BREAKING: The nation's largest teachers union has approved a plan to promote critical race theory in all 50 states and 14,000 local school districts. The argument that "critical race theory isn't in K-12 schools" is officially dead.
Here is the entire item:
There's a big argument raging about what to call this thing. I refer to it as Critical Race Theory because these teachings have their roots in CRT, even though these teaching have morphed into what we are currently seeing in many classroom. Whatever you call it, you can find it in all these places.
Are there other things to be wary of? Absolutely. Climate issues, current and future pandemics, the false narratives of the far right. Many of these discussions are unproductive for the same reason that we can't discuss CRT: because we can't even agree on the basic facts. I'm not in the mood for what-about-ism at the moment, because unapologetic woke struggle sessions now inhabit many of our once-schools and universities. Why do I keep "obsessing" about this trend? Because unquestionable facts (e.g., the biological fact that there are two--and only two-sexes) mean nothing to many of those who lead these sessions. They proclaim that striving for excellent and reaping the rewards of hard work is inappropriate.
On racial issues, the leaders of these sessions are smearing the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. When I read their words, I imagine these loud and rude Wokesters throwing rotten fruit or rocks at MLK and jeering him. They claim to be leading a new improved Civil Rights Movement, but they are reversing the gains of the past 60 years. They call it progress when they go into third grade classrooms, dividing the children by color and sow lifetime seeds of suspicion and distrust when they tell the "white" children that they are oppressors of the "black" children. These kids should be freely playing with each other at recess, but now they are being told to fear each other. Further, the "black" children are being fed huge doses of the soft bigotry of low expectations.
Yet social media bristles with accusations that to have these concerns makes one a "conservative" or a "Republican" and that people like me are paranoid because the new syllabus merely teaches "racial history," as though previous generations of children have not been taught about racial history.
Hell, yes, I'm concerned. And I will keep speaking out as long as larges swathes of social media are motivated to get the facts wrong. I feel the moral imperative to be, if necessary, the only one in the large room to speak up.
Matt Taibbi somehow convinced himself to read race-grifter Robin DiAngelo's new book, Nice racism. I can't muster the necessary masochism to join him in this effort, especially after I forced myself to trudge through DiAngelo's first book, White Fragility. According to Taibbi, DiAngelo's sequel is a regurgitation of her first book and nothing more. The title of Taibbi's review is "Our Endless Dinner With Robin DiAngelo Suburban America's self-proclaimed racial oracle returns with a monumentally oblivious sequel to "White Fragility." Here's an excerpt of Taibbi's review:
Nice Racism’s central message is that it’s a necessity to stop white people from seeing themselves as distinct people. “Insisting that each white person is different from every other white person,” DiAngelo writes, “enables us to distance ourselves from the actions of other white people.” She doesn’t see, or maybe she does, where this logic leads. If you tell people to abandon their individual identities and think of themselves as a group, they sooner or later will start to behave as a group. Short of something like selling anthrax spores or encouraging people to explore sexual feelings toward nine year-olds, is there a worse idea than suggesting — demanding — that people get in touch with their white identity?If DiAngelo’s insistence that “I don’t feel guilty about racism,” reveling in scenes of making people experience and re-experience racial discomfort, and weird puffery in introducing herself by saying things like, “I am Robin and I am white” feel familiar, it’s because she’s hitting all the themes favored by Klansmen and identitarian loons of yore. Read a book like David Duke’s My Awakening (if you can stand it, you can find excerpts here) and you’ll encounter the same types of passages present in Nice Racism.
It's a mistake to argue whether the poisonous divisive and dishonest ideas being preached in many schools is "Critical Race Theory" (even though it is clear that much of it is very much like CRT). Instead, look at the types of things that are being taught in many schools, things that sound so much like CRT that they are reasonably being referred to as a modern version of CRT. Then simply ask yourself whether it is a good thing to preach this sort of divisive and dishonest drivel to children and teenagers. Just point to the things that are being embraced by schools, such as the recent episode at Julliard, and then ask yourself whether good, healthy school environments like this lead to human flourishing. That avoids intentional obfuscation such as this disingenuous conversation by Joy Reid and Ibram X. Kendi (as pointed out by Wokal Distance).
