As a person of color who has binge watched all the PBS documentaries about the various forms of racism that have defined American systemic white supremacist ideology, I agree that examining what 'race' is and how it is used to define people into social castes needs to be critiqued and questioned. This is important, given the ridiculous myths and implicit biases that have sprung from the dominant cultural narrative of the past 250 years. Ditto 'gender' constructs.
As a scientifically trained person, I do worry that there is an overarching inclusion of anyone who has an axe to grind against institutional norms. My beef in particular is the "math is racist" movement. Math is not racist. Access to a good education is the true problem, not a subject that needs more properly trained people of color to teach it. Today, a generation of kids are being told that if they struggle with learning math, it's because of their skin color, not bad teaching and the unrealistic goals and deadlines for the ill-equipped teachers of numeracy assessment tests to measure intelligence and competency in chaotic classrooms from unreadable books.
Achievement of competence in the modern world's two "universal" lingua francas, Mathematics and English is accessible to anyone who is committed to learning it, even if they ultimately have to teach themselves. Teaching yourself how to learn from another groups texts is critically important for a successful scientific or academic career and should not be demonized in its entirety as 'racist' despite any real or perceived historical biases that shaped the academic fields that they arose from centuries ago.
There are clearly aspects of all pedagogy that are unfairly biased toward the perspective of the dominant group, everywhere, but repeating any idiotic generalization about Mathematics or English communication skills over and over again doesn't make it true. CRT shouldn't become a clown car for every complaint about historic racial bias. It needs to define itself and keep the crackpots from derailing the entire train of social justice just because they can.
Thanks for the comment. As I said, I do think there are types of anti-racist pedagogy that are faddish, ill-conceived and counterproductive. And I welcome measures to challenge that. But the current anti-CRT push (especially given that CRT isn't really a pedagogy and isn't even related to much of this stuff) is aiming at something larger, to stifle any and all anti-racist pedagogy.
"the current anti-CRT push (especially given that CRT isn't really a pedagogy and isn't even related to much of this stuff) is aiming at something larger, to stifle any and all anti-racist pedagogy."
I completely and wholeheartedly agree with you on this statement. I just want to distance myself from the extremists and alarmists who try to rush the doors of our own ideological camp bearing faddish, ill-conceived and counterproductive platforms.
Useful idiots on our side do nothing but play into the mushroom cloud of delusions and mischaracterizations of CRT by those same racist pedagogues.
As a person of color who has binge watched all the PBS documentaries about the various forms of racism that have defined American systemic white supremacist ideology, I agree that examining what 'race' is and how it is used to define people into social castes needs to be critiqued and questioned. This is important, given the ridiculous myths and implicit biases that have sprung from the dominant cultural narrative of the past 250 years. Ditto 'gender' constructs.
As a scientifically trained person, I do worry that there is an overarching inclusion of anyone who has an axe to grind against institutional norms. My beef in particular is the "math is racist" movement. Math is not racist. Access to a good education is the true problem, not a subject that needs more properly trained people of color to teach it. Today, a generation of kids are being told that if they struggle with learning math, it's because of their skin color, not bad teaching and the unrealistic goals and deadlines for the ill-equipped teachers of numeracy assessment tests to measure intelligence and competency in chaotic classrooms from unreadable books.
Achievement of competence in the modern world's two "universal" lingua francas, Mathematics and English is accessible to anyone who is committed to learning it, even if they ultimately have to teach themselves. Teaching yourself how to learn from another groups texts is critically important for a successful scientific or academic career and should not be demonized in its entirety as 'racist' despite any real or perceived historical biases that shaped the academic fields that they arose from centuries ago.
There are clearly aspects of all pedagogy that are unfairly biased toward the perspective of the dominant group, everywhere, but repeating any idiotic generalization about Mathematics or English communication skills over and over again doesn't make it true. CRT shouldn't become a clown car for every complaint about historic racial bias. It needs to define itself and keep the crackpots from derailing the entire train of social justice just because they can.
Thanks for the comment. As I said, I do think there are types of anti-racist pedagogy that are faddish, ill-conceived and counterproductive. And I welcome measures to challenge that. But the current anti-CRT push (especially given that CRT isn't really a pedagogy and isn't even related to much of this stuff) is aiming at something larger, to stifle any and all anti-racist pedagogy.
"the current anti-CRT push (especially given that CRT isn't really a pedagogy and isn't even related to much of this stuff) is aiming at something larger, to stifle any and all anti-racist pedagogy."
I completely and wholeheartedly agree with you on this statement. I just want to distance myself from the extremists and alarmists who try to rush the doors of our own ideological camp bearing faddish, ill-conceived and counterproductive platforms.
Useful idiots on our side do nothing but play into the mushroom cloud of delusions and mischaracterizations of CRT by those same racist pedagogues.