My hypothesis:
The college administrators and HR employees who refuse to say no to young woke adults are disproportionately the same people who, in the role of parents, coddled these wokesters over the past decade. Their reluctance to say "no" is their legacy to the rest of us.
I tend to describe what we're witnessing under the guise of social justice politics as a kind of moral panic. And this is not to say that racism and sexism and transphobia aren't problems anywhere. I think they clearly are, but they're not problems everywhere. And they're being treated as such by a large group of activists and cult leaders, frankly, people like Ibram X. Kendi, who are pushing a politics on the rest of the country that resembles nothing so much as mental illness. And because they enjoy an asymmetrical advantage with respect to social stigma, because being accused of racism in particular is so destructive to a person's reputation.
These activists are successfully silencing and cowing most good people. And the people who do have the courage to call bullshit on all this dishonesty and bullying can be made to seem like they're joining the
ranks of bad people who are really racist and sexist and transphobic. So now we have the spectacle of some of the least racist people and institutions on Earth issuing abject apologies, the kinds of apologies that would seem appropriate in an exit interview from the Ku Klux Klan, just rending themselves over their past sins. I've remained convinced that this fever will break at some point and that same people will step forward and acknowledge that while there's still a lot of work to do to address specific inequalities in our society, we have made tremendous progress. I mean, there is in fact less racism and sexism and transphobia at this moment in America, in particular in our institutions, than there has ever been anywhere on earth, and not to acknowledge that is becoming increasingly perverse.
When I deny that the current versions of CRT are related to the Civil Rights Movement, I assert this because:
A) CRT and antiracism are obsessed with dividing people into "colors" and treating them differently on the basis of "color."
B) The Platform of CRT and antiracism have no meaningful mechanism for improving the lives of the poor minority populations they pretend to serve.
C) CRT and antiracism excel at denying data relating to their mission (including police statistics and economic facts, such as the fact that 60% of Americans who identify as "black" are middle class or above).
D) CRT and antiracism advocates do not extol the teachings of Martin Luther King. In fact, King's teachings are barely mentioned in training materials.
There are other difference too, but this is a sampling based upon some of the articles I've written recently.
Increasing numbers of people are starting to understand that CRT and "antiracism" have no meaning connection to do with the traditional Civil Rights Movement, but now they are increasingly denying that CRT and "antiracism" are being taught in schools. I see this as motivated reasoning based on the fact that most of these people (the ones I know) are only exposed to left-leaning legacy media. These people admit of only a few outliers and deny that CRT or antiracism is a significant problem in the U.S. I disagree, based on these resources:
The recent case of Dana stangel-Plowe, former teacher at a school in Englewood.
The recent case of Paul Rossi.
The observations of Andrew Gutmann, a former parent at Brearly School.
Christopher Rufo's reports based upon leaked training materials at numerous schools.
Chloe Valdary teaches a good-hearted program to diminish bigotry she compares to the CRT programs of which she is knowledgable.
Numerous reports by Parents Defending Education.
Numerous reports of attempted cancellation based on CRT here.
Reports at businesses by Counterweight.
Many more reports here, by Princetonians for Free Speech.
I have also been personally contacted by approximately a dozen people who work in academia who are afraid to speech honestly on issues because CRT permeates the campus
More reports here (Stanford) and here (Rutgers).
John McWhorter's receipt of numerous complaints (see the comments) here.
Another recent resource is Christopher Rufo's "Critical Race Theory Briefing Book."
There are numerous other reports, more of them surfacing every week. I will try to update this list periodically.
Today Matt Taibbi Tweeted: ""Field of Dreams" on TV this morning. Remember when censorship advocates were depicted in pop culture as brainless goons?"
Many people who only read left-leaning legacy media falsely assume that they are well-informed. They take their own select slice of information as a proxy for the full gamut of available information. Many do this because they don't want to spend an admittedly exhausting amounts of time doubling or tripling their news gathering time, much less doing the extra-hard work of processing conflicting accounts from various sources of information. Limiting our news gathering intellectually crimps us, but then we don't know what we don't know, so ignorance becomes bliss. Ignorance feels powerful and omniscient.
I'm posting these concerns because I keep hearing from people who are absolutely convinced that they know that criticism of CRT (Critical Race Theory) is a sham because they've heard about it at NYT/WaPo/NPR. These same news sources also tell us that Christoper Rufo is to be ignored because some Republicans find some of his ideas attractive. There is a much bigger world out there than left-learning legacy media. I lean left on many issues, but I keep encountering ad hominem attacks that I am a "conservative" or "Republican" because I don't pass the DNC purity test. Such simplistic and silo-driven reasoning!
I have been provoked to write this article because I noticed several people on FB citing WaPo's recent piece that starts off by straw-manning Rufo's concerns with this sentence: "Critical race theory holds that racism is systemic in the United States, not just a collection of individuals prejudices--—an idea that feels obvious to some and offensive to others." And with this single sentence, WaPo's entire article becomes a fraud. But those who choose to trust WaPo as authority wouldn't know it. If anyone wants to be truly informed, please consider Rufo's response to WaPo's article on Twitter. Of course, you don't HAVE TO read Rufo's response. But don't consider yourself well-informed unless you do.
[Added June 22, 2021]
The Washington Post walks back many steps.
