First off, not a democrat. Secondly, Republicans concretely instrumented and benefited from the CRT media moral panic. Not "painting" anyone, simply stating facts.
> It wasn't Republicans who thought it a good idea to constantly tell white schoolboys that they are "oppressors".
Show me who's constantly telling white schoolboys they are oppressors and not that they are protected[1] by every institution we have[2]? It's an entirely invented self-victimization.
I don't think you can make a good faith claim that straight white boys are being "protected by every institution we have" in the age of diversity quotas, gifted program elimination, affirmative action in college applications...etc
You can pretend that all of this is justified because of so called privilege, but ultimately you are also discriminating against white boys who are potentially underprivileged for a multitude of other reasons. It is tacitly racist to effectively presume that all white boys are trust fund babies from loving homes who deserve a handicap for the color of their skin. No more valid than assuming that all black men are violent and/or ignorant because of crime statistics and deserve unequal treatment before the law.
To poor white families, all of these initiatives are in fact oppression. There is very little so called privilege in appalachia, for example. Hardly a self-invented victimization - and continuing to insist otherwise is evidently costing the democratic party votes. Rightly so in my humble opinion.
Again, you can't seem to point me at anyone telling white schoolboys they are oppressors.
Public schooling, one of the few institutions that actually values and reaches Appalachian folks[1], has been under attack by exactly the forces behind the latest "critical race theory" boogeyman. If you actually gave a damn about folks in poverty you wouldn't be shilling for the latest fad attack on schools, the list of which you've nicely outlined.
What do you want, a source that literally uses the term "oppression"?
Does CRT not posit that all inequities in our society are a result of white supremacist oppression?
Is the point of privilege not to imply that those who have it must forgo equal treatment in order to correct for historical oppression?
And if white boys fail to do enough to combat this white supremacist, oppressive system, is the implication not that they are furthering this supposed oppression?
>the latest "critical race theory" boogeyman.
First, I don't know how else to repeat this, the fact that young white boys are being singled out for their race and shamed into atoning for their privilege is emphatically not a boogeyman. It's happening. Second, being opposed to racist doctrine being taught in schools to children is not equivalent to attacking public schooling in general. Maybe public schools are under attack because CRT inspired doctrine is offensive to parents of white males, when it does not even allow debate over the premise that all social inequities stem from white male racism, aka oppression. This is not the way to end racism, it will only breed reactionary white supremacy.
Again, if you are accusing white boys of inheriting privilege from an oppressive white supremacist system then you are obviously implying that if they do not actively work against this system, they are acting as oppressors. Your argument is disingenuous.
But at least we've seemingly moved past the lie that "CRT isn't being taught in schools".
> Does CRT not posit that all inequities in our society are a result of white supremacist oppression?
No, it does not.
> Maybe public schools are under attack because CRT inspired doctrine is offensive to parents of white males
Public schools have been under attack by conservatives since they were first created.
> Again, if you are accusing white boys of inheriting privilege from an oppressive white supremacist system then you are obviously implying that if they do not actively work against this system, they are acting as oppressors.
No, they are participating in an oppressive system. If they were not aware of its oppressive nature, it would be hard to fault them. The purpose of efforts to introduce a more honest educational overview of our country's history with racism (which, btw, is not CRT) is primarily so that more of our citizens will understand clearly how things have been and to some extent are. Given such an understanding, it would not be quite so easy to simply brush off "mindless participation", but it also doesn't necessarily dictate what should follow instead.
Kendi's maxim that if you're not an anti-racist then you're a racist is an unfortunate distilling of a really quite deep and profound point that his book(s) make much more subtly and convincingly than this oft-quoted glib phrase.
>CRT scholars view race and white supremacy as an intersectional social construct[7] that advances the interests of white people[11] at the expense of persons of other races
I feel like you're playing a game of sophistry when you try to suggest that this isn't equivalent to blaming inequities on white supremacy. And when all of the outreach efforts are almost exclusively aimed at white people, when all of the "dismantling" comes almost exclusively in the form of shaming or forcing whites to abdicate power that is claimed to be unearned, then it doesn't matter how cleverly CRT is defined in polite conversation; in practice it's dishonest to suggest that white supremacy is the problem, white people are the practicioners, white people must effectively pay the price (by ceding their "privilege"), but somehow CRT isn't actually about blaming white people for racism.
It's also telling (and convenient) that all of this talk of racism falls exclusively into the category of white on minority racism, lending credence to the vicious lie that only white people can be racist.
And for some reason the loudest voices in the field (e.g. deangelo, kendi) explicitly and solely demonize white people and white culture. It doesn't matter how carefully you attempt to deflect from what CRT "really is" when it is so trivially and ubiquitously weaponized against whites in a petty, revenge seeking powergrab. When it is only white men who are expected to attend Kafkaesque reeducation seminars and apologize for their "whiteness". There is no excuse, no suitable apologism, no clever deflection that can hide what CRT is in theory, because there is always one inevitable application in practice, and this blatant, toxic anti white sentiment is fundamentally the essence of CRT. And that is why it has no business influencing what children are learning in school.
>No, they are participating in an oppressive system. If they were not aware of its oppressive nature, it would be hard to fault them.
Shaming children with accusations of privilege and taking away opportunities from them based on the color of their skin is effectively faulting them.
>The purpose of efforts to introduce a more honest educational overview of our country's history with racism
There was nothing insufficiently honest about how we were taught about slavery, racism, and jim crow. What is dishonest is overemphasizing these past transgressions as though they are the most important lessons for white kids to learn. What is dishonest is, in practice, teaching white kids to be ashamed of their heritage, forbidding them from taking or expressing pride in their history by focusing so exclusively on the negative, and overtly blaming whiteness and white culture while simultaneously pretending that this isn't equivalent to blaming white people.
If an ideology is so trivially and ubiquitously corruptible then there is a problem with the ideology. And this is obvious given that, as a critical theory, it is explicitly designed for the sole purpose of exploring the interaction between so called white supremacy and social outcomes. As a college level elective it may be justifiable to teach; as a tool in primary school classrooms it is exclusively a vehicle for anti-white indoctrination and, frankly, your dishonest apologism is offensive to me.
And apparently also to so many of the parents who are being slandered as merely opposing it because Fox told them to; I have part white nephews. I hear what they are being taught in school. I hear how they are being effectively blamed and expected to act for the sins of past people who shared their skin color. I recognize what kind of effect this sort of toxic, racist rhetoric will have on the self esteem of young white boys. And if you listen to great intellectuals like DeAngelo and Kendi, that is the purpose: to knock whitey down a peg. Nothing good can come of this.
This is the problem with the ”CRT” moral panic. The hyperbole knows no bounds:
Shaming children with accusations of privilege? That’s not what a discussion of privilege is.
Taking away opportunities? Expanding the pie so there are more opportunities available is only oppressive to the people that believe every opportunity belongs to them.
There was nothing insufficiently honest about existing curriculum?
Total bs. No one taught us about the bombing of Black Wall Street. No one taught us about how public works submerged Black free towns under water to protect white towns from floods.
Forbidding people from expressing pride?
Have you not seen the success of Hamilton? The American exceptionalist civic religion is alive and well. Everyone is taught about Washington and Grant’s strategic brilliance.
How exactly are your nephews blamed and expected to act? Like decent people?
You don't know what's going on in schools? Or have you just internalized this oppression narrative so much that you don't think there is any reason to oppose it?
"Teachers who had light skin were placed into a “white caucus” group and asked to “remember” that we are “White” and “to take responsibility for [our] power and privilege.” D-E’s racial segregation of educators, aimed at leading us to rethink of ourselves as oppressors, was regressive and demeaning to us as individuals with our own moral compass and human agency."[1]
Really this leaked out during the pandemic when schools went to zoom and parents saw what their kids were being taught. That is what created the outrage.
Check out some of the data gathered by concerned parents and other whistleblowers:
Here is testimony from dissident teachers complaining that they are being forced to teach this social justice narrative and that they are being policed even in their personal lives and private communication, complaining about the climate of fear and authoritarianism:
The whole charade falls apart when you actually read what is being passed off as controversial "Critical Race Theory." The CT Mirror article mentions schools are doing utterly banal things like actually discussing Reconstruction and including more diverse authors in their reading lists.
As for the Moms For Liberty, just look at the books they're trying to ban:
"'Martin Luther King Jr. and the March on Washington' and 'The Story of Ruby Bridges,' about the Black 6-year-old who integrated a Louisiana public school in 1960."[1]
What is threatening about Ruby Bridges and MLK?
Your DailyMail link doesn't even provide a concrete example of what the school is doing. Just cites a bunch of right-wing grifters and context-free snippets from a pamphlet.
As for your YouTube links, it's unsurprising that people are posting exactly the content that the algorithm prioritizes[2]. Make sure to Like and Subscribe!
So you discount the testimony of teachers because youtube has an algorithm, and you discount the oppression narrative quotes because you label the source as "astroturf" and you discount the actual school materials leaked by whistleblowers because -- oh that one was ignored.
Look, I get the strategy of smearing whoever provides information as a way of ignoring the provided data. I just don't understand why you think this strategy is a legitimate form of debate -- it's not.
The only strategy that was engaged in there was (a) the time honored HN tradition of noting that the plural of anecdote is not data and (b) noting that there's nearly always more context to any leaked document or covertly recorded video, and the context frequently doesn't line up with what the party pushing the material is trying to say.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/how-a-conse...