That message is not at all popular in any sense of the word.
Could this be related to the issue?
A speech at an Ohio Memorial Day ceremony cites freed slaves’ involvement in one of its earliest observations. Someone, exercising her personal bias beyond her official authorization, silences the microphone.
Can I infer from this that there are people so radicalized by Right Wing media, that anything containing “American History” plus African Americans, slavery, etc., from an mature, soft-spoken white man in Army dress blues, produces the same response as a duck on a junebug?
Thread on it here in MPSIMS:
Yes, and not to balk against the mods, but I brought it here as this thread is about CRT, the dumbed-down, fear-mongering response to it, and how that will show up as a thousand points of malicious nitwittery.
Or, as a guest on NPR said this morning, how factual history has to contend with the mythology of heritage, as uplifting (though exclusionary) the latter may be.
I have to say it is only related to CRT because proponents do like point at how history is constantly revised to avoid or suppress the teaching of a lot of what took place. It is disturbing really that I found about a lot of those massacres and injustices just by looking at the information provided in this thread, or that I found by taking a look. (I was aware of the Tulsa massacre, but I was not aware of many others that took place.)
The point here IMO is that one does not need to use CRT to talk about those injustices and teach about them. The problem we do have is that many on the right do think now that claiming that the teaching of those injustices is the same as “CRT teaching racism and division” means also that teaching of those past injustices, outside any CRT paper or article, is bad too. One should notice that a lot of the recent moves by conservative governors does not stop with just banning the teaching of CRT, they reach beyond what scholars are talking about and it also bans the teaching of anything similar that they decided was/is “bad” for kids to learn.
On a side note, UNC’s treatment of Nikole Hannah-Jones has cost them a chemistry faculty candidate they’ve being actively wooing for two years:
The letter to the Chancellor from the UNC Chemistry Department, included in the article, is worth a read. They’re…not happy.
But CaNcEl CuLtUrE iSn’T rEaL. 
I’ve never seen someone eyeroll their own silly post, but it’s an apt use of the emoji.
If by “Cancel Culture,” you mean, “People in positions of power, mostly white, using financial pressure to mute academic pursuits they find objectionable or to advance Ayn Rand,” then several things are true.
- You’re using “Cancel Culture” in a way that’s very different from how the Tucker Carlsons or the DemonTrees in previous threads have used it.
- It’s definitely a real thing.
- Focusing on the people in power who are stifling academic freedom doesn’t happen as often as focusing on undergrads and other, relatively powerless individuals, because the people in power don’t like to be focused on.
- We leftists have been pointing at this problem for years.
We can judge how powerful or powerless groups are from the results. If people lose their jobs and reputations, or self censor for fear of the same, then those responsible do have power.
That is not as big as you think. The issue is that in general, what is taking place is a growing chance that the ones in power are becoming affected in areas they thought would never be looked at, and specially by minorities that find evidence of the systemic racism in those areas. This is of course intolerable by the status quo and until there is a more lasting change, the powerful still have a lot of influence to make miserable the lives of the ones looking at the injustices while the ones defending injustices have more places to keep their unjust views going.
First and perhaps most important, focusing on cancel culture and woke people is a fairly easy strategy for the GOP to execute, because in many ways it’s just a repackaging of the party’s long-standing backlash approach. For decades, Republicans have used somewhat vague terms (“dog whistles”) to tap into and foment resentment against traditionally marginalized groups like Black Americans who are pushing for more rights and freedoms. This resentment is then used to woo voters (mostly white) wary of cultural, demographic and racial change.
In many ways, casting people on the left as too woke and eager to cancel their critics is just the present-day equivalent of attacks from the right against “outside agitators” (civil rights activists in 1960s), the “politically correct” (liberal college students in the 1980s and ’90s) and “activist judges” (liberal judges in the 2000s). Liberals pushing for, say, calling people by the pronoun they prefer or reparations for Black Americans serve as the present-day analogies to aggressive school integration programs and affirmative action. These are ideas that are easy for the GOP to run against, because they offer few direct benefits (the overwhelming majority of Americans aren’t transgender and/or Black) but some costs to the (white) majority of Americans. In many ways, we are just watching an old GOP strategy with new language and different issues.
I read all 750 posts with great interest. As you might guess the idea seems suspect to me but like others, I just can’t understand what CRT is. Yes, many posters have quoted some flowery rhetoric from articles, but I still don’t understand what it does in practice.
First, it defines race as a social construct and not biological. To me that is an astounding statement that can’t really mean what it says. If it is merely social, then we make decisions all of the time based on social habits and customs. If race isn’t even a real scientific thing, then why not use it to categorize people like anything else (note: I don’t agree with this).
Next, posters have tried to flesh out what CRT advocates but get conflicting and sometimes evasive answers. For example, a poster asked early in the thread that if a racial disparity alone was present in a certain area, if that meant that systematic racism was in play. Another poster responded, of course, because the only other possible explanation was biological difference and that was nothing more that scientific racism. However, yet another poster opined that CRT held no such thing at all.
The parking lot example was instructive. All of the posters seemed to agree that CRT held that the company could have nicer parking facilities for executives but only if the percentage of minority executives equaled the percentage of minority staff. Is that a proposed law? If so, it would be mandatory affirmative action on steroids. It would also likely be an unconstitutional quota system.
Further, many have complained about the spate of state laws that “ban minority research” or “ban teaching CRT” or the like.
Here is the text of the relevant portion of the Idaho Law:
In accordance with section 6, article IX of the constitution of the
state of Idaho and section 67-5909, Idaho Code:
(a) No public institution of higher education, school district, or public school, including a public charter school, shall direct or other wise compel students to personally affirm, adopt, or adhere to any of
the following tenets:
(i) That any sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national
origin is inherently superior or inferior;
(ii) That individuals should be adversely treated on the basis of
their sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin;
or
(iii) That individuals, by virtue of sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin, are
inherently responsible for
actions committed in the past by other members of the same sex,
race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin.(b) No distinction or classification of students shall be made on ac2 count of race or color.
(c) No course of instruction or unit of study directing or otherwise
compelling students to personally affirm, adopt, or adhere to any of the
tenets identified in paragraph (a) of this subsection shall be used or
introduced in any institution of higher education, any school district,
or any public school, including a public charter school.
Does CRT have any dispute with disagreeing with the statements in 3(a) (i) (ii) and (iii)? If so, I think that is astounding. Many posters were asked similar questions early in the thread and either refused to answer or dodged the question.
In any event, this law doesn’t prohibit the research of CRT, it doesn’t forbid the teaching of CRT, nor does it even forbid requiring students to take the class. It simply says that at no time can the school “direct or otherwise compel” students “to personally affirm, adopt, or adhere” to any of those three things. This is not a ban.
Short version: The tenets of CRT are vague and contradictory, but we are all told what it is not.
Your first point already goes off the rails because it is not the CRT proponents who came up with that in the first place. It is not outstanding. It is a conclusion that biologists and social scientists agree with.
Even shorter, you missed the points by a country mile. CRT people that are cited for their books are mostly giving opinions, one has to look at published science or law journals to see what they are actually getting into. The subjects and tenants are clear there, as it was mentioned one has to look at the published papers and take them as a case by case basis, attempting to dismiss the whole framework is what is bananas.
And most of the right wing sources are really being foolish, because as noted, the right wing by attempting to ban CRT and anything that is similar is actually calling for the Streisand Effect x1000 on this one.
I’ll address two misconceptions:
I’ve not heard a CRT advocate say “don’t use race to categorize people.” Indeed, some folk, like Ibrim X. Kendi, push back really heavily against that idea, saying that racial identity is a key part of who folk are. Rather, CRT folk say, “Don’t use race to oppress people, and don’t deny that racial hierarchies and histories are oppressing people.”
I think if you go back and read what was said, this is an imprecise summary. I tend to get pretty persnickety around such matters, because in my experience the right-wing playbook is to change what someone is saying just slightly so that what they’re saying sounds dumb, and then to attack them for that. If you want to quote the posts you’re referring to, I’m happy to clear up, once, any misunderstanding you have on the subject.
I don’t think I understand what you’re saying here. What’s astounding about this?
This makes perfect sense if you actually know what the point being made is.
All “races” are arbitrarily defined. You are, I have no doubt, looking at physiological differences between people and saying “those differences are obviously not social constructs.” Of course that is true. Michael Che has darker skin, different hair, and a different facial structure than Colin Jost. Awkwafina and Taylor Swift clearly cannot be long lost biological siblings.
However, what RACE are they? You will probably look at those names and think Black, white, Asian, white again. But why is Michael Che “Black”? That isn’t a genetically coherent thing. Africans from Nigeria and Africans from Somalia are generally not very genetically similar, and to be honest, once you take a moment, they don’t look all that alike either. West Africans have as many differences with white people as they do with the San, who in turn aren’t very closely related to Ethiopians. Even within more genetically related groups racial differences are often perceived; look at what happened in Rwanda.
You tend to think of the “races” as being Black, white, Asian, maybe something approximating “south Asian/Indian” etc. because that is how Americans have defined human races since the 19th century. There is no particular objective reason why the borders must be drawn that way. People are very definitely categorized as white and Black because that’s socially relevant. People from Mexico and South America are often racially categorized as “Hispanic” or “Latin,” despite that being biologically incoherent, because that’s socially relevant. Precisely where Malaysians, Aborigines, or Tamils are isn’t a bit vague because those groups aren’t terribly common in the USA and their social issues aren’t presently the major political issues.
I hope not one thinks Latino is a race.
Here are 3 presidents of South American countries:
Alberto Fujimori
Mauricio Macri
Evo Morales
And yet that’s often how the word is used.
And the thing is, Latino can be a race. “Race” can be any defined subdivision of humanity. It used to be quite common for people to refer to “the British race,” a group scarcely more genetically homogenous than Latinos. Jews are often called a race despite being a wildly varied bunch of people. Are Arabs a race? They have slightly darker (well, more olive-colored) skin than I do, but not as dark as people from Ghana. You can put the borders in a million different places.
Hell, even the people at the US Census Bureau admit this:
“We recognize that the race categories include racial and national origins and sociocultural groups.”
IMHO it is treated like a race because people are using it as a euphemism for ‘mestizo’, which is not considered polite to say. Same as Americans would use ‘African American’ (which was not meant to be strictly a racial designation) to mean ‘black’, and hence do weird things like calling certain British people African American.
As the professor in the link provided told us:
[Race] “It’s a concept we think is too crude to provide useful information [for biology], it’s a concept that has social meaning that interferes in the scientific understanding of human genetic diversity and it’s a concept that we are not the first to call upon moving away from,” said Michael Yudell, a professor of public health at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
…
“While we argue phasing out racial terminology in the biological sciences, we also acknowledge that using race as a political or social category to study racism, although filled with lots of challenges, remains necessary given our need to understand how structural inequities and discrimination produce health disparities between groups,” Yudell said.
And of course, that was only about what he can see about the inequalities in public health, CRT scholars are more involved on the inequalities in the law side and education. As it should be clear by now, the right wingers in the US are setting up bans of CRT and the teaching of other injustices in such a way that even teaching about inequalities in public health is likely to be affected before someone takes them to court for their overreach.
I second that question. I’m astounded that someone on this message board would find that statement astounding.