pretty rude awakening when I actually listened to some of them and realized I had been doing exactly what I despised about them: assuming the worst about people who aren't like me, thinking I'm better than them, not actually listening, not opening my mind to the possibility I might have some things wrong in my understanding of the world. It's not a pleasant experience but it does require giving individual people the benefit of the doubt while you have a conversation.
I agree with Jeet that CRT is a bogeyman, a distraction and a way of making anti-racists seem scary. But Brad is also right that we, as a nation, aren't even working from the same definition of racism, much less in agreement on how to fight it. There are some actually deeply troubling examples of grade school "anti-racist" exercises that many people would find deeply immoral, and counter-productive to boot. No one (worth listening to) is trying to stop teachers from teaching about slavery; people just don't want teachers teaching their kids that striving to treat people equally, without regard to race, is immoral.
My own feeling is that CRT is more appropriate for the courtroom than the classroom. Way more prosecutors are racist than are professors.
I'm not getting into the 'how do we define racism' question. *Everyone* defines racism in a way that buttresses their prior beliefs.
Similarly, everyone takes what they want from MLK Jr.'s voluminous speeches and writings to suit their own polemical needs. I would note that he said "I have a dream" and not "I have a plan." Fighting for a better society was and is a grubby business. MLK Jr. was assassinated while supporting a trash haulers strike in Memphis.
I think one problem is that people are working with different definitions of racism. Generally speaking, there are three broad definitions.
1. Bigotry towards members of a different race or the belief that one race is superior to another.
2. Power plus prejudice (systemic racism).
3. Racial essentialism or the belief that race exists at all and is not a purely social construct.
All three are useful in different contexts. I believe that those objecting in good faith to the abandonment of MLK’s (albeit impossible but worthy) goal of a colorblind society, are those who most adhere to the third definition, who see race as a harmful fiction thrust upon us by colonizers and slave traders. Those who most adhere to this third definition have genuine cause for concern when it comes to a lot of DEI training. In theory, most DEI work acknowledges race as a social construct, but for anyone who has been through some of these workshops or read about the exercises being taught in schools, it is clear that in practice it imparts something quite different. If racism is ubiquitous, if it is embedded in every institution, if it exists regardless of intent, hiding underneath every “universal principle”, if it is treated as a kind of natural and inescapable phenomenon, then suddenly race becomes a much more essential and defining characteristic. There is some truth to this (a bit of a catch-22), but this is the good faith fear; that in the name of fighting racism, we may be reifying the fiction of race altogether.
If people were just objecting to DEI training or the more outlandish forms of management consulting, I'd be happy to support them. But the actual anti-CRT movement and the actual anti-CRT laws are much broader, so broad as to make talking about racism in schools itself impossible. So I again insist that there is no reason to pretend people are saying something reason when they are not.
You packed a lot into your response, not all of it clear. A meaningful critique would be pages long. I want to note that your item #3 is also called 'race realism' and is rejected by >90% of anthropologists and human geneticists.
You seem to be saying that those who adhere to race realism see race as a harmful fiction. That's backwards. Race realists see race as an objective reality that must be acknowledged, regardless of who gets hurt.
Race realists typically accuse their opponents of secretly accepting the reality of different races but lying about their beliefs in public [a 'noble lie']--motivated by a bleeding-heart fear that race realism necessarily implies a hierarchy of races.
The idea that we process 'race' when we meet strangers on the street by means of dress, hairstyle, skin color and mannerisms is just how the social construct works in practice. These trait differences are only weakly tied to genetic differences, if at all. But these traits inevitably affect how we interact with others, along with perceived gender, age, height and weight, language, and many other differences in appearance and behavior that humans use to pigeon hole others. This is the part of the 'race' question that I think is ubiquitous and inescapable.
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.
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.
Debating the merits of CRT is a category mistake here because the controversy has literally nothing to do with CRT. It's like debating whether the Elders of Zion really wanted to take over the world or not -- when the point is the Elders of Zion don't exist. CRT is in reality a legal theory taught at a post-graduate level -- to lawyers. And not even really taught that much (Harvard notoriously purged its CRT profs). The idea that kids in public school are being taught CRT is as credible as the idea that the Elders of Zion caused Russia to lose the war with Japan or caused the Great Depression.
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...
Hard to credit people with good faith if they complaining about something that is not happening (CRT being taught in school) and they can't be bothered to learn distinctions between different forms of anti-racism. And hard to believe people are committed to the ideal of a color blind society when schooling and housing remains massively segregated in the north and south. Nor is it hard to credit good faith to political movements and outlets (Fox) that pushed Birtherism and Donald Trump. You're asking people to ignore the evidence of their own eyes and experience.
Understood. It is hard. Fox News is the most unscrupulous purveyor of bad faith in modern America. But there still exist people who are not purely cynical, politically motivated actors. I think it’s worthwhile to address their honest concerns, and that by doing so may we in fact be able to undercut some of the potency of Fox News’ toxic culture war rhetoric. Ignoring real concerns plays right into their hands I’m afraid. Maybe I’m wrong, but I genuinely believe it won’t help. Tucker Carlson has the highest rated cable news show for the last three years... we can’t wish that away.
You: 'What they are objecting to is the abandonment of MLK’s vision of a colorblind society.'
MLK Jr.'s vision was aspirational, like a vision of a society free of disease or cancer. He never claimed in his writings that a colorblind society could be founded right here, right now, if we just wanted it hard enough.
Instead, just like treating cancer may require counter-intuitive and toxic treatments like radiation or chemotherapy, fighting racism might (according to MLK Jr in his later writings) require temporary racial preferences.
Having said that, I would like to see secondary and higher ed ditch the highly-paid outside consultants who market anti-racism packages. Instead, such programs need *much* more local buy-in to work.
Whenever people insist MLK was being purely aspirational and did not think a post-racial society was possible on any kind of earthly timeline, I think of the way he signed off his Birmingham letter: "Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty." His writings are overwhelmingly progress-oriented. The man had a real, Earthly mission to shift hearts and minds on both sides of the divide and convince people to see each other as people, not enemies. 3 generations later seems like it would have been a reasonable expectation on his part.
I agree with Brad. I spent a long time being so sure that conservatives were "the problem" and we just needed to convert them, shame them, or suppress them until they were sufficiently outnumbered and powerless. I had a pretty rude awakening when I actually listened to some of them and realized I had been doing exactly what I despised about them: assuming the worst about people who aren't like me, thinking I'm better than them, not actually listening, not opening my mind to the possibility I might have some things wrong in my understanding of the world. It's not a pleasant experience but it does require giving individual people the benefit of the doubt while you have a conversation.
I agree with Jeet that CRT is a bogeyman, a distraction and a way of making anti-racists seem scary. But Brad is also right that we, as a nation, aren't even working from the same definition of racism, much less in agreement on how to fight it. There are some actually deeply troubling examples of grade school "anti-racist" exercises that many people would find deeply immoral, and counter-productive to boot. No one (worth listening to) is trying to stop teachers from teaching about slavery; people just don't want teachers teaching their kids that striving to treat people equally, without regard to race, is immoral.
Paul Campos over at LG&M has also written about the moral panic over CRT in schools:
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/06/the-moral-panic-over-critical-race-theory
My own feeling is that CRT is more appropriate for the courtroom than the classroom. Way more prosecutors are racist than are professors.
I'm not getting into the 'how do we define racism' question. *Everyone* defines racism in a way that buttresses their prior beliefs.
Similarly, everyone takes what they want from MLK Jr.'s voluminous speeches and writings to suit their own polemical needs. I would note that he said "I have a dream" and not "I have a plan." Fighting for a better society was and is a grubby business. MLK Jr. was assassinated while supporting a trash haulers strike in Memphis.
I think one problem is that people are working with different definitions of racism. Generally speaking, there are three broad definitions.
1. Bigotry towards members of a different race or the belief that one race is superior to another.
2. Power plus prejudice (systemic racism).
3. Racial essentialism or the belief that race exists at all and is not a purely social construct.
All three are useful in different contexts. I believe that those objecting in good faith to the abandonment of MLK’s (albeit impossible but worthy) goal of a colorblind society, are those who most adhere to the third definition, who see race as a harmful fiction thrust upon us by colonizers and slave traders. Those who most adhere to this third definition have genuine cause for concern when it comes to a lot of DEI training. In theory, most DEI work acknowledges race as a social construct, but for anyone who has been through some of these workshops or read about the exercises being taught in schools, it is clear that in practice it imparts something quite different. If racism is ubiquitous, if it is embedded in every institution, if it exists regardless of intent, hiding underneath every “universal principle”, if it is treated as a kind of natural and inescapable phenomenon, then suddenly race becomes a much more essential and defining characteristic. There is some truth to this (a bit of a catch-22), but this is the good faith fear; that in the name of fighting racism, we may be reifying the fiction of race altogether.
If people were just objecting to DEI training or the more outlandish forms of management consulting, I'd be happy to support them. But the actual anti-CRT movement and the actual anti-CRT laws are much broader, so broad as to make talking about racism in schools itself impossible. So I again insist that there is no reason to pretend people are saying something reason when they are not.
You packed a lot into your response, not all of it clear. A meaningful critique would be pages long. I want to note that your item #3 is also called 'race realism' and is rejected by >90% of anthropologists and human geneticists.
You seem to be saying that those who adhere to race realism see race as a harmful fiction. That's backwards. Race realists see race as an objective reality that must be acknowledged, regardless of who gets hurt.
Race realists typically accuse their opponents of secretly accepting the reality of different races but lying about their beliefs in public [a 'noble lie']--motivated by a bleeding-heart fear that race realism necessarily implies a hierarchy of races.
The idea that we process 'race' when we meet strangers on the street by means of dress, hairstyle, skin color and mannerisms is just how the social construct works in practice. These trait differences are only weakly tied to genetic differences, if at all. But these traits inevitably affect how we interact with others, along with perceived gender, age, height and weight, language, and many other differences in appearance and behavior that humans use to pigeon hole others. This is the part of the 'race' question that I think is ubiquitous and inescapable.
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.
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.
Debating the merits of CRT is a category mistake here because the controversy has literally nothing to do with CRT. It's like debating whether the Elders of Zion really wanted to take over the world or not -- when the point is the Elders of Zion don't exist. CRT is in reality a legal theory taught at a post-graduate level -- to lawyers. And not even really taught that much (Harvard notoriously purged its CRT profs). The idea that kids in public school are being taught CRT is as credible as the idea that the Elders of Zion caused Russia to lose the war with Japan or caused the Great Depression.
Love the Simpsons clip. It always pops up in the back of my head whenever I hear anyone invoke protectionist ideologies.