Critical Race Theory Compared to the Civil Rights Ideals of the 1960s

Critical Race Theory claims to be the new improved way to deal with racial issues. How does the Woke doctrine, spreading through American schools and workplaces, compare to the principles of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's?

The creator of the above image is Woke Temple at Twitter. The "original document" above doesn't exist (I confirmed this through personal communication with "Woke Temple"), but it accurately serves as a summary of some of Martin Luther King's core teachings.  The "corrections" in the graphic accurately reflect commonly espoused principles of Critical Race Theory (For more on CRT, consider the lectures and writings of prominent CRT advocates Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi).  See also this glossary entry for CRT at New Discourses.

It should be apparent that one cannot honor the memory and teachings of Martin Luther King and, at the same time, support Critical Race Theory. They are mutually exclusive, so each of us needs to decide where we stand on this clash of ideas.

In the early 1960s, I was a young boy.  I barely watched the news back then and I didn't appreciate the importance of the civil rights movement. That said, I always knew it was a bad idea to judge each other based on the way we looked. It made deep visceral sense, as did the platitude: "Don't judge a book by its cover."  Now that I'm much older, I sometimes imagine going back in time to march with Martin Luther King to make a strong show of support for the real Civil Rights Movement.

For those of us who were too young to march with MLK, 2021 is our second chance to stand up for true Civil Rights Movement.  Are you willing to be called names like "racist" by a loud group of zealots in order to take this strong moral stand? That would be such a small price to pay compared to what MLK had to endure.  Are you willing to allow people to call you names to help keep this country from decaying back to days where we judge each other by immutable physical characteristics like color of skin?  Where millions of people obsess about what "race" someone is?  To a system of categorizing each other that makes no more sense than astrology or phrenology? Again, this is your chance - - your voice is needed, and all you need to do is to say out loud those thoughts you are already thinking.  Judging each other by the way we look is an outrageously dysfunctional approach to interact with each other.

The longer we don't take a strong stand against Critical Race Theory, the more entrenched CRT will become in numerous schools (grade schools and colleges and see here), media outlets and governmental offices. Here's how bad it recently got at a major national museum.  See also John McWhorter's  analysis: CRT is a new fundamentalist religion.

You know what is at stake.  We've already set aside a national holiday in his honor.  Are you ready to speak up in support of Martin Luther King?

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Quotes of Martin Luther King that bear on the principles set forth in the "document" above:

[Don't Judge Others by the Color of their Skin]

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.

[Violence, Hatred, Love]

Hate begets hate; violence begets violence; toughness begets a greater toughness. We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love... Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man, but to win his friendship and understanding.

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy, instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

[Segregation]

Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children

[More . . . ]

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Bari Weiss: Affluent Parents Who are Afraid to Speak Out When Their Kids’ Private Schools Turn Woke

Here's a short excerpt from a long detailed article by Bari Weiss. She does not name her sources because they told her they are afraid of being named. They also told her that these stories need to be told. Weiss titled her article "The Miseducation of America's Elites Affluent parents, terrified of running afoul of the new orthodoxy in their children’s private schools, organize in secret."

These are two-career couples who credit their own success not to family connections or inherited wealth but to their own education. So it strikes them as something more than ironic that a school that costs more than $40,000 a year — a school with Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s right hand, and Sarah Murdoch, wife of Lachlan and Rupert’s daughter-in-law, on its board — is teaching students that capitalism is evil.

For most parents, the demonization of capitalism is the least of it. They say that their children tell them they’re afraid to speak up in class. Most of all, they worry that the school’s new plan to become an “anti-racist institution” — unveiled this July, in a 20-page document — is making their kids fixate on race and attach importance to it in ways that strike them as grotesque.

. . .

But physics looks different these days. “We don’t call them Newton’s laws anymore,” an upperclassman at the school informs me. “We call them the three fundamental laws of physics. They say we need to ‘decenter whiteness,’ and we need to acknowledge that there’s more than just Newton in physics.”

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The Entirely Predictable Result of “Abolishing” the Police in Minneapolis

The statistics have been clear and unwavering for many years: Fewer police on the streets means more violent crime, young Black men will disproportionately be the homicide victims of this street violence and very few of these deaths will have anything to do with the police.

Minneapolis is finally figuring out the obvious, as described through a series of headlines assembled by Melissa Chen, with a cadenza by Peter Boghossian.

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Camille Paglia: How Postmodernism (Woke ideology) is Destroying Education

I just finished reading Camille Paglia's essay, "Free Speech and the Modern Campus," from a collection of her prior writings, a book titled Provocations."  This essay takes aim at practices that were once called "Political Correctness," which now fall under the description of excesses of the Woke or Wokeness.  Paglia begins her essay by recounting how and why many colleges and universities founded niche studies departments, such as women's studies. Colleges made the mistake of allowing these departments to serve as singularities, unengaged with traditional core studies of, for example, history or psychology. These departments

were so hastily constructed in the 1970s, a process that not only compromised professional training in those fields over time but also isolated them in their own worlds and thus ultimately lessened their wider cultural impact.. . . Working on campus only with the like-minded, they treat dissent as a mortal offense that must be suppressed, because it threatens their entire career history and world-view. The ideology of those new programs and departments, predicated on victimology, has scarcely budged since the 1970s.

These new departments confused scholarship with ideology. They became like churches:

Teaching and research must strive to remain objective and detached. The teacher as an individual citizen may and should have strong political convictions and activities outside the classroom, but in the classroom, he or she should never take ideological positions without at the same time frankly acknowledging them as opinion to the students and emphasizing that all students are completely free to hold and express their own opinions on any issue, no matter how contested, from abortion, homosexuality, and global warming to the existence of God . . .

A familiar trio of Continental philosophers was carted into these niche curricula:

The Derrida and Lacan fad was followed by the cult of Michel Foucault, who remains a deity in the humanities but whom I regard as a derivative game-player whose theories make no sense whatever about any period preceding the Enlightenment. The first time I witnessed a continental theorist discoursing with professors at a Yale event, I said in exasperation to a fellow student, “They’re like high priests murmuring to each other.”

At p. 379, Paglia explains the main problem with poststructuralism:

Post-structuralism, in asserting that language forms reality, is a reactionary reversal of the authentic revolutionary spirit of the 1960s, when the arts had turned toward a radical liberation of the body and a reengagement with the sensory realm. By treating language as the definitive force in the world—a foolish thesis that could easily be refuted by the dance, music, or visual arts majors in my classes—poststructuralism set the groundwork for the present campus impasse where offensive language is conflated with material injury and alleged to have a magical power to create reality. Furthermore, poststructuralism treats history as a false narrative and encourages a random, fragmented, impressionistic approach that has given students a fancy technique but little actual knowledge of history itself.

Another problem with political correctness is the inability to interpret the significance of events in the context of the time period in which they occurred (see here for a recent example):

The problem of political correctness is intensified by the increasing fixation of humanities and even history departments on “presentism,”that is, a preoccupation with our own modem period.

What are the solutions? Paglia offers three:

[E]ducators must first turn away from the sprawling cafeteria menu of over-specialized electives and return to broad survey courses based in world history and culture, proceeding chronologically from antiquity to modernism. Students desperately need a historical framework to understand both past and present.

Second, universities should sponsor regular public colloquia on major topics where both sides of sensitive, hot-button controversies are frilly discussed. Any disruptions of free speech at such forums must be met with academic sanctions.

[C]olleges and universities must stay totally out of the private social lives of students.The intrusive paternalism o f American colleges in this area is an unacceptable infringement of student rights.If a crime is committed on campus, it must be reported to the police.There is no such thing as a perfectly “safe space” in real life. Risk and danger are intrinsic to human existence.

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