It’s Time to Carefully Examine Critical Race Theory Programs Imposed on our Students in the Classroom

In his most recent column at City Journal, Christopher Rufo points out the dishonest claim by NYT columnist Michelle Goldberg that opponents of critical race theory are supposedly refusing to discuss and debate the merits of CRT. Goldberg's claim is wildly untrue. As Rufo states:

For more than a year, prominent black intellectuals, including John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Wilfred Reilly, and Coleman Hughes have challenged the critical race theorists to debate—and none has accepted. After Goldberg published her column, I called her bluff even further, challenging to “debate any prominent critical race theorist on the floor of the New York Times.” Predictably, none responded, catching the New York Times in a fib and further exposing the critical race theorists’ refusal to submit their ideas to public scrutiny.

Rufo then challenges those like Goldberg who vaguely describe CRT school programs as encouraging "social justice."

They present critical race theory as a benign academic discipline that seeks “social justice,” while ignoring the avalanche of reporting, including my own, that suggests that, in practice, CRT-based programs are often hateful, divisive, and filled with falsehoods; they traffic in racial stereotypes, collective guilt, racial segregation, and race-based harassment. The real test for intellectuals on the left is not to defend their ideas as abstractions but to defend the real-world consequences of their ideas.

Goldberg and Sachs should answer in specifics. Do they support public schools forcing first-graders to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities, then ranking themselves according to their “power and privilege”? Do they support a curriculum that teaches that “all white people play a part in perpetuating systemic racism”? Do they support telling white teachers that they are guilty of “spirit murdering” black children? Do they support telling white parents that they must become “white traitors” and advocate for “white abolition”? These are all real-world examples from my investigative reporting over the past two months, all of which the left-wing critics have deliberately ignored in their rebuttals.

Rufo also challenges Jeffrey Sachs who, along with Goldberg, claim that lawmakers working to restrict CRT training are impinging on free speech issue. Really?  All you need to turn the clock back to 1850 to make it clear that muzzling overt racism in a classroom is not a serious free speech issue.  Rufo explains:

To raise the stakes even further, we could also propose a counterfactual. If the Ku Klux Klan sponsored a public school curriculum that stated, “whites deserve to have the power and privilege” and “black culture is inherently violent”—a simple transposition of critical race theory’s basic tenets—would Goldberg and Sachs jump to the Klan’s defense? They would not—and for good reason. Racism, from the Right or from the Left, is wrong. However, for the critical race theorists, opposing racism is not categorical; it is instrumental. Official discrimination against blacks and Latinos is considered “bad”; official discrimination against whites and Asians is considered “good.”

I have seen many news reports (including Rufo's) that convince me that he is accurately portraying many modern attempts to teach "racial sensitivity" or "bias" or "social justice." That said, we need to be careful how we categorize these programs and those who are advocating for them.  There are some productive ways to talk about race, including the programs advocated by Chloe Valdary.  The programs I find offensive fall along a continuum. Some of these programs (e.g., programs based on the teachings of Robin DiAngelo) shamelessly argue that we ought to see people as "colors," which is a dysfunctional and destructive way to interact with others.  Other programs suggest that we strive to find differences in each other where there are not relevant differences, though they don't say it as explicitly. Every program is different and must be evaluated on its own merits. [More . . . ]

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The New York Times Finally Wakes Up to the Dangers and Dysfunctions of Wokeness

After a long deep sleep, the NYT is finally starting to acknowledge the dysfunctions and dangers of Critical Race Theory. Or maybe I'm being too charitable. This has been a newspaper in deep denial, paralyzed by the fear of being called names by hostile people who mislabel themselves as "liberal" and who falsely claim to have solutions to "racism."  I've been reading and writing about these dangers for the past year, yet this is only the second article I've seen by the NYT that acknowledges obvious dysfunction in many of our colleges (the other was last week's article about Smith College). Here's an excerpt from Brett Stephens Op-Ed, "Smith College and the Failing Liberal Bargain: Absolution is off the table. And liberal ideals themselves are up for renegotiation": 

Why is it that racial tensions keep boiling over at some of the nation’s most emphatically progressive-minded institutions, whether it’s at Smith, Yale, Northwestern, Bryn Mawr or the Dalton School? Why does the embrace of social justice pedagogies seem to have gone hand in hand with deteriorating race relations on campus?

One answer is that if many students are enjoying a diet of courses on critical race theory, and employees are trained on the fine points of microaggressions, they might take to heart what they are taught and notice what they have been trained to see. Another answer is that if those who report being offended gain sympathy, attention and even celebrity, more accusations may be reported. . . .

In place of former notions of fairness toward individuals regardless of race, the Woke left has new ideas of “restorative justice” for racial groups. In place of traditional commitments to free speech, it has new proscriptions on hate speech. In place of the liberal left’s past devotion to facts, it demands new respect for feelings.

All of this has left many of the traditional gatekeepers of liberal institutions uncertain, timid and, in many cases, quietly outraged. This is not the deal they thought they struck. But it’s the deal they’re going to get until they recover the courage of their liberal convictions."

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No Thanks, [Formerly Prestigious American University]. I Need to Go To School Elsewhere to Get a Real Education

John McWhorter has received many hundreds of emails from people who are dismayed with the Woke dismantling of American Education. Here is a recent communication he received, redacted to protect this person and published at It Bears Mentioning, McWhorter's Substack Website, part of an article titled, "If I like it, it's data; if I don't like it, it's "anecdata." No - whether you like it or not, it is neither dim nor racist to generalize on the basis of widespread and frequent events (i.e. both cop killings and Elect abuses)." McWhorter introduces this communicating by noting that this person had been "accepted into a graduate program at a prestigious institution."

It hurts so much that I have to decline your offer and several other great offers that I have received from elite universities and programs that used to be the dream schools for young people like me. I am simply very frustrated by ideology masquerading as objective science in today's higher ed. particularly humanity fields. Universities these days are trying to make young people like me feel guilty because we are white and because the whole system is filled with white racists, and me included. There is such strong moralization in the academy that is so certain that it has Science on its side in all of its proclamations. Frankly, today's academy’s ideological dogmatism is one of my major fear and hesitancies for entering it. I fear any work I do, especially in developmental or evolutionary psychology, would be evaluated not on its merit but instead on what is perceived as my politics based on how politically convenient my findings are. I have decided to move to [foreign country] to join a group of very creative and young [subject area redacted by me] on a [ibid.] research project. I want to spend the last 5 years in my 20s on something scientific, not political. But it seems that it is simply impossible to accomplish that goal in my own country.

Continue ReadingNo Thanks, [Formerly Prestigious American University]. I Need to Go To School Elsewhere to Get a Real Education

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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