Critical Race Theory policy in hiring at UT

Mrs Whiggins · July 12, 2021

Spoilered the article; coming soon to a kindergarten through university campus near you (if not already). Rufo has been discussed before, this article goes into detail.

Spoiler

How to Manufacture a Moral Panic

Christopher Rufo helped incite an uproar over racism education with dramatic, dodgy reporting.

Los Angeles public school teacher R. Tolteka Cuauhtin had Googled his discipline, ethnic studies, in March when he discovered he wanted children to honor the Aztec gods of human sacrifice and cannibalism. Should the state of California implement the curriculum that Cuauhtin had helped design, an article in the conservative magazine City Journal reported, students would “chant to the gods Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli, and Xipe Totek, seeking ‘healing epistemologies’ and ‘a revolutionary spirit. Huitzilopochtli, in particular, is the Aztec deity of war and inspired hundreds of thousands of human sacrifices during Aztec rule.”

Cuauhtin found himself in crowded company, the latest educator singled out by right-wing activist Christopher Rufo for crimes against public education. Rufo’s article was picked up by American Conservative columnist Rod Dreher, who wrote it up in a blog post headlined “The Re-Barbarization of California.” The Daily Caller grabbed it. So did Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, who interviewed Rufo about his story. He has also captured the attention of liberals. He recently sparred with MSNBC’s Joy Ann Reid on her show, visibly sighing as Reid explained the concept of whiteness to him.

Last summer, Rufo seemed to come from nowhere, arriving on the scene after a national uprising against racism to lead the charge against the supposed excesses of anti-racism education, branding it all with a once-obscure academic term: critical race theory. Armed with a prolific Twitter account and the backing of the conservative Establishment, he brandished “scoops” about the widespread infiltration of the theory and eventually caught the attention of the Trump White House. In short order, he had transformed himself from a limited kind of Twitter star to bona fide conservative influencer. The proof lies offline in the new moral panic he helped instigate. Republican operatives, legislators, and commentators, all professing concern for young hearts and minds, claim that children are being taught to hate white people.

A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor to City Journal, Rufo didn’t just bolt onto Twitter from the void. He is the product of a right-wing movement that has formed countless others from the same mold. A documentary filmmaker who graduated from Georgetown University’s school of foreign service, Rufo possesses an impeccable conservative pedigree: Fellowships with unclear purviews litter his resume. A former visiting fellow for domestic-policy studies at the Heritage Foundation, Rufo was also once a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute alongside James O’Keefe of Project Veritas. Later, he worked for a little-known Christian think tank based in Seattle called the Discovery Institute, where he wrote frequently on the subject of homelessness. Before long, Rufo’s interests combined in a new cause. After last summer’s protests, he wrote a piece for City Journal comparing the diversity training conducted by the city of Seattle to “cult programming” that was picked up by the New York Post. A week later, he promoted a story about the Treasury Department that has since been debunked by the Washington Post. In Rufo’s account, Treasury allegedly subjected workers to a radical diversity training that urged them to “accept their white racial superiority.” In reality, the document Rufo cites as proof said no such thing.

Despite the flaws in his reporting, Rufo’s profile grew, and by last September, he had appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show to urge Trump to issue an executive order “abolishing critical race theory trainings from the federal government.” Three days later, Trump’s budget director sent out a memo relaying Trump’s desire that federal agencies “cease and desist” funding diversity programs that allegedly trained “government workers to believe divisive, anti-American propaganda,” as Yahoo News reported at the time. Trump would later issue an executive order banning programs that, in the words of the budget director’s memo, taught government employees that the “United States is an inherently racist or evil country or that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil.”

Though he refers to himself as an investigative journalist, writing dramatically of whistleblowers and documents, Rufo is often responsible for propagating false or misleading accounts like the Treasury Department story and has arguably helped to incite a nationwide panic over the alleged presence of critical race theory in public schools, the federal government, and the workplace.

“There’s no question about it that he’s quite influential,” said Charlie Sykes, a Rufo critic and former conservative talk-show host who broke with the GOP over Donald Trump. “People were looking around for some way to play this card of racial grievance. They were looking for another cause in the cultural war. And this happened to be it, and he happened to be on it.”

Rufo’s war often targets noncombatants like Cuauhtin. What Rufo published “are classically racist interpretations about indigenous cultures, fabricated lies about mass human sacrifice, lies that continue on a 500-year-plus trajectory,” Cuauhtin said. Rufo got a lot wrong, Cuauhtin told me, posting short fragments of a curriculum that spans more than 900 pages and has multiple authors. The conservative writer didn’t reach out to him for his side of the story either, Cuauhtin said.

Rufo didn’t answer questions sent to him by email, responding instead that “New York Magazine is trash. If it stopped publication tomorrow, the world would be a better place.” Nevertheless, it’s possible to glean much about his motivations and worldview from his public writing. Rufo isn’t interested in denying that racism exists. No, he says, racism is real — but the actual racists are those who are teaching and spreading critical race theory, and they must be deplored in public. What Rufo and his ilk really object to isn’t critical race theory at all but the ugliness of history. When an educator exposes the racism that lurks within this nation, they often find themselves at the mercy of an onslaught from the right.

That’s what happened to officials in Oregon’s Tigard-Tualatin School District. In an article for City Journal’s spring issue, Rufo said he’d received “a blueprint” from a whistleblower. It purportedly showed that the district’s new director of equity and inclusion, Zinnia Un, planned to transform “the pedagogy and curriculum” by adopting the theories of Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator whose best-known work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, encourages teachers to work with their students as partners and frames education as an act of liberation and mutual humanization. This is a problem, Rufo said, because Freire was a Marxist. “Following Freire’s categorizations, Un writes that the Tigard-Tualatin school district must move from a state of ‘reading the world’ to the phase of ‘denunciation’ against the revolution’s enemies and, finally, to the state of ‘annunciation’ of the liberated masses, who will begin ‘rewriting the world,’” Rufo wrote.

The school-district document Rufo cites does not say this. It references Freire’s work but not, for example, revolution, its enemies, or the liberated masses. A spokesperson for the district said the presentation was used internally for an opt-in professional-development session and school-board discussions about implementing an anti-racist resolution; a revolutionary vanguard has yet to form.

Of an additional staff resource, Rufo wrote that it “assumes” whites are born racist, which he called “textbook cult indoctrination.” The truth is a bit tamer: The guide urges white educators to move beyond the “belief that you aren’t racist if you don’t purposely or consciously act in racist ways,” and according to the spokesperson, it has not been used in any formal settings, such as for staff training. Still, this hysterical interpretation appealed to right-wing commentators like Andy Ngo, and Rufo later went on Newsmax to promote the misleading story further.

Professor Cheryl Harris, a leading scholar in the field of critical race theory and the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Professor in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at UCLA Law, began to receive hostile emails so “distorted” that, at first, “I didn’t know what they were talking about,” she said. The emails came after Rufo referenced her in a March article for Hillsdale College’s Imprimis magazine, claiming she had called for “suspending private property rights, seizing land and wealth and redistributing them along racial lines.” He later included cherry-picked quotes from her seminal article “Whiteness as Property,” in an online “briefing book” on critical race theory.

“I was getting emails saying, ‘Well, why don’t you redistribute your property?’” she said. She realized then that it was because of Rufo’s pamphlet, where he “explicitly says, I’m calling for the suspension of private property, seizing land and wealth and distributing them along racial lines.” She added, “I’ve never said such a thing.” Though the emails didn’t contain any direct threats, she described them as “disturbing” and said, “Maybe I’m reading this in a particular way, but I know that when people believe that something like their property is threatened, or their children are threatened, they feel justified in doing whatever they need to do to protect them.”

The curriculums and programs targeted by the right have little to do with critical race theory itself, according to Harris. “One of the challenges is there is what critical race theory is, and there’s what it’s being portrayed to be in the context of this disinformation campaign. So it’s difficult to start out a discussion about what it is when what is being projected really bears no resemblance to it and has no intention of bearing any resemblance to it,” Haris said. The theory started as a school of thought in law to examine how racial inequality persisted in society despite policies adopted to eliminate it, she explained.

In this context, Rufo’s role is clear. He takes critical-race theory as a concept, strips it of all meaning, and repurposes it as a catchall for white grievances. “The goal,” he tweeted, “is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.” In an interview with the Post, he said the tweet described an “obvious” approach: “If you want to see public policy outcomes you have to run a public persuasion campaign.”

That campaign might be working. InsideHigherEd reported in early June that lawmakers in sixteen states “have introduced or passed legislation this year seeking to limit the teaching of critical race theory within public institutions.” The head of the Nevada Family Alliance recently suggested that schools outfit teachers with body cameras to make sure they aren’t teaching critical race theory. Online, Rufo often cheerleads these anti-critical-race-theory developments to his nearly 200,000 Twitter followers, proof of a war going well. The militaristic overtones are hard to miss. Rufo’s Twitter handle includes an emoji of crossed swords, which he has said means “swords up.”

In form, the fight over critical race theory in schools resembles earlier panics over the teaching of intelligent design and its cousin creationism, over the teaching of LGBT themes, and over prayer and the Bible — remove God from school, and young people will tumble down the highway to hell. Mike Pompeo recently couched things in more secular terms, with the nation taking the place of the divine. “If we teach that the founding of the United States of America was somehow flawed. It was corrupt. It was racist. That’s really dangerous,” he tweeted. “It strikes at the very foundations of our country.”

Rufo isn’t the first to treat schools like battlegrounds. At both the K-12 and college levels, education represented a challenge for the Christian right to which Rufo’s former employer, the Discovery Institute, belongs. Like many a young Evangelical, I encountered the think tank in the 1990s, when they battled the forces of Darwinism. They argued schools should teach intelligent design, if not as the sole truth of the world, then as a credible scientific theory. Rufo was surrounded by people long accustomed to classroom culture wars. “Teach the controversy,” they urged. Decades later, with Rufo, they appeared to have changed their minds. When did it conclude that some controversies matter more than others?

I called up my old boss Rob Boston of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which has repeatedly challenged the Discovery Institute and its allies over the teaching of intelligent design in schools. “It’s really interesting, this question of public schools, because I’ve followed this for a long time, and there’s this theory among Christian nationalist groups that the public schools are almost like laboratories for whatever social-engineering project liberals have come up with,” he said.

That theory boasts many adherents, as my own experiences can testify. I was homeschooled until the mysteries of algebra defeated my mother. My textbooks told me that God had created the Earth in seven days, that abortion was murder, and that America was founded on Biblical principles. Against reality, each claim runs aground. But the last, about the origins of America, still consumes Rufo and conservatives in his orbit.

The teaching of evolution, sex, and LGBT themes to America’s impressionable youth inflamed the Christian right, though, like Rufo, the movement never acted alone. It found common cause with its more secular conservative counterparts on issues of race. Years before anyone had ever heard of Rufo, the Texas board of education fought over where, exactly, to fit slavery among the causes of the Civil War. More recently, the 1619 Project has presented a direct challenge to the right’s popular version of history and incited widespread conservative fury in turn. Republican legislators in multiple states filed bills to cut funding to public schools that teach it.

Rufo’s punches don’t always land. The California State Board of Education adopted the model ethnic-studies curriculum in March despite backlash from Rufo and others. But the battle he’s fighting will likely persist. School segregation is not a matter of the past. Neither is white supremacy. Probably no one is teaching Harris’s “Whiteness as Property” to elementary school students, but that doesn’t matter to Rufo, Harris says. He isn’t interested in facts but myths, and myths can be dangerous. “We have the experience now of witnessing how isolated incidents of voter irregularities have been marshaled now into a myth about voter fraud,” she said. “What happens when that kind of myth is said? What it can actually engender is quite violent. It’s not just voter-suppression laws. It’s January 6th.”

Rufo, meanwhile, is pursuing his new cause with his customary militaristic vengefulness. In April, he announced on Twitter that he had formed a new “center for narrative, legal and policy warfare,” called Battlefront. “The time is now,” he added. “Swords up.”

wildcat09 · July 22, 2021

The Atlantic has a great piece out today about the murder of Emmett Till. Everyone should read it in full, but I thought this part was notable:

Quote

Over the decades, evidence and facts had slowly vanished. The only copy of the trial transcript disappeared, and FBI agents had to track down a copy of a copy of a copy, which a source led them to at a private residence on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The ring Till had been wearing, which had belonged to his father, vanished. In the 1970s, the Sumner courthouse was renovated and old evidence was discarded. A lawyer in Sumner looked on the curb of the courthouse and saw the gin fan that had been used to sink Till’s body sitting with all sorts of meaningless trash bound for the dump. He took it as a trophy but soon threw it away.

A recording of Roy Bryant’s account of that night in 1955 exists. The tapes are either in Mississippi or in Los Angeles, where the United American Costume Company is based. That’s the company founded by John Wayne’s personal costumer, a native of Ruleville, Mississippi, named Luster Bayless. Decades ago, Bayless decided he wanted to make a movie about the Till murder and so he arranged an interview with Bryant. A microcassette recorder captured every word as Bryant drove around the Delta, re-creating the night of the murder; it is likely the only existing description of what happened inside the barn in the final hour of Till’s life. Bryant even posed for a Polaroid in front of the store. Other than FBI agents and a few random people, nobody has heard the recording.

These tapes contain something other than facts, although they contain lots of those, too. They contain the sound of Bryant’s voice, the way his laugh sounds when he recounts torturing a child, the way he drawls his vowels, the little details that let you know a human being did this terrible thing. Locals remember Bryant as an old man, blinded by a lifetime of welding, working at a store on Highway 49 in Ruleville, eight miles from the barn.

The researcher Bayless hired, a woman named Cecelia Lusk, told me she went to the libraries at Delta State and Ole Miss and was stunned. Stories about Till had been torn out of magazines in the archives. In both of the courthouses in Tallahatchie County, she said, she found the legal file folders for the case. They were empty. “Not one sheet of paper,” she said. “Someone had removed everything. There was absolutely not one piece of paper in those folders.”

This is the world of silence Killinger entered when he started asking questions around the Delta, trying to find Wheeler Parker’s idea of justice and maybe Simeon’s too. He went to Carolyn Bryant’s home to question her; when she dies, that interview will become public. He tracked down missing transcripts and uncovered new evidence. A forensic team searched Andrews’s barn but came up empty.

In Mississippi, the murder of Emmett Till was almost completely whitewashed from history. Locals didn't talk about it and most schools didn't teach about it, so younger generations didn't know about it. The textbooks that did mention it only did so through the lens of the damage the murderers did to the white community. It was erased so well that the current owner of the barn in which Till was brutally beaten and murdered, who grew up just a few miles away, had no idea about it when he bought the property.

There were likely seven white men involved in the beating and murder, members of a pretty normal southern white community. Seven men who gleefully tortured a black child and then returned to their community as if what they did was completely normal. The whites in the community didn't care until it became a national embarrassment, then they pretended that the murderers weren't like them. But they were. The other white people in the community were complicit, even if they weren't there when Till was murdered. They supported it by creating a community where seven of their members felt like it was not just perfectly acceptable, but that it was morally righteous to kidnap, brutally torture, and murder a black child. They supported it by acquitting the murderers. They supported it by trying to hunt down the witnesses who had the guts to testify in 1955. That complicity is what they tried (and very nearly succeeded) to erase from history. The white people who weren't there still enjoyed the community they'd created based on racism and protected with violence. They tried to pretend that the murderers weren't like them, but they were exactly like them. It could've been any of dozens of others if it hadn't been the seven that it ended up being. Because the truth they didn't want to admit is that it doesn't take monsters to do monstrous things, it just takes ordinary people. And anyone who can't admit that to himself or herself is capable of doing evil and considering it good.

With that in mind, anyone who is on the fence in the CRT debate should spend some time thinking about why the anti-CRT crowd is so vociferous in its opposition to teaching about our country's racial sins. You should spend some time thinking about the evil that will inevitably happen if they succeed. Even today with all of our technology, history can still easily be whitewashed and forgotten. Emmett Till would've turned 80 this year. He was murdered 90 years after the end of the Civil War. Carolyn Bryant, the woman who lied and said Till assaulted her, is still fucking alive. The past isn't even passed. Anyone who thinks that we should just ignore this and move on is a fool or someone who wants it to happen again.

TwiceHorn · July 22, 2021

On 7/12/2021 at 12:56 PM, Mrs Whiggins said:

I'm not sure what to think about Mr. Carson's viewpoint here. I'm not black so my perspective is not going to be from having experienced a situation remotely similar to his. The history I studied in school (not in Texas), talked about white slave traders and plantation owners breaking up families and the laws created post Reconstruction and to the present ended up not only with black families splitting due to employment opportunities (in the North) but also the criminal codes that incarcerated males at a very high rate over and over again.

So when he talks about family I cannot dispute that family units, regardless of composition, tend to create stronger bonds of accountability, love, security, and well-being, but to discount the sanctioned destruction of black lives that preceded what he calls 'government interference' as not as egregious makes me question his sincerity about improving the lives of persons of color.

It's just another one of the non-justifications for slavery.

Families were stronger then; well yeah, because that is about all they had, until massa broke it up
Conditions as slaves were better than in Africa; well, maybe so, still doesn't justify holding humans in chattel slavery, particularly for a nation that holds freedom so dear
Contemporary African tribes held slaves and sold many of them into American slavery; ok, fine, great point, since when are we holding America to the standards of tribal Africa?
There are probably half a dozen more that aren't occurring to me right now

These all may be valid points, as far as they go. But they don't begin to justify the institution of slavery in the United States of America, or the century of Jim Crow that followed abolition. Just stahp.

Edited July 22, 2021 by TwiceHorn

TwiceHorn · July 22, 2021

On 7/12/2021 at 4:42 PM, Mrs Whiggins said:

Spoilered the article; coming soon to a kindergarten through university campus near you (if not already). Rufo has been discussed before, this article goes into detail.

Hide contents

How to Manufacture a Moral Panic

Christopher Rufo helped incite an uproar over racism education with dramatic, dodgy reporting.

Los Angeles public school teacher R. Tolteka Cuauhtin had Googled his discipline, ethnic studies, in March when he discovered he wanted children to honor the Aztec gods of human sacrifice and cannibalism. Should the state of California implement the curriculum that Cuauhtin had helped design, an article in the conservative magazine City Journal reported, students would “chant to the gods Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli, and Xipe Totek, seeking ‘healing epistemologies’ and ‘a revolutionary spirit. Huitzilopochtli, in particular, is the Aztec deity of war and inspired hundreds of thousands of human sacrifices during Aztec rule.”

Cuauhtin found himself in crowded company, the latest educator singled out by right-wing activist Christopher Rufo for crimes against public education. Rufo’s article was picked up by American Conservative columnist Rod Dreher, who wrote it up in a blog post headlined “The Re-Barbarization of California.” The Daily Caller grabbed it. So did Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, who interviewed Rufo about his story. He has also captured the attention of liberals. He recently sparred with MSNBC’s Joy Ann Reid on her show, visibly sighing as Reid explained the concept of whiteness to him.

Last summer, Rufo seemed to come from nowhere, arriving on the scene after a national uprising against racism to lead the charge against the supposed excesses of anti-racism education, branding it all with a once-obscure academic term: critical race theory. Armed with a prolific Twitter account and the backing of the conservative Establishment, he brandished “scoops” about the widespread infiltration of the theory and eventually caught the attention of the Trump White House. In short order, he had transformed himself from a limited kind of Twitter star to bona fide conservative influencer. The proof lies offline in the new moral panic he helped instigate. Republican operatives, legislators, and commentators, all professing concern for young hearts and minds, claim that children are being taught to hate white people.

A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor to City Journal, Rufo didn’t just bolt onto Twitter from the void. He is the product of a right-wing movement that has formed countless others from the same mold. A documentary filmmaker who graduated from Georgetown University’s school of foreign service, Rufo possesses an impeccable conservative pedigree: Fellowships with unclear purviews litter his resume. A former visiting fellow for domestic-policy studies at the Heritage Foundation, Rufo was also once a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute alongside James O’Keefe of Project Veritas. Later, he worked for a little-known Christian think tank based in Seattle called the Discovery Institute, where he wrote frequently on the subject of homelessness. Before long, Rufo’s interests combined in a new cause. After last summer’s protests, he wrote a piece for City Journal comparing the diversity training conducted by the city of Seattle to “cult programming” that was picked up by the New York Post. A week later, he promoted a story about the Treasury Department that has since been debunked by the Washington Post. In Rufo’s account, Treasury allegedly subjected workers to a radical diversity training that urged them to “accept their white racial superiority.” In reality, the document Rufo cites as proof said no such thing.

Despite the flaws in his reporting, Rufo’s profile grew, and by last September, he had appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show to urge Trump to issue an executive order “abolishing critical race theory trainings from the federal government.” Three days later, Trump’s budget director sent out a memo relaying Trump’s desire that federal agencies “cease and desist” funding diversity programs that allegedly trained “government workers to believe divisive, anti-American propaganda,” as Yahoo News reported at the time. Trump would later issue an executive order banning programs that, in the words of the budget director’s memo, taught government employees that the “United States is an inherently racist or evil country or that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil.”

Though he refers to himself as an investigative journalist, writing dramatically of whistleblowers and documents, Rufo is often responsible for propagating false or misleading accounts like the Treasury Department story and has arguably helped to incite a nationwide panic over the alleged presence of critical race theory in public schools, the federal government, and the workplace.

“There’s no question about it that he’s quite influential,” said Charlie Sykes, a Rufo critic and former conservative talk-show host who broke with the GOP over Donald Trump. “People were looking around for some way to play this card of racial grievance. They were looking for another cause in the cultural war. And this happened to be it, and he happened to be on it.”

Rufo’s war often targets noncombatants like Cuauhtin. What Rufo published “are classically racist interpretations about indigenous cultures, fabricated lies about mass human sacrifice, lies that continue on a 500-year-plus trajectory,” Cuauhtin said. Rufo got a lot wrong, Cuauhtin told me, posting short fragments of a curriculum that spans more than 900 pages and has multiple authors. The conservative writer didn’t reach out to him for his side of the story either, Cuauhtin said.

Rufo didn’t answer questions sent to him by email, responding instead that “New York Magazine is trash. If it stopped publication tomorrow, the world would be a better place.” Nevertheless, it’s possible to glean much about his motivations and worldview from his public writing. Rufo isn’t interested in denying that racism exists. No, he says, racism is real — but the actual racists are those who are teaching and spreading critical race theory, and they must be deplored in public. What Rufo and his ilk really object to isn’t critical race theory at all but the ugliness of history. When an educator exposes the racism that lurks within this nation, they often find themselves at the mercy of an onslaught from the right.

That’s what happened to officials in Oregon’s Tigard-Tualatin School District. In an article for City Journal’s spring issue, Rufo said he’d received “a blueprint” from a whistleblower. It purportedly showed that the district’s new director of equity and inclusion, Zinnia Un, planned to transform “the pedagogy and curriculum” by adopting the theories of Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator whose best-known work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, encourages teachers to work with their students as partners and frames education as an act of liberation and mutual humanization. This is a problem, Rufo said, because Freire was a Marxist. “Following Freire’s categorizations, Un writes that the Tigard-Tualatin school district must move from a state of ‘reading the world’ to the phase of ‘denunciation’ against the revolution’s enemies and, finally, to the state of ‘annunciation’ of the liberated masses, who will begin ‘rewriting the world,’” Rufo wrote.

The school-district document Rufo cites does not say this. It references Freire’s work but not, for example, revolution, its enemies, or the liberated masses. A spokesperson for the district said the presentation was used internally for an opt-in professional-development session and school-board discussions about implementing an anti-racist resolution; a revolutionary vanguard has yet to form.

Of an additional staff resource, Rufo wrote that it “assumes” whites are born racist, which he called “textbook cult indoctrination.” The truth is a bit tamer: The guide urges white educators to move beyond the “belief that you aren’t racist if you don’t purposely or consciously act in racist ways,” and according to the spokesperson, it has not been used in any formal settings, such as for staff training. Still, this hysterical interpretation appealed to right-wing commentators like Andy Ngo, and Rufo later went on Newsmax to promote the misleading story further.

Professor Cheryl Harris, a leading scholar in the field of critical race theory and the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Professor in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at UCLA Law, began to receive hostile emails so “distorted” that, at first, “I didn’t know what they were talking about,” she said. The emails came after Rufo referenced her in a March article for Hillsdale College’s Imprimis magazine, claiming she had called for “suspending private property rights, seizing land and wealth and redistributing them along racial lines.” He later included cherry-picked quotes from her seminal article “Whiteness as Property,” in an online “briefing book” on critical race theory.

“I was getting emails saying, ‘Well, why don’t you redistribute your property?’” she said. She realized then that it was because of Rufo’s pamphlet, where he “explicitly says, I’m calling for the suspension of private property, seizing land and wealth and distributing them along racial lines.” She added, “I’ve never said such a thing.” Though the emails didn’t contain any direct threats, she described them as “disturbing” and said, “Maybe I’m reading this in a particular way, but I know that when people believe that something like their property is threatened, or their children are threatened, they feel justified in doing whatever they need to do to protect them.”

The curriculums and programs targeted by the right have little to do with critical race theory itself, according to Harris. “One of the challenges is there is what critical race theory is, and there’s what it’s being portrayed to be in the context of this disinformation campaign. So it’s difficult to start out a discussion about what it is when what is being projected really bears no resemblance to it and has no intention of bearing any resemblance to it,” Haris said. The theory started as a school of thought in law to examine how racial inequality persisted in society despite policies adopted to eliminate it, she explained.

In this context, Rufo’s role is clear. He takes critical-race theory as a concept, strips it of all meaning, and repurposes it as a catchall for white grievances. “The goal,” he tweeted, “is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.” In an interview with the Post, he said the tweet described an “obvious” approach: “If you want to see public policy outcomes you have to run a public persuasion campaign.”

That campaign might be working. InsideHigherEd reported in early June that lawmakers in sixteen states “have introduced or passed legislation this year seeking to limit the teaching of critical race theory within public institutions.” The head of the Nevada Family Alliance recently suggested that schools outfit teachers with body cameras to make sure they aren’t teaching critical race theory. Online, Rufo often cheerleads these anti-critical-race-theory developments to his nearly 200,000 Twitter followers, proof of a war going well. The militaristic overtones are hard to miss. Rufo’s Twitter handle includes an emoji of crossed swords, which he has said means “swords up.”

In form, the fight over critical race theory in schools resembles earlier panics over the teaching of intelligent design and its cousin creationism, over the teaching of LGBT themes, and over prayer and the Bible — remove God from school, and young people will tumble down the highway to hell. Mike Pompeo recently couched things in more secular terms, with the nation taking the place of the divine. “If we teach that the founding of the United States of America was somehow flawed. It was corrupt. It was racist. That’s really dangerous,” he tweeted. “It strikes at the very foundations of our country.”

Rufo isn’t the first to treat schools like battlegrounds. At both the K-12 and college levels, education represented a challenge for the Christian right to which Rufo’s former employer, the Discovery Institute, belongs. Like many a young Evangelical, I encountered the think tank in the 1990s, when they battled the forces of Darwinism. They argued schools should teach intelligent design, if not as the sole truth of the world, then as a credible scientific theory. Rufo was surrounded by people long accustomed to classroom culture wars. “Teach the controversy,” they urged. Decades later, with Rufo, they appeared to have changed their minds. When did it conclude that some controversies matter more than others?

I called up my old boss Rob Boston of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which has repeatedly challenged the Discovery Institute and its allies over the teaching of intelligent design in schools. “It’s really interesting, this question of public schools, because I’ve followed this for a long time, and there’s this theory among Christian nationalist groups that the public schools are almost like laboratories for whatever social-engineering project liberals have come up with,” he said.

That theory boasts many adherents, as my own experiences can testify. I was homeschooled until the mysteries of algebra defeated my mother. My textbooks told me that God had created the Earth in seven days, that abortion was murder, and that America was founded on Biblical principles. Against reality, each claim runs aground. But the last, about the origins of America, still consumes Rufo and conservatives in his orbit.

The teaching of evolution, sex, and LGBT themes to America’s impressionable youth inflamed the Christian right, though, like Rufo, the movement never acted alone. It found common cause with its more secular conservative counterparts on issues of race. Years before anyone had ever heard of Rufo, the Texas board of education fought over where, exactly, to fit slavery among the causes of the Civil War. More recently, the 1619 Project has presented a direct challenge to the right’s popular version of history and incited widespread conservative fury in turn. Republican legislators in multiple states filed bills to cut funding to public schools that teach it.

Rufo’s punches don’t always land. The California State Board of Education adopted the model ethnic-studies curriculum in March despite backlash from Rufo and others. But the battle he’s fighting will likely persist. School segregation is not a matter of the past. Neither is white supremacy. Probably no one is teaching Harris’s “Whiteness as Property” to elementary school students, but that doesn’t matter to Rufo, Harris says. He isn’t interested in facts but myths, and myths can be dangerous. “We have the experience now of witnessing how isolated incidents of voter irregularities have been marshaled now into a myth about voter fraud,” she said. “What happens when that kind of myth is said? What it can actually engender is quite violent. It’s not just voter-suppression laws. It’s January 6th.”

Rufo, meanwhile, is pursuing his new cause with his customary militaristic vengefulness. In April, he announced on Twitter that he had formed a new “center for narrative, legal and policy warfare,” called Battlefront. “The time is now,” he added. “Swords up.”

That's a good piece. Rufo was cited earlier in the thread with hysterical bullshit that didn't jibe with the facts.

DonkeyCigars · July 27, 2021

This excerpt from The New Yorker encapsulates in a paragraph what I took a page trying to say, insomuch as why it’s dishonest and not smart to say “CRT is just about learning and getting the full story— why are people using it as a bogey man how politically stupid!”

—

Ultimately, the liberal defense of critical race theory ignores an aspect of the movement that many of its founders considered fundamental: the “desire not merely to understand the vexed bond between law and racial power but to changeit,” as the editors of “Critical Race Theory” wrote. Many scholars, myself included, might debate the attainability of this goal—the subtitle of Derrick Bell’s book “Faces at the Bottom of the Well,” from 1992, is, after all, “The Permanence of Racism.” But the transformative aims of critical race theory, inspired by the as-yet-unrealized dreams of Jim Crow’s children, have been awfully undersold in the current liberal punditsphere. Critical race theory is not merely about making a better historical document but about movement toward the way things could be. If there is anything valid about conservatives’ cooked-up attack, it’s their sense that a free accounting of race in society cannot help but imply an unmaking of the rule of law as we know it. And, in that case, the influential liberal class might have good reason to diminish the movement’s teachings. As Bell and as his peers knew well, reformers can be corrosive, too.

Dahobbs · July 27, 2021

11 minutes ago, DonkeyCigars said:

This excerpt from The New Yorker encapsulates in a paragraph what I took a page trying to say, insomuch as why it’s dishonest and not smart to say “CRT is just about learning and getting the full story— why are people using it as a bogey man how politically stupid!”

—

Ultimately, the liberal defense of critical race theory ignores an aspect of the movement that many of its founders considered fundamental: the “desire not merely to understand the vexed bond between law and racial power but to changeit,” as the editors of “Critical Race Theory” wrote. Many scholars, myself included, might debate the attainability of this goal—the subtitle of Derrick Bell’s book “Faces at the Bottom of the Well,” from 1992, is, after all, “The Permanence of Racism.” But the transformative aims of critical race theory, inspired by the as-yet-unrealized dreams of Jim Crow’s children, have been awfully undersold in the current liberal punditsphere. Critical race theory is not merely about making a better historical document but about movement toward the way things could be. If there is anything valid about conservatives’ cooked-up attack, it’s their sense that a free accounting of race in society cannot help but imply an unmaking of the rule of law as we know it. And, in that case, the influential liberal class might have good reason to diminish the movement’s teachings. As Bell and as his peers knew well, reformers can be corrosive, too.

Yeah, that sounds just awful. You probably also hate puppies.

DonkeyCigars · July 27, 2021

55 minutes ago, Dahobbs said:

Yeah, that sounds just awful. You probably also hate puppies.

Not at all. I think it's interesting The New Yorker said what a lot of people were thinking, and in such a succinct and brilliant way. I mean if you look at this thread and we can all be honest, I think it looks like the following:

1) CRT is not just a modality differentiation of learning new material for the sake of learning the new material as some have suggested (e.g. "why are you afraid of just simply teaching the full context of everything, etc.")

2) The real aim of CRT is change-- change that is disruptive and/or in tension and conflict with the status quo

3) People denying that CRT is about aforementioned change are either ignorant or lying, which then leads to

4) It is actually quite smart for conservatives and people of privilege who stand to lose to get out in front of this and nip it in the bud (i.e. create a bogeyman out of it and kill it before it can mature and it's too unwieldy to control). Which is why,

5) Pro-CRT folks who are trying to characterize people as stupid and overreacting and just ignorant of what CRT are wrong. The faction of conservatives that has made a big deal of CRT and armed their constituents with political tools to neuter it and have mobilized to get the talking points out and poison the term in their communities have actually outmaneuvered the liberals on this political battle.

6) Denying CRT was always a Trojan Horse to expedite and implement political change was lying. It would have been an amazing political gambit that would have been studied for ages because it's a brilliant tactic-- it would have been studied like a revolution, the way that CRT could quietly destabilize the status quo if folks weren't more forward thinking about the consequences.

Edit to add: Dahobbs, I don't say any of this as a pro or anti-CRT person these days. I've landed on CRT as a neutral topic and a curiosity-- will it be an anchor topic for years to come? Will it evolve or morph into something else? Is it a fleeting issue that we will look back upon as occupying 15 minutes of political fame? I'll be an interested observer.

Edited July 27, 2021 by DonkeyCigars

DonkeyCigars · July 27, 2021

On 7/22/2021 at 1:04 PM, wildcat09 said:

The Atlantic has a great piece out today about the murder of Emmett Till. Everyone should read it in full, but I thought this part was notable:

In Mississippi, the murder of Emmett Till was almost completely whitewashed from history. Locals didn't talk about it and most schools didn't teach about it, so younger generations didn't know about it. The textbooks that did mention it only did so through the lens of the damage the murderers did to the white community. It was erased so well that the current owner of the barn in which Till was brutally beaten and murdered, who grew up just a few miles away, had no idea about it when he bought the property.

There were likely seven white men involved in the beating and murder, members of a pretty normal southern white community. Seven men who gleefully tortured a black child and then returned to their community as if what they did was completely normal. The whites in the community didn't care until it became a national embarrassment, then they pretended that the murderers weren't like them. But they were. The other white people in the community were complicit, even if they weren't there when Till was murdered. They supported it by creating a community where seven of their members felt like it was not just perfectly acceptable, but that it was morally righteous to kidnap, brutally torture, and murder a black child. They supported it by acquitting the murderers. They supported it by trying to hunt down the witnesses who had the guts to testify in 1955. That complicity is what they tried (and very nearly succeeded) to erase from history. The white people who weren't there still enjoyed the community they'd created based on racism and protected with violence. They tried to pretend that the murderers weren't like them, but they were exactly like them. It could've been any of dozens of others if it hadn't been the seven that it ended up being. Because the truth they didn't want to admit is that it doesn't take monsters to do monstrous things, it just takes ordinary people. And anyone who can't admit that to himself or herself is capable of doing evil and considering it good.

With that in mind, anyone who is on the fence in the CRT debate should spend some time thinking about why the anti-CRT crowd is so vociferous in its opposition to teaching about our country's racial sins. You should spend some time thinking about the evil that will inevitably happen if they succeed. Even today with all of our technology, history can still easily be whitewashed and forgotten. Emmett Till would've turned 80 this year. He was murdered 90 years after the end of the Civil War. Carolyn Bryant, the woman who lied and said Till assaulted her, is still fucking alive. The past isn't even passed. Anyone who thinks that we should just ignore this and move on is a fool or someone who wants it to happen again.

I just finished this article, thanks for sharing it. I will admit something here-- I didn't know the full story of Emmett Till. I thought Emmett Till was dragged by a truck in Jasper, Texas and died that way and so reading this I was at first confused but quickly understood why.

Again thanks for sharing and it's an interesting read for those who might not know a lot about this and how relatively recent it was. For example, the lady who was ogled that was the catalyst for this whole thing is still alive today and she went on record talking about it, but they won't release her story or comments until she's dead (which makes me think she gave a lot of details that might incriminate herself or family or others).

ndawg · July 28, 2021

2 hours ago, DonkeyCigars said:

Not at all. I think it's interesting The New Yorker said what a lot of people were thinking, and in such a succinct and brilliant way. I mean if you look at this thread and we can all be honest, I think it looks like the following:

1) CRT is not just a modality differentiation of learning new material for the sake of learning the new material as some have suggested (e.g. "why are you afraid of just simply teaching the full context of everything, etc.")

2) The real aim of CRT is change-- change that is disruptive and/or in tension and conflict with the status quo

3) People denying that CRT is about aforementioned change are either ignorant or lying, which then leads to

4) It is actually quite smart for conservatives and people of privilege who stand to lose to get out in front of this and nip it in the bud (i.e. create a bogeyman out of it and kill it before it can mature and it's too unwieldy to control). Which is why,

5) Pro-CRT folks who are trying to characterize people as stupid and overreacting and just ignorant of what CRT are wrong. The faction of conservatives that has made a big deal of CRT and armed their constituents with political tools to neuter it and have mobilized to get the talking points out and poison the term in their communities have actually outmaneuvered the liberals on this political battle.

6) Denying CRT was always a Trojan Horse to expedite and implement political change was lying. It would have been an amazing political gambit that would have been studied for ages because it's a brilliant tactic-- it would have been studied like a revolution, the way that CRT could quietly destabilize the status quo if folks weren't more forward thinking about the consequences.

Edit to add: Dahobbs, I don't say any of this as a pro or anti-CRT person these days. I've landed on CRT as a neutral topic and a curiosity-- will it be an anchor topic for years to come? Will it evolve or morph into something else? Is it a fleeting issue that we will look back upon as occupying 15 minutes of political fame? I'll be an interested observer.

There's something about the discussion of critical race theory that really bothers me, which seems so obvious that I hope I'm not just regurgitating a tired point that's been made before -- but damned if it isn't remarkable how quickly "CRT" has become an acronym. Our shitty political theater has managed to assimilate the entire life's work of a small number of individuals, stripped it of all context, and rebranded it as a new hot-topic-of-the-day. With amazing (and diabolical) efficiency.

Now, Americans are arguing about what something called "CRT" means, instead of the truth about our country's relationship with racism that is fucking ongoing.

This weakness in human psychology is ancient. See Lao Tzu, "the way that can be named isn't the unchanging way" -- we fixate on terms themselves without any comprehension of the entire universe of knowledge and ideas that they're referring to.

You're arguing that conservatives have effectively countered an attempt to advance "CRT" as an agenda, but I'll argue you're not giving them enough credit for their cunning and depravity. Conservatives are more than happy to prop "CRT" as a strawman that justifies any amount of opposition. Wanna teach that the KKK wasn't so bad after all? Sure, it's the logical counter to the radical communist "CRT."

There has been absolutely zero concerted effort by the political left to advance something called "CRT." The political left has been trying for decades to teach our racial past (and present!) more honestly -- a good thing, for anyone who isn't a racist shitbag -- which can now be recast by the right as advancing "CRT."

This is nothing more than appropriating terminology from a narrow field of academic study to reframe the public debate.

jimmyjazz · July 28, 2021

2 minutes ago, ndawg said:

There has been absolutely zero concerted effort by the political left to advance something called "CRT." The political left has been trying for decades to teach our racial past (and present!) more honestly -- a good thing, for anyone who isn't a racist shitbag -- which can now be recast by the right as advancing "CRT."

I'll posit that an overwhelming majority of the "political left" had never heard of "critical race theory" until a year ago. I certainly hadn't.

DonkeyCigars · July 28, 2021

1 minute ago, ndawg said:

There's something about the discussion of critical race theory that really bothers me, which seems so obvious that I hope I'm not just regurgitating a tired point that's been made before -- but damned if it isn't remarkable how quickly "CRT" has become an acronym. Our shitty political theater has managed to assimilate the entire life's work of a small number of individuals, stripped it of all context, and rebranded it as a new hot-topic-of-the-day. With amazing (and diabolical) efficiency.

Now, Americans are arguing about what something called "CRT" means, instead of the truth about our country's relationship with racism that is fucking ongoing.

This weakness in human psychology is ancient. See Lao Tzu, "the way that can be named isn't the unchanging way" -- we fixate on terms themselves without any comprehension of the entire universe of knowledge and ideas that they're referring to.

You're arguing that conservatives have effectively countered an attempt to advance "CRT" as an agenda, but I'll argue you're not giving them enough credit for their cunning and depravity. Conservatives are more than happy to prop "CRT" as a strawman that justifies any amount of opposition. Wanna teach that the KKK wasn't so bad after all? Sure, it's the logical counter to the radical communist "CRT."

There has been absolutely zero concerted effort by the political left to advance something called "CRT." The political left has been trying for decades to teach our racial past (and present!) more honestly -- a good thing, for anyone who isn't a racist shitbag -- which can now be recast by the right as advancing "CRT."

This is nothing more than appropriating terminology from a narrow field of academic study to reframe the public debate.

Awesome post. Thank you for the reply. That was great— and kinda got me fired up. I struggle with a deep rooted cynicism I think which can give me tunnel vision and I appreciate the Dutch uncle of a post here to get help me tilt my head a bit and try and look at it from a different angle.

Captainant · July 28, 2021

4 minutes ago, ndawg said:

Now, Americans are arguing about what something called "CRT" means, instead of the truth about our country's relationship with racism that is fucking ongoing.

Welcome to conservative grievance politics. There's nothing wrong, and even if there was, it's too hard to change so you're just a commie for pointing it out.

Or something like that, right donkey?

ndawg · July 28, 2021

21 minutes ago, DonkeyCigars said:

Awesome post. Thank you for the reply. That was great— and kinda got me fired up. I struggle with a deep rooted cynicism I think which can give me tunnel vision and I appreciate the Dutch uncle of a post here to get help me tilt my head a bit and try and look at it from a different angle.

Hah, thanks. I'm a few fingers in to some bourbon, and just couldn't resist the impulse to vent. I have such a hard time coping with the fact that our political discourse constantly gets edited down into something that fits within our tiny attention collective span, and as a result we experience a constant barrage of what amounts to essentially mini-marketing campaigns designed to trigger the same tired emotional impulses.

immadashellandimnotgonnatakeitanymore.gif

Edited July 28, 2021 by ndawg

Pancho · July 28, 2021

33 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

I'll posit that an overwhelming majority of the "political left" had never heard of "critical race theory" until a year ago. I certainly hadn't.

As mentioned before, most of my research in higher ed centers around race and gender. Even I hadn’t heard of CRT until my 4th year in my doctoral program. I was halfway into my dissertation proposal when one of my committee members said I need to look into it. I was pretty mindblown I’d gone my entire educational career without hearing CRT until that moment.

My experience alone can further let people know that no, this is not being taught in elementary, middle, or high schools and those on the radical right are just taking anything dealing with race and classifying it as CRT and pulling their children out of schools for fear they are being taught CRT when they have no idea what it is.

Mole · July 28, 2021

Maybe it’s small, but as the fall semester approaches I find myself personally resenting this whole thing. Last year, I found the perfect paper to frame the first week of one of my upper level major courses. By that point, students feel like they know a lot and the paper wonderfully undermines everything that they had been taught, calls into question pretty much everything I would teach the rest of the semester, and shows how small and provincial their education is. A paper that says I’m a small-minded idiot hurting the education of all of my students by perpetuating a racist framing of their field seems worth exploring in an upper level class.

There was some slight political resistance to the premise (“why does everything have to be about race?”), but the moment of realization about the glaring hole in their education was wonderful. It’s important to be periodically reminded how little you know about subjects that you know so well. Those moments are the foundation to a good education.

The paper/lecture borrows heavily from the language of CRT. It was some heavy lifting last year, but this year I’m not sure if it’s worth the cost of entry. It was a means to an end for deeper understanding (kind of like CRT), but now I know a good portion of the students will never get past the politics.

Maybe I’ll still roll with it or maybe I’ll find some less politicized way to tell them that everything we’ve been teaching them is arbitrary and closes their mind as much as it opens it, but every subsequent cohort misses out either way. The subject has been poisoned.

Of course, poisoning uncomfortable subjects seems to be the point. Something else, however small, has been lost in the culture war.

DonkeyCigars · July 28, 2021

13 hours ago, Pancho said:

As mentioned before, most of my research in higher ed centers around race and gender. Even I hadn’t heard of CRT until my 4th year in my doctoral program. I was halfway into my dissertation proposal when one of my committee members said I need to look into it. I was pretty mindblown I’d gone my entire educational career without hearing CRT until that moment.

My experience alone can further let people know that no, this is not being taught in elementary, middle, or high schools and those on the radical right are just taking anything dealing with race and classifying it as CRT and pulling their children out of schools for fear they are being taught CRT when they have no idea what it is.

And this is evident in the first 25 pages of this thread and I was as guilty as everyone else for not really knowing what it is. Outside of you, I don't know how many folks on this site went to fully funded Phd programs in the humanities or post on thegradcafe as that is a very narrow interest and career path (and narrowing as tenure/teaching positions in the humanities is all but a lottery ticket at this point), and as you even mentioned you weren't aware until well after your research and reading phase in your own program.

DonkeyCigars · July 28, 2021

12 hours ago, Mole said:

There was some slight political resistance to the premise (“why does everything have to be about race?”), but the moment of realization about the glaring hole in their education was wonderful. It’s important to be periodically reminded how little you know about subjects that you know so well. Those moments are the foundation to a good education.

For whatever it is worth (especially coming from me), you sound like a great teacher.

Edited July 28, 2021 by DonkeyCigars

wildcat09 · July 28, 2021

14 hours ago, ndawg said:

There's something about the discussion of critical race theory that really bothers me, which seems so obvious that I hope I'm not just regurgitating a tired point that's been made before -- but damned if it isn't remarkable how quickly "CRT" has become an acronym. Our shitty political theater has managed to assimilate the entire life's work of a small number of individuals, stripped it of all context, and rebranded it as a new hot-topic-of-the-day. With amazing (and diabolical) efficiency.

Now, Americans are arguing about what something called "CRT" means, instead of the truth about our country's relationship with racism that is fucking ongoing.

This weakness in human psychology is ancient. See Lao Tzu, "the way that can be named isn't the unchanging way" -- we fixate on terms themselves without any comprehension of the entire universe of knowledge and ideas that they're referring to.

You're arguing that conservatives have effectively countered an attempt to advance "CRT" as an agenda, but I'll argue you're not giving them enough credit for their cunning and depravity. Conservatives are more than happy to prop "CRT" as a strawman that justifies any amount of opposition. Wanna teach that the KKK wasn't so bad after all? Sure, it's the logical counter to the radical communist "CRT."

There has been absolutely zero concerted effort by the political left to advance something called "CRT." The political left has been trying for decades to teach our racial past (and present!) more honestly -- a good thing, for anyone who isn't a racist shitbag -- which can now be recast by the right as advancing "CRT."

This is nothing more than appropriating terminology from a narrow field of academic study to reframe the public debate.

This is literally what the asshole behind most of the panic has said he wants to do:

He doesn't even hide that he's intentionally misleading people.

Captainant · July 28, 2021

2 hours ago, wildcat09 said:

This is literally what the asshole behind most of the panic has said he wants to do:

He doesn't even hide that he's intentionally misleading people.

TFW @BabaYaga and @Macklemore and the rest of the MAGA gang took the bait hook line and sinker. Rufo is good at manipulating racists who lack the intellectual curiosity to actually learn for themselves by providing them with easy and (superficially and circularly) cited arguments.

Brisketexan · July 28, 2021

TFW [mention=1701]BabaYaga[/mention] and [mention=5490]Macklemore[/mention] and the rest of the MAGA gang took the bait hook line and sinker. Rufo is good at manipulating racists who lack the intellectual curiosity to actually learn for themselves by providing them with easy and (superficially and circularly) cited arguments.

They took the bait because they wanted it. Their self image is inextricably intertwined with thing that white folks do no wrong, and dark people are 100% responsible for their lower status. To acknowledge any truth would destroy their brains.

elfenix · July 28, 2021

TIL that running interference for wealthy fucks makes one a "dissident"

hpslugga · July 28, 2021

4 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

They took the bait because they wanted it. Their self image is inextricably intertwined with thing that white folks do no wrong, and dark people are 100% responsible for their lower status. To acknowledge any truth would destroy their brains.

And society in general.

Dahobbs · July 29, 2021

8 hours ago, DonkeyCigars said:

And this is evident in the first 25 pages of this thread and I was as guilty as everyone else for not really knowing what it is. Outside of you, I don't know how many folks on this site went to fully funded Phd programs in the humanities or post on thegradcafe as that is a very narrow interest and career path (and narrowing as tenure/teaching positions in the humanities is all but a lottery ticket at this point), and as you even mentioned you weren't aware until well after your research and reading phase in your own program.

But, per your post above, you're now also convinced that conversatives were right all along in opposing CRT and that liberals and everyone on this thread was wrong in saying that CRT wasn't the demon the conservatives were calling it. Again, extreme eye roll to your mush mouth bullshit.

DonkeyCigars · July 29, 2021

3 minutes ago, Dahobbs said:

But, per your post above, you're now also convinced that conversatives were right all along in opposing CRT and that liberals and everyone on this thread was wrong in saying that CRT wasn't the demon the conservatives were calling it. Again, extreme eye roll to your mush mouth bullshit.

Nah brother; I said from a purely political lens and perspective, it’s an amazing play. In the same sentence that I said if liberals could have used a watered down, CRT framework to get adopted in public schools, that would have been a politically genius way of affecting hearts and minds and ultimately (eventually) change.

I would need to go back and reread this entire thread but I think most here, except panchohorn, were like Jimmy and I in that we didn’t know the technical definition or implication of CRT and have been educated from this becoming a political football.

That said I also recognize that terms and slogans and ideas, especially once’s reduced to acronyms, have a tendency to evolve and take on a meaning in public consciousness that is often wildly different from what it meant when it was originated, and I think CRT lives in that space, so if in a year or two this is still a political talking point, trying to reframe every conversation around what CRT is in a Phd program context is going to be even more pedantic than it already is becoming.

TwiceHorn · July 29, 2021

56 minutes ago, DonkeyCigars said:

I said if liberals could have used a watered down, CRT framework to get adopted in public schools,

It's kind of absurd to me that this should be a "liberal" issue. Granted, I suppose POC should be somewhat more concerned about this than non-racist whitey, and POC tend to fall on the liberal end of the scale.

The only thing that the current teaching labeled CRT by the disingenuous right has in common with CRT is that it examines the racial history of the United States in a way that does not whitewash it, as past curricula, particularly in the south, have done.

I had long ago become disgruntled with the GOP and its incessant partisan polarization of social issues that don't or shouldn't really fall along partisan lines. Occasionally, they had a semi-plausible policy justification for doing so, but now it's clear that it's just pandering to certain elements of society. Things like truth, and kindness, and empathy should not be partisan issues.

Edited July 29, 2021 by TwiceHorn

DonkeyCigars · July 29, 2021

1 hour ago, TwiceHorn said:

It's kind of absurd to me that this should be a "liberal" issue. Granted, I suppose POC should be somewhat more concerned about this than non-racist whitey, and POC tend to fall on the liberal end of the scale.

The only thing that the current teaching labeled CRT by the disingenuous right has in common with CRT is that it examines the racial history of the United States in a way that does not whitewash it, as past curricula, particularly in the south, have done.

I had long ago become disgruntled with the GOP and its incessant partisan polarization of social issues that don't or shouldn't really fall along partisan lines. Occasionally, they had a semi-plausible policy justification for doing so, but now it's clear that it's just pandering to certain elements of society. Things like truth, and kindness, and empathy should not be partisan issues.

I think I agree with you, but I also think when you are ultimately (as an end state) talking about upsetting the apple cart of folks (people who have inherently benefited and/or still benefit from inequality or whatever) by taking away advantages that have been forecasted and baked in (e.g. making it "harder" to be at status quo), you are firmly in the realm of emotion. Emotional responses by human beings have always been our greatest strength leading to amazing beauty and worst weakness leading to unthinkable evil.

I'm not saying I agree with this line of thinking, I'm just trying to rationalize why it happens, to the best of my ability at least.

Edited July 29, 2021 by DonkeyCigars

TwiceHorn · July 29, 2021

8 hours ago, DonkeyCigars said:

I think I agree with you, but I also think when you are ultimately (as an end state) talking about upsetting the apple cart of folks (people who have inherently benefited and/or still benefit from inequality or whatever) by taking away advantages that have been forecasted and baked in (e.g. making it "harder" to be at status quo), you are firmly in the realm of emotion. Emotional responses by human beings have always been our greatest strength leading to amazing beauty and worst weakness leading to unthinkable evil.

I'm not saying I agree with this line of thinking, I'm just trying to rationalize why it happens, to the best of my ability at least.

Yeah, to the extent that it is conservative to support the status quo, I suppose it is conservative to let things remain as they are.

Captainant · July 29, 2021

10 hours ago, DonkeyCigars said:

I think I agree with you, but I also think when you are ultimately (as an end state) talking about upsetting the apple cart of folks (people who have inherently benefited and/or still benefit from inequality or whatever) by taking away advantages that have been forecasted and baked in (e.g. making it "harder" to be at status quo), you are firmly in the realm of emotion. Emotional responses by human beings have always been our greatest strength leading to amazing beauty and worst weakness leading to unthinkable evil.

I'm not saying I agree with this line of thinking, I'm just trying to rationalize why it happens, to the best of my ability at least.

But ultimately if YOU are able to recognize that maintaining the status quo is simply perpetuating a known injustice, does that not make YOU part of the problem? If you are aware of it, don't you have a civic duty to do something about it? Or at the very least, not actively participate in the right-wing misrepresentation and perpetuation of its talking points?

DonkeyCigars · July 29, 2021

18 minutes ago, Captainant said:

But ultimately if YOU are able to recognize that maintaining the status quo is simply perpetuating a known injustice, does that not make YOU part of the problem? If you are aware of it, don't you have a civic duty to do something about it? Or at the very least, not actively participate in the right-wing misrepresentation and perpetuation of its talking points?

Yes, I think that is right. I think a lot of the analysis and insight we’ve talked about on this page, on the why and how as it relates to political efficiency, is not something a lot of folks are probably concerning themselves with and are aware or recognizing, because they are in the land of emotions and it’s easy to drive a horse when you have a bit in the mouth.

And I personally think, as someone (and a lot of us as someones, plural) who is not middle class, I think we discount that a true middle class life is also one devoid of most privilege. There is a lot of anxiety and emotion and fear when becoming a “poor” for the middle class is only a month or two of being out of work and when the middle class knows they have to run out the clock because there might not be a strong, in-demand skillset for today’s workforce. Because of this I think it’s easy for a lot of folks to fight tooth and nail and never be rational about things in order to keep whatever little advantage or status they have.

Anything to not get relegated down to the bottom tier of the American caste system, as it were.

Edited July 29, 2021 by DonkeyCigars

DonkeyCigars · July 29, 2021

1 hour ago, TwiceHorn said:

Yeah, to the extent that it is conservative to support the status quo, I suppose it is conservative to let things remain as they are.

1000%. What you have said is the moser articulate synthesis of what it means to be politically conservative and “fundamentalist”.

Which is why I think the most ignorant and, frankly, stupid criticism of conservative politics I hear on these boards is “they never want to do anything with govt when they have power! All they do is block stuff and never try to do anything new or politically innovative!11 but whhyyyy!!????”

Conservative politics is about preserving what is left of the old guard and maintaining the status quo. Or, when you get a firebrand like Trump, not only stalling “progress” but actually trying to actively go backwards and ripping out “progress” and reinstalling old methods. Hence the “make America great again” sloganeering, which is essentially saying “take us back to the good days, not whatever this is presently.”

Captainant · July 29, 2021

26 minutes ago, DonkeyCigars said:

1000%. What you have said is the moser articulate synthesis of what it means to be politically conservative and “fundamentalist”.

Which is why I think the most ignorant and, frankly, stupid criticism of conservative politics I hear on these boards is “they never want to do anything with govt when they have power! All they do is block stuff and never try to do anything new or politically innovative!11 but whhyyyy!!????”

Conservative politics is about preserving what is left of the old guard and maintaining the status quo. Or, when you get a firebrand like Trump, not only stalling “progress” but actually trying to actively go backwards and ripping out “progress” and reinstalling old methods. Hence the “make America great again” sloganeering, which is essentially saying “take us back to the good days, not whatever this is presently.”

And yet, you voted for trump. Thanks for voting to make America move backwards

Edited July 29, 2021 by Captainant
mea culpa, apologies for misrepresenting donk

DonkeyCigars · July 29, 2021

11 minutes ago, Captainant said:

And yet, you voted for trump. TWICE. Thanks for voting to make America move backwards

Once. Let the record reflect accuracy, whether good, bad or indifferent.

Dahobbs · July 29, 2021

10 minutes ago, Captainant said:

And yet, you voted for trump. TWICE. Thanks for voting to make America move backwards

That is because he is his own definition of conservative. He just wants things to stay the same or go backwards. He doesn't want racism per se except in so far as it happens to coincide with things staying the same or going backwards. He spends a lot of words saying nothing of substance because he has nothing of substance to offer.

For instance, he says it is bad and ignorant of us to be critical of conservatives for not actually wanting to govern. He thinks our criticisms are based on what we think conservatives should be doing as "conservatives" as opposed to being based on the belief that those conservative policies are morally and fundamentally wrong.

Dahobbs · July 29, 2021

5 minutes ago, DonkeyCigars said:

Once. Let the record reflect accuracy, whether good, bad or indifferent.

Accurately, the record shows you fucking suck.

Captainant · July 29, 2021

6 minutes ago, DonkeyCigars said:

Once. Let the record reflect accuracy, whether good, bad or indifferent.

Apologies for that, edited my post. But you did vote trump in 2020, correct?

Seeing you post knowingly of how the objective of the trump presidency was to "rip out progress and reinstall old methods" - and then just a couple posts later, acknowledge that the "old methods" were inherently unequal and unjust... My dude, you knowingly voted for the reinstatement of racist policies to specifically disadvantage black and minority peoples.

Which is EXACTLY why schools of thought such as CRT are such an important tool - it provides mechanisms to actually have an intellectual dialogue around not just the why, but the HOW.

Edited July 29, 2021 by Captainant

Bojack · July 29, 2021

On 7/27/2021 at 5:38 PM, DonkeyCigars said:

I just finished this article, thanks for sharing it. I will admit something here-- I didn't know the full story of Emmett Till. I thought Emmett Till was dragged by a truck in Jasper, Texas and died that way and so reading this I was at first confused but quickly understood why.

I'm really curious how the fuck you confused the murder of 14 year old Emmett Till from 1955 with the murder of James Byrd Jr. in 1998. Is this some Maga Gr Horn joke that I'm not getting?

Dahobbs · July 29, 2021

4 minutes ago, Captainant said:

Apologies for that, edited my post. But you did vote trump in 2020, correct?

Yes, he voted for him the second time. He wasn't convinced Trump would actually be as horrible as he said he would be the first time. He had to see the evil in action to know he wanted to support it.

DonkeyCigars · July 29, 2021

1 minute ago, Bojack said:

I'm really curious how the fuck you confused the murder of 14 year old Emmett Till from 1955 with the murder of James Byrd Jr. in 1998. Is this some Maga Gr Horn joke that I'm not getting?

No joking, that is sick and twisted to joke about something like that. I'll cop to ignorance, I guess. I'd heard the name and knew it was a hate crime but that's about the extent of it.

DonkeyCigars · July 29, 2021

7 minutes ago, Captainant said:

Apologies for that, edited my post. But you did vote trump in 2020, correct?

Seeing you post knowingly of how the objective of the trump presidency was to "rip out progress and reinstall old methods" - and then just a couple posts later, acknowledge that the "old methods" were inherently unequal and unjust... My dude, you knowingly voted for the reinstatement of racist policies to specifically disadvantage black and minority peoples.

Which is EXACTLY why schools of thought such as CRT so critical - to actually have an intellectual dialogue around not just the why, but the HOW.

I voted for Tump in 2020, but as I've said, I like Biden and feel like he was the optimal candidate for my tastes of all the candidates in the D primary. I am gracious and respectful of a Biden presidency generally and generally try to defend from various strawman insults. He's a good guy and I like him and think he doesn't want to upset the apple cart too much.

But my personal political beliefs and voting record isn't really germane to this conversation, I don't feel like, because it is skewed. I am one of the more staunch "single item voter" and put a near universal weight on a certain subject that I personally and spiritually believe is the worst thing you can do. Worse than anything Trump or Biden or any American politician could even wish to do, unless they started genociding people.

TwiceHorn · July 29, 2021

23 minutes ago, Bojack said:

I'm really curious how the fuck you confused the murder of 14 year old Emmett Till from 1955 with the murder of James Byrd Jr. in 1998. Is this some Maga Gr Horn joke that I'm not getting?

I can't recall how I became aware of Emmett Till, but I have been for a long time.

Although it is grotesque and vivid, it is, in many aspects, not differentiable from most lynchings, just better documented.

Equating it with the Jasper killings is odd, though.

Captainant · July 29, 2021

1 minute ago, DonkeyCigars said:

I am one of the more staunch "single item voter" and put a near universal weight on a certain subject that I personally and spiritually believe is the worst thing you can do.

(I'm presuming you mean abortion here) So do the ends always justify the means to you? Any means are permissible - especially if it leads to unequal laws to disproportionally damage nonwhite communities - as long as you can control what women can do with their bodies?

Well, at least you own that you're a regressive.

DonkeyCigars · July 29, 2021

9 minutes ago, Captainant said:

(I'm presuming you mean abortion here) So do the ends always justify the means to you? Any means are permissible - especially if it leads to unequal laws to disproportionally damage nonwhite communities - as long as you can control what women can do with their bodies?

Well, at least you own that you're a regressive.

Yea, probably not the place to get into this and probably no value in discussing it at all, but that's a too simplistic reduction and one that isn't considering the full point of view (or at least mine), and is only filtered through the prism of what you believe the subject to mean and be.

Anyways, back to CRT news. I read an interesting piece on a latinx professor being denied tenure at Harvard that might be of interest to this topic. It's interesting how one of the last bastions of a conservative guard (centrist libs, or Harvard in this case) is to hold the line and take the position that activism is not scholarship:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-education/why-lorgia-garcia-pena-was-denied-tenure-at-harvard

Edited July 29, 2021 by DonkeyCigars

DigglerontheHoof · July 29, 2021

Single issue voters are fucking idiots.

DonkeyCigars · July 29, 2021

3 minutes ago, DigglerontheHoof said:

Single issue voters are fucking idiots.

Dahobbs · July 29, 2021

25 minutes ago, DigglerontheHoof said:

Single issue voters are fucking idiots.

Yes. And @DonkeyCigars, Trump has definitely never paid for an abortion 🙄

elfenix · July 30, 2021

i'm a single issue voter and that issue is that conservatives fucking suck

Mole · July 30, 2021

I’ve become a single issue voter on objective reality.

DonkeyCigars · July 30, 2021

On 7/29/2021 at 9:03 AM, DonkeyCigars said:

No joking, that is sick and twisted to joke about something like that. I'll cop to ignorance, I guess. I'd heard the name and knew it was a hate crime but that's about the extent of it.

Why are people on an entirely different thread, picking on the fact that I didn't know the details of Emmett Till and just knew the name and knew there was a hate crime and got it confused with another more local hate crime, as a huge deal. I copped to it, I've learned something, and I won't make that mistake again. Did I commit some unforgivable sin here or something?

I'll say it louder for those in the back: I AM SORRY.

Edited July 30, 2021 by DonkeyCigars

Willfully Horn · August 8, 2021

Nmnm

My dumb ass hit send, and didn’t realize it.

Edited August 9, 2021 by Willfully Horn

Bookman · August 8, 2021

On 7/30/2021 at 11:22 AM, Mole said:

I’ve become a single issue voter on objective reality.

I have too. I will never understand how so many voted for a corrupt, incompetent, immoral failed-businessman to become President of the United States. I suppose they're just gullible people. But as long as the party supports Trump or denies reality, I will never vote Republican.

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