History is written by the victors, and the post-WW2 Boomer generation won the population demographic war in the latter half of the 20th century. Wait 10-20 more years (2030's-2040's) and they will no longer be able to promote the WW2 mythology that there is a Master race, and that systemic racism results from "meritocracy". The US will have become a majority minority country by then. The academic historian led curriculums will not be silenced by these moronic bubbas outside of their high school kids' bible study groups.
These reactionary laws will go away once the Boomers go away due to dementia and old age, and the legislative push against CRT scholarship will eventually be found as unconstitutional as the Scopes Monkey trial laws were, in teaching Creationism over Evolution in neighboring Tennessee were a century ago.
Two hundred and sixty-seven years later, Jeet is still seething about the Battle of Palashi and, one assumes, equally aggrieved about the purported distribution of smallpox blankets (on behalf of his symbolic brethren in the global, eternal One Struggle). Only Ahura Mazda truly knows what sort of Master Race mythology entails the bubbas you fear so much climbing into airplanes (invented by them) and bombing other Master Race devotees back to the Stone Age, i.e., committing unprecedented war crimes that are celebrated in our popular culture and part of the greatest mutual slaughter the world has yet seen (alongside Mao). The United States, the U.K., ANZAC, and Western Europe are in the post-WW2 era the most propagandized societies in human history, entirely in the direction that favors your irrational hatred of them. "CRT" as a discipline doesn't rise to the level of tortoiseshell divination in its capacity to explain reality. Have a great 2024
Wait 10-20 years? More? Less? The Scopes verdict was not effectively over-turned by the US Supreme Court until Epperson v. Arkansas (1968), 43 years later.
The demographic changes in 2030-2040 (or 2050?) will be very different than those that occurred in 1960-70.
Epperson v. Arkansas wasn't related to any demographic changes other than the end of the Baby Boom , but based on Cold War driven science education becoming the norm in US public schools..
Don't take the analogy too far with Scopes....whatever year whites become a US demographic minority, that will closely coincide with the year ersatz scholarship and attempts to whitewash ugly history will accept CRT and no longer be the dominant educational narrative.
(d) Nothing in this section shall be construed as prohibiting the following:
(3) Stating concepts described in subsection (c) of this section or assigning materials that incorporate such concepts for educational purposes in contexts that make clear the public school unit does not sponsor, approve, or endorse such concepts or works."
So everything that you describe could, in fact, be taught.
No, the definition of "promoting" which I quote is vague enough to counteract that. And what does it mean to say you could quote the Declaration as a primary text but not draw the logical inferences about the racism of the Founders from it?
No. The passage that I quoted would reduce the the vagueness of the definition of "promote." "Nothing in this section" cannot be counteracted by anything in this section, including the definition of "promote." In other words, NC public schools could still teach the concepts given in (c) but not sponsor, approve, or endorse them.
On your specific example, NC public school teachers could quote those passages from the Declaration and state that the Founders "sanctioned policies of political exclusion, ethnic cleansing and genocide carried out for decades after the founding." This would not be contrary to the bill's prohibition on promoting "that the United States was created by members of a particular race or sex *for the purpose of* oppressing members of another race or sex." (c)(7) My asterisks highlights the importance of that phrase. Yes, the Declaration suggests that genocide was central to the founding of the country, but teaching this is not the same as teaching that genocide was THE purpose.
The precision here is appreciated, particularly your noting the utility of the phrase "for the purpose of" in the bill. You're politely conceding too much, though: The Declaration *doesn't* suggest or declare that genocide was central to the founding of the country; it rudely trash-talks the indigenous people with whom the ethnically English colonists had been fighting--fairly or not--over land and security for generations. That's all appropriate for classroom discussion in grades 8-12, and the bill doesn't block it. Nobody needs to meet Mr. Heer's fanatical friends (and employers) halfway--they interpret any concessions as admissions of moral inferiority, which only increases their venal hatred. (Note the frothing celebration of demographic change, considered "conspiracy" talk from other lips, in the comment below.)
For my part I could care less what resentful Oberlin scribblers at Vox et al. (I mean: Jesus Christ) think about me and my country, with their fake outrage on behalf of Native Americans to whom they can't hold a candle; but we're all God's children, and I'd rather not deliver those of my relatives into the power of people who despise them at a crude, phylogenetic level
Had the Founders used the term "merciless indigenous savages" instead of another entirely conventional (in its day) but technically less accurate term, we (I and my tapeworm) suspect this would be less on your radar. In earnest, where's the lie in their complaint? I know all about the Pequot Massacre, King Phillip's War, and the Seven Years' War; there was brutality on all sides in Colonial America, and the settler-conquerors can be forgiven for putting one-sided topspin into a 100% political revolutionary manifesto (much as NPR, an organization devoid of descendants of either American enslaved people *or* colonists, does in its obsessive reporting on the subject). A determined activist from anywhere on the political spectrum will make any argument they like about whether the Declaration "promotes" racial superiority, but in substance it obviously doesn't; it'd have been redundant, as such attitudes were taken for granted by majority groups everywhere until the recent past -- a reality that really *ought* to be taught in history classrooms. These "anti-CRT" bills will go down in flames in the courts. As for their "chilling effect," I invite anybody to survey the unhinged racial rhetoric of the supposed (that is, corporate-sponsored) Left in the last year.
You're obviously a good person. In all seriousness, please consider that the English conquerors of Canada and the Thirteen Colonies diverged from Britain culturally and psychologically hundreds of years ago, before the term "British" existed and long before "Britain" seized the Subcontinent. They are not actually the same people, and the British evince significant and, I suspect, pointless (given human nature) remorse about their former empire, to a degree unprecedented in history; America exhibits much the same attitudes.
Given your career, I suspect you've met my second cousin, a comics scholar at an American university. For what it's worth, she's representative of my very nice, progressive relatives; I'm the outlier.
Again, the CRT framework is very present in public education and is a long-term, goal-oriented political and psychological project that it's completely natural to resist. If the pushback takes the form of opportunistic, clumsy GOP tub-thumping, so be it; nobody else was doing anything. Before this racialist nonsense started metastasizing around 2013, responsible approaches to teaching U.S. history were gradually evolving, as is the American way. The desperate drive to morally bloody the nose of the palefaces isn't improving our shared society or delivering equity in any way.
There is no CRT framework in public schools. CRT is a legal theory, not an approach to primary school pedagogy. My main interest here is the teaching of accurate history and these anti-CRT bills won't allow that.
Critical Legal Studies, Critical Law Studies, and Critical Legal Theory et al. are interchangeable terms whose variety is dictated by the copyright concerns of academic publishers. As NPR interns discovered this past spring, Derrick Bell pioneered the field, which at its inception was insightful--a point made by John McWhorter, a Traitor to the Left, when the New York Times recently deigned to allow him on one of their podcasts once President Biden had been safely sworn in.
Critical Race Theory ("CRT") is an outgrowth (or excrescence, if you prefer) of the above. It isn't a coherent or consistent academic discipline that can be correctly cited or defined; that's why this month's sneering Brooklyn talking point is "these QAnon rednecks and dim-bulb Young Republicans can't even say what CRT is!"
I know the deal, and you know the deal. The term "CRT" imparts the prestige of a purported scholarly field to a general *zeitgeist* (a Nazi term with which you're familiar) that has come to pervade every aspect of life among the bien pensants. White Privilege, Supremacy, and Fragility; Systemic Racism; Hegemony; Decolonization; and so on. Everybody gets a dose, and the jargon dominates law schools and graduate programs in education. Textbooks on CRT pedagogy abound. Your daughters' teachers don't get up in front of the class and explain the evolution of Kimberle Crenshaw's PhD thesis; they teach the worldview, which is political and has nothing to do with accurate history. As a non-Leaf ten years older than you, I get to say this without citation. Like its own definition of "racism," CRT permeates our social transactions. The pushback to the pushback to CRT in schools is interesting: Folks who've worked hard and can sense that they're close to the finish line, a half generation away from finally breaking Varsity Lacrosse America, are enraged that the rubes have caught on without benefit of controlling every major institution in the country. Liberal Democracy is messy, apparently.
Again, what is the accurate history that won't be taught to the rednecks in the boondocks under this legislation? The claim that kids can't be taught how John Hancock and the families of his associates drove out America's indigenous peoples over generations, because using the Declaration of Independence as a primary source is now outlawed, isn't credible. If I'm proven wrong two years from now, I'll be the first to admit it, not that I'm anybody.
The bills aren't legal genius and theoretically might presage a Guangxi-1968-level crackdown on opponents of the Mar-A-Lago regime, but neither of us really believes that. The current anti-anti-Critical Race Theory movement may be animated more by a genuine anger that, after the stressful Trump years, U.S. students still won't be required to participate in "critical thinking" about whether or not America is a white supremacist culture. It's the potential omission of that *premise* that's the source of the anger--that the top-down approach isn't dominating, even after all this work.
A great selling point of the more arid quarters of Substack ought to be that it's a more gratia artis version of bigger platforms--one can buttonhole some unfortunate pub-crawler as IRL, without playing to an audience
History is written by the victors, and the post-WW2 Boomer generation won the population demographic war in the latter half of the 20th century. Wait 10-20 more years (2030's-2040's) and they will no longer be able to promote the WW2 mythology that there is a Master race, and that systemic racism results from "meritocracy". The US will have become a majority minority country by then. The academic historian led curriculums will not be silenced by these moronic bubbas outside of their high school kids' bible study groups.
These reactionary laws will go away once the Boomers go away due to dementia and old age, and the legislative push against CRT scholarship will eventually be found as unconstitutional as the Scopes Monkey trial laws were, in teaching Creationism over Evolution in neighboring Tennessee were a century ago.
Two hundred and sixty-seven years later, Jeet is still seething about the Battle of Palashi and, one assumes, equally aggrieved about the purported distribution of smallpox blankets (on behalf of his symbolic brethren in the global, eternal One Struggle). Only Ahura Mazda truly knows what sort of Master Race mythology entails the bubbas you fear so much climbing into airplanes (invented by them) and bombing other Master Race devotees back to the Stone Age, i.e., committing unprecedented war crimes that are celebrated in our popular culture and part of the greatest mutual slaughter the world has yet seen (alongside Mao). The United States, the U.K., ANZAC, and Western Europe are in the post-WW2 era the most propagandized societies in human history, entirely in the direction that favors your irrational hatred of them. "CRT" as a discipline doesn't rise to the level of tortoiseshell divination in its capacity to explain reality. Have a great 2024
Wait 10-20 years? More? Less? The Scopes verdict was not effectively over-turned by the US Supreme Court until Epperson v. Arkansas (1968), 43 years later.
The demographic changes in 2030-2040 (or 2050?) will be very different than those that occurred in 1960-70.
Epperson v. Arkansas wasn't related to any demographic changes other than the end of the Baby Boom , but based on Cold War driven science education becoming the norm in US public schools..
Don't take the analogy too far with Scopes....whatever year whites become a US demographic minority, that will closely coincide with the year ersatz scholarship and attempts to whitewash ugly history will accept CRT and no longer be the dominant educational narrative.
You forgot this paragraph from the 2 page bill:
(d) Nothing in this section shall be construed as prohibiting the following:
(3) Stating concepts described in subsection (c) of this section or assigning materials that incorporate such concepts for educational purposes in contexts that make clear the public school unit does not sponsor, approve, or endorse such concepts or works."
So everything that you describe could, in fact, be taught.
No, the definition of "promoting" which I quote is vague enough to counteract that. And what does it mean to say you could quote the Declaration as a primary text but not draw the logical inferences about the racism of the Founders from it?
No. The passage that I quoted would reduce the the vagueness of the definition of "promote." "Nothing in this section" cannot be counteracted by anything in this section, including the definition of "promote." In other words, NC public schools could still teach the concepts given in (c) but not sponsor, approve, or endorse them.
On your specific example, NC public school teachers could quote those passages from the Declaration and state that the Founders "sanctioned policies of political exclusion, ethnic cleansing and genocide carried out for decades after the founding." This would not be contrary to the bill's prohibition on promoting "that the United States was created by members of a particular race or sex *for the purpose of* oppressing members of another race or sex." (c)(7) My asterisks highlights the importance of that phrase. Yes, the Declaration suggests that genocide was central to the founding of the country, but teaching this is not the same as teaching that genocide was THE purpose.
The precision here is appreciated, particularly your noting the utility of the phrase "for the purpose of" in the bill. You're politely conceding too much, though: The Declaration *doesn't* suggest or declare that genocide was central to the founding of the country; it rudely trash-talks the indigenous people with whom the ethnically English colonists had been fighting--fairly or not--over land and security for generations. That's all appropriate for classroom discussion in grades 8-12, and the bill doesn't block it. Nobody needs to meet Mr. Heer's fanatical friends (and employers) halfway--they interpret any concessions as admissions of moral inferiority, which only increases their venal hatred. (Note the frothing celebration of demographic change, considered "conspiracy" talk from other lips, in the comment below.)
For my part I could care less what resentful Oberlin scribblers at Vox et al. (I mean: Jesus Christ) think about me and my country, with their fake outrage on behalf of Native Americans to whom they can't hold a candle; but we're all God's children, and I'd rather not deliver those of my relatives into the power of people who despise them at a crude, phylogenetic level
Had the Founders used the term "merciless indigenous savages" instead of another entirely conventional (in its day) but technically less accurate term, we (I and my tapeworm) suspect this would be less on your radar. In earnest, where's the lie in their complaint? I know all about the Pequot Massacre, King Phillip's War, and the Seven Years' War; there was brutality on all sides in Colonial America, and the settler-conquerors can be forgiven for putting one-sided topspin into a 100% political revolutionary manifesto (much as NPR, an organization devoid of descendants of either American enslaved people *or* colonists, does in its obsessive reporting on the subject). A determined activist from anywhere on the political spectrum will make any argument they like about whether the Declaration "promotes" racial superiority, but in substance it obviously doesn't; it'd have been redundant, as such attitudes were taken for granted by majority groups everywhere until the recent past -- a reality that really *ought* to be taught in history classrooms. These "anti-CRT" bills will go down in flames in the courts. As for their "chilling effect," I invite anybody to survey the unhinged racial rhetoric of the supposed (that is, corporate-sponsored) Left in the last year.
You're obviously a good person. In all seriousness, please consider that the English conquerors of Canada and the Thirteen Colonies diverged from Britain culturally and psychologically hundreds of years ago, before the term "British" existed and long before "Britain" seized the Subcontinent. They are not actually the same people, and the British evince significant and, I suspect, pointless (given human nature) remorse about their former empire, to a degree unprecedented in history; America exhibits much the same attitudes.
Given your career, I suspect you've met my second cousin, a comics scholar at an American university. For what it's worth, she's representative of my very nice, progressive relatives; I'm the outlier.
Again, the CRT framework is very present in public education and is a long-term, goal-oriented political and psychological project that it's completely natural to resist. If the pushback takes the form of opportunistic, clumsy GOP tub-thumping, so be it; nobody else was doing anything. Before this racialist nonsense started metastasizing around 2013, responsible approaches to teaching U.S. history were gradually evolving, as is the American way. The desperate drive to morally bloody the nose of the palefaces isn't improving our shared society or delivering equity in any way.
Good luck
There is no CRT framework in public schools. CRT is a legal theory, not an approach to primary school pedagogy. My main interest here is the teaching of accurate history and these anti-CRT bills won't allow that.
Critical Legal Studies, Critical Law Studies, and Critical Legal Theory et al. are interchangeable terms whose variety is dictated by the copyright concerns of academic publishers. As NPR interns discovered this past spring, Derrick Bell pioneered the field, which at its inception was insightful--a point made by John McWhorter, a Traitor to the Left, when the New York Times recently deigned to allow him on one of their podcasts once President Biden had been safely sworn in.
Critical Race Theory ("CRT") is an outgrowth (or excrescence, if you prefer) of the above. It isn't a coherent or consistent academic discipline that can be correctly cited or defined; that's why this month's sneering Brooklyn talking point is "these QAnon rednecks and dim-bulb Young Republicans can't even say what CRT is!"
I know the deal, and you know the deal. The term "CRT" imparts the prestige of a purported scholarly field to a general *zeitgeist* (a Nazi term with which you're familiar) that has come to pervade every aspect of life among the bien pensants. White Privilege, Supremacy, and Fragility; Systemic Racism; Hegemony; Decolonization; and so on. Everybody gets a dose, and the jargon dominates law schools and graduate programs in education. Textbooks on CRT pedagogy abound. Your daughters' teachers don't get up in front of the class and explain the evolution of Kimberle Crenshaw's PhD thesis; they teach the worldview, which is political and has nothing to do with accurate history. As a non-Leaf ten years older than you, I get to say this without citation. Like its own definition of "racism," CRT permeates our social transactions. The pushback to the pushback to CRT in schools is interesting: Folks who've worked hard and can sense that they're close to the finish line, a half generation away from finally breaking Varsity Lacrosse America, are enraged that the rubes have caught on without benefit of controlling every major institution in the country. Liberal Democracy is messy, apparently.
Again, what is the accurate history that won't be taught to the rednecks in the boondocks under this legislation? The claim that kids can't be taught how John Hancock and the families of his associates drove out America's indigenous peoples over generations, because using the Declaration of Independence as a primary source is now outlawed, isn't credible. If I'm proven wrong two years from now, I'll be the first to admit it, not that I'm anybody.
The bills aren't legal genius and theoretically might presage a Guangxi-1968-level crackdown on opponents of the Mar-A-Lago regime, but neither of us really believes that. The current anti-anti-Critical Race Theory movement may be animated more by a genuine anger that, after the stressful Trump years, U.S. students still won't be required to participate in "critical thinking" about whether or not America is a white supremacist culture. It's the potential omission of that *premise* that's the source of the anger--that the top-down approach isn't dominating, even after all this work.
A great selling point of the more arid quarters of Substack ought to be that it's a more gratia artis version of bigger platforms--one can buttonhole some unfortunate pub-crawler as IRL, without playing to an audience
'...the people who yelp the loudest...'?
Seems to me that Rod Dreher, Andrew Sullivan, et al., are *cheerleading* for the anti-CRT side.