White people are FREAKING OUT about “critical race theory”

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businessinsider.com
Top House Republican group urges its members to 'lean into the culture wars' and fight critical race theory
Eliza Relman
5-6 minutes

• The largest House Republican caucus is urging conservative members of Congress to "lean into the culture war.
• Rep. Jim Banks writes in the memo that Republicans are "winning" the war against critical race theory.
• More than 20 states have introduced bills banning critical race theory and other "divisive concepts.
• See more stories on Insider's business page.

The largest House Republican caucus is urging conservative members of Congress to "lean into the culture war," according to a memo sent out by Republican Study Committee chair Rep. Jim Banks and published by Politico.

The Ohio Republican writes in the memo to his members that Republicans are "winning" the war against critical race theory, which some public schools are using to teach students about racism.

"My encouragement to you is lean into it. Lean into the culture war," he writes. "Because the backlash against Critical Race Theory is real."

Banks cites polling showing that 79% of Americans in swing districts don't want kids to be taught "that their destiny and inherent value depends on their skin color" and instead "want American schools to be teaching about the American Dream." He celebrated the "organic" movement of parents demanding that their kids' schools not teach about systemic racism.

The congressman also baselessly claimed the GOP's opposition to critical race theory, which holds that US institutions are systemically racist, "is the same vision shared by civil rights icon Martin Luther King, Jr."

"We believe that individuals should be judged based on the contents of their character, not their skin. And we believe that America's institutions should be colorblind, just as our Constitution is colorblind," Banks writes in the memo.

While the modern GOP espouses a "color blind" approach to policy, King dedicated his work to addressing systemic and institutional racism before his assassination in 1968. King fought the legalized racism of segregation with civil disobedience, saying in 1967 that most white Americans had never made a determined effort to give Blacks "genuine equality" and contrasted the government's willingness after the Civil War to give acres of land to white immigrants against its paltry offerings to freed Blacks.

Republicans and right-wing media have aggressively focused on the issue in recent months, framing the debate over how to teach US history as a fight between conservative patriots and Democrats "who want to tear America down." More than 20 states have introduced bills banning the teaching of critical race theory and other "divisive concepts" in public schools.

The GOP has doubled down on many of the cultural battles former President Donald Trump waged on the campaign trail and in office. The party's positions on race and education, including policing alleged liberal "indoctrination" on college campuses, has the potential to appeal to key constituencies, including white suburban women, and fuel passions among the party's base.

More: Congress GOP Republicans US House of Representatives

 

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Pat Robertson Says Critical Race Theory ‘Is a Monstrous Evil’
By Kyle Mantyla | June 25, 2021 10:42 am

It seems as if the entire right-wing movement is currently obsessed with critical race theory, which is leading to increasingly unhinged reactions to the dangers supposedly posed by it.

Technically, critical race theory is an academic framework for examining the ways in which systemic racism shapes and influences national and social institutions. But to right-wing activists who refuse to understand this, it has instead become a catchall phrase used to attack anything they dislike. This has created a vicious cycle whereby right-wing commentators misrepresent what critical race theory is and instead attribute to it a cavalcade of hypothetical horrors that, in turn, generates panic and outrage among other right-wing activists over something they don’t understand.

Predictably, televangelist Pat Robertson got into the act on “The 700 Club” Thursday, where he claimed that critical race theory is “a monstrous evil” that is encouraging people of color to “rise up and overtake their oppressors.”

“What is it?” Robertson said. “That the people of color have been oppressed by the white people, and that white people begin to be racist by the time they’re 2 or 3 months old, and that therefore the people of color have to rise up and overtake their oppressors. And then, having gotten the whip handle—if I can use the term—then to instruct their white neighbors how to behave. Now, that’s critical race theory.”


“This is the way the communists take over; they try to destroy the children,” he added. “It is a monstrous evil. And you hear, ‘Oh, critical race theory, that’s OK.’ No, it’s not. [You don’t] want to have your children in the third grade indoctrinated into a hate group so that he’ll wind up hating people or hating himself. And so the white people are supposed to feel guilty, and they’re supposed to have white guilt, and the people of color are supposed to cleanse them of that guilt by taking over. It is a monstrous evil.”

 

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https://theweek.com/politics/1001865/critical-race-theory-george-floyd-protests

 

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https://theweek.com/politics/1001865/critical-race-theory-george-floyd-protests

Why are conservatives throwing a tantrum about anti-racism? The George Floyd protests.
A ginned-up moral panic is an excuse to not do anything about racial injustice

Many school districts across the country are in the grips of a full-blown moral panic, supposedly over something called "critical race theory" (CRT). Fox News has been blaring deranged propaganda about CRT for months. In Loudon County, Virginia (home to many Republican political professionals), angry conservatives deluged a recent school board meeting, and were so loud and disruptive that two were eventually arrested. Similar stories can be found in Maine, Texas, Pennsylvania, and many other states.

This panic, as I've previously written, has nothing to do with the actual arguments of critical race theory scholars. But that raises the question of what it really is about. The answer is the George Floyd protests of last summer and the ongoing surge of anti-racist activism.

Ben Wallace-Wells recently published an excellent profile in The New Yorker of Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist who all but singlehandedly bootstrapped this moral panic. In Rufo's own telling, it all started with someone sending him an annoying anti-racism seminar in July of last year. He then read books by Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi about anti-racism that surged to the top of bestseller lists last year and followed the footnotes therein to older articles about critical race theory. Then he went on Tucker Carlson and delivered a carefully-prepared harangue about CRT; President Trump (of course) was watching, leading to a call from then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. Trump began to attack anti-racist trainings and scholarship, numerous conservative states have passed laws attacking CRT, and here we are.

Rufo straight-up admits that it was corporate and educational anti-racist trainings that motivated his crusade, not critical race theory itself; that the primary reason he selected it as a target was its ominous sounding name; and that he neither knows nor cares about the actual substance of CRT. "Strung together, the phrase 'critical race theory' connotes hostile, academic, divisive, race-obsessed, poisonous, elitist, anti-American," he told Wallace-Wells. At a recent conference, he contemptuously scoffed at "pathetic … angry graduate students" who try to argue with him about CRT or other topics. "I don't give a s**t about this stuff," he said. On Twitter, Rufo frankly admitted that he wants to make CRT into a vacuous smear and fill up its meaning with everything he doesn't like:

NBC News recently reported how a network of conservative activists have taken up Rufo's ideas to whip up a frenzy about CRT in their local school board meetings.

So the moral panic over anti-racism has a strong astroturf element to it. One guy who is completely open about his dishonest intentions inserted himself into the propaganda vortex that circles endlessly between Trump and conservative media, and that was all it took to create shrieking panic in tens of thousands of people.

But the moral panic probably wouldn't have caught fire to quite the same degree if it wasn't hooking into some real problems or conflicts. On one level, it must be admitted that some of the anti-racist politics from writers like DiAngelo have played into Rufo's hands. The corporate diversity seminar where some well-paid consultant lectures white employees to do self-criticism (while carefully avoiding ideas that might harm the corporate bottom line, like improving the welfare state or unionizing the company) is at best not very helpful, and at worst will actually make people more prejudiced.

Indeed, the individualist, self-obsessed creed of this style of anti-racism strongly smacks of the neoliberal ideology that many critical race theory scholars have attacked. Kimberlé Crenshaw, a foundational scholar in the CRT tradition, told Wallace-Wells: "I've been witness to trainings that I thought, 'Ennnnnh, not quite sure that's the way I would approach it … To be honest, sometimes people want a shortcut.'"

That said, the deeper reason Rufo's anti-anti-racism crusade caught on in conservative politics simply has to be the George Floyd protests. Remember that these were the largest protests in American history in terms of raw numbers. For a couple weeks, the footage of helpless Floyd being brutally murdered by a cop was so shocking that even conservatives were jolted into sympathy. Favorability numbers for Black Lives Matter soared to 61 percent in June of last year.

Moreover, the protests were the reason so many diversity trainings have happened over the last year in the first place. Corporate America was taken aback by the strength and reach of the outrage, and struggled to maintain their brand images or preemptively insulate themselves from accusations of racial prejudice (though to be fair some surely had a genuine commitment to doing something about racism, however clumsy).

There is clearly tremendous potential cultural power in the idea of freeing Black Americans from police brutality and other oppression that they (and other minority groups) suffer. The violence suffered by Floyd and so many thousands of other people is horrifying to anyone with a conscience, and arguments for ending this injustice hook directly into bedrock American ideas about liberty and equality. What racial justice activists are saying today echo the positions of famous national heroes like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Abraham Lincoln.

Conservatives therefore risked being routed in a culture war battle. As Crenshaw said, "This is a post-George Floyd backlash … The reason why we're having this conversation is that the line of scrimmage has moved." A new ideological construct was needed to sweep all this discontent about racial injustice under the rug, and Rufo eventually made one up. As the writer John Ganz argues:

Rufo and his cohort are in the process of creating an ideological space where the signifier "anti-racism" will necessarily imply bloody Marxism, the gulag, the end of American democracy, the seizure of private property etc., but mentions of "racism" will also imply Critical Race Theory, which in their formulation creates the "real racism" through even talking about race. [Unpopular Front]

The intended plan going forward is clearly to leverage this moral panic to conduct Red Scare-style political purges of educational institutions, the civil service, the military, and anywhere else leftists or liberals might be driven out of public life. (After the right-wing propaganda machine kicked into high gear and BLM was smeared around the clock for months, conservative support fell to lower than it had been before Floyd was killed.)

That is the obvious intent of all the (baldly unconstitutional) attacks on the free speech and inquiry of academics passed in so many conservative states — supposed bans on "critical race theory" that are intentionally written so vaguely they would preclude any accurate instruction of American history or racism. GOP members of Congress recently harangued Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley about anti-racist trainings in the armed forces. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently signed a bill that would require surveys of university students and faculty, and threatened budget cuts for any institution found to be "indoctrinating" students — that is, if they disagree with conservative ideology.

The staggering hypocrisy of conservatives who just five minutes ago were whining about campus snowflakes being a threat to free inquiry is indeed galling. But what may happen to America's disproportionately-minority underclass is even more important. Rufo and his allies want to stamp out any attempt to do anything about the epidemic of police brutality and return to the days when poor Black, brown, and quite frequently white people were shot to death by agents of the state and nobody in power cared at all. If conservatives aren't confronted and defeated politically that is what will happen.

 

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washingtonpost.com
The challenge for educators amid the critical race theory backlash: How do you fight hot air?
Karen Attiah
5-6 minutes
DALLAS — “I’ve been a superintendent for 26 years. I don’t get rattled easily,” Dallas Schools Superintendent Michael Hinojosa told me. “But this ... I was startled.”

Hinojosa was speaking of the fervent anti-critical-race-theory movement that has gripped legislatures and schools across mostly red states, including and especially here in Texas. This month, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) signed a new law that effectively prohibits teachers from talking honestly and in any depth about the country’s racial history. The law also strongly discourages — the “both sides” language it dictates is maddeningly loose — teachers from taking on controversial current events in the classroom and prohibits crediting students for civic efforts to lobby government on social issues.

The law will go into effect Sept. 1, and those who want to push back on it have their summer homework cut out for them. How best to bring the heat against a state law clearly designed to have a chilling effect on educational discussions about race in America?

For Hinojosa, the question is personal. He knows what it’s like to be presented a whitewashed history as a child of color. The memory of it lies at the core of the educator he set out to be.

“I’m Mexican American, and with the Alamo, they always talked about slaughtering the Mexicans when I was a little kid,” he said. “Can you imagine what went through my mind? When I became a teacher, I could say, ‘Well, here’s the other perspective. Make up your own mind about it.’”

As Texas Republicans advanced the legislation, Hinojosa was outspoken about using litigation to fight back. But now that the bill has been signed into law, educators are scratching their heads. That vagueness in the language poses a huge challenge. Where, exactly, are the red lines? “We’ve got to figure out what the language of the law says,” Dallas school board president Ben Mackey told me. Because of that, Mackey said, the board would likely wait until August or September to decide on a course of action.

For all the conservative outrage about critical race theory, few GOP lawmakers can define what it is. It’s not as if the theory is widely taught in the K-12 schools — we’re talking about an advanced framework developed by scholars interested in interpreting America’s systems through the lens of race and civil rights. The Texas law doesn’t even use the words “critical race theory.” The vagueness is clearly intentional, as is the paranoid bluster that critical race theory is not only unpatriotic, but also designed to make White kids feel bad for being White. Fighting it is like fighting the hot air of this blazing Texas summer.

And the Dallas Independent School District has progress to protect. The school board had been making strides in developing programs to promote cultural competency and racial equity among staff and teachers. At the same time, Dallas is a blue city in a red state, and the district’s students are 90 percent lower-income and 95 percent racial minority, while 45 percent are English learners. One point of particular pride: Some of the state’s milestones on education in the past year can be traced back to Dallas and its civically engaged students. “We had some students who gained some pretty serious recognition for going down and lobbying the state legislature,” Mackey said. “We saw a huge step forward in making Mexican studies and African American studies official in the state of Texas.”

Hinojosa, a former history and government teacher, said he was caught by surprise by how quickly the stealthy, well-orchestrated movement against critical race theory picked up steam. I can’t say the same. Preserving white supremacy in America’s schools is as American as apple pie — made with fruit picked by slave labor.

What else but white supremacy drove Native American children to be separated from their families and forced into schools that prevented them from learning their language, history and culture? What else but white supremacy fought tooth and nail to preserve school segregation? After Brown v. Board of Education, it was white supremacy that blocked the excellent Black teachers, principals and superintendents who lost jobs at Black-only schools from positions of authority at integrated schools.

And now comes this backlash. Indeed, it is darkly ironic that laws designed to suppress the teaching of America’s history are producing scenes around America that look like something out of the 1950s and ’60s, as mostly White parents disrupt school board meetings. Groups in some states are beginning to call for McCarthy-esque surveillance measures. In Nevada, some groups want teachers to wear body cameras to monitor whether they are teaching about racial justice.

This is all about as far from the true purpose of education as you can get. Fortunately, some American educators have not — will not — lose sight of their calling. Hinojosa’s compass has not wavered. “We believe in inclusion, diversity and equity,” he said, “and that’s what we are sticking to.”

 

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If you are a black person shocked by the cac reaction to this should be ashamed of yourself.



Stop trying to deny the true nature of cacs.

 

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[saturn7]

Judge be losing me with these Right Wing takes.



I thought CRT was started by Derrick Bell and is NOT taught in elementary, middle or High schools.