I read the article and was talking about that, not the tweet.
Not sure how I’d find out if someone had been influenced by CRT or not, unless they directly say so. My perception is that there is a wider movement that CRT is part of; what the right-wingers call ‘woke’, or ‘identity politics’ (but Trump also used the latter, so I don’t think that’s specific enough). Don’t know of a good name for it.
Update: The policy of allocating vaccinations based on race, which definitely never existed and was made up by right-wing media and no serious person could possibly believe was being proposed, is officially being implemented in Vermont this week.
Indeed. And this will keep sowing the seeds of racial strife for all time.
I grew up in rural West Virginia and was born in the 1970s. There weren’t many black people around, and I was taught to treat everyone equally. Many of my peers were not taught that. Although I didn’t do everything my parents told me to do, I have always upheld that part of the bargain.
However, CRT seems to say that NOTHING I can do will make up for the treatment of blacks. I can be as non-discriminatory as anyone, but the theory holds that I still am oppressing blacks unconsciously. They don’t quantify that in any way, but trust us, they say, I am doing it.
So what am I supposed to do? Kiss ass forever? Just sit by when my daughter’s seat at a school is passed over for a lesser qualified minority student? I will do neither of those things, and most people like me will not do that. I will not be punished for the sins of my fathers and will not subject myself to an ever changing standard that I am truly not guilty of perpetuating.
The ideas of the CRT movement simply will not happen, and if we are to continue as a society, there must be a point where once people like me have agreed that we will no longer have slavery, Jim Crow, etc. that things can recede into the past and we can move forward.
Failures in some communities like drug dealing, poor education, out of wedlock children, and general ignorance are not grounds to blame me. White people do that in my state and we don’t condone that either. This isn’t a racial issue and at some point it must stop being a racial issue unless we keep dividing the country.
Looks like they’re implementing early vaccination (by a whole two weeks - shocking!) for a particular identified higher risk group. What does that have to do with CRT, again?
As opposed to deciding there’s nothing to make up for at all, as you’ve done…
But black people are still being punished for the sins of your father even today. In some way, we as whites have benefitted from that system that was created by whites. Does that mean that the system in 2020 is still so rigged that we as white men can just demand that a black person shine our shoes at the snap of a finger? Maybe not, but we were born into a system in which police, the law, and institutions ‘see’ me and you in ways that are different from how they see black people. And there’s also that thing about inheritance and how blacks comparatively have so little of it passed on between generations, as opposed to whites. Not to mention things like social and economic networks that are created beginning from childhood.
I wonder if there is some evidence-informed middle ground between “there’s no history of racism in America and every problem black people have is their fault” and “purposely make more white people die of covid to create equity.” Part of CRT is saying no, there isn’t, and we have to keep creating racial strife forever by insisting on choosing between those two options only.
If you look at the vaccination data, people are color are disproportionately being underrepresented, and yet they tend to be at disproportionately higher risk of being infected.
The causes of both statistics are not entirely clear but the data almost certainly point to the need to move people of color closer to the front of the line. Last time I looked, that was pretty much an incontrovertible finding.
Seriously? You want to go down that road?
If dispensing lifesaving medication based on racial groupings is allowable then clearly the entire body of laws on non-discrimination is worthless and should be thrown out. This is so flagrantly illegal that only someone deep in the CRT distortion could possibly have considered it. The fact that this policy was put in with no discussion whatsoever and the usual leftist bulldozing of “no one is proposing this, the person who said it doesn’t control anything, you’re spreading fake news by saying this is a thing, aaaaand now we’re doing it and you’re not allowed to disagree” only goes to show how indefensible it is.
The game of “which racial groups are statistically more X than others” is playing with fire and it’s strictly illegal for the government to engage in for damn good reasons.
Based on what I’ve read so far, I think this might be a good example of CRT-based policy leading to potentially sub-optimal outcomes.
The gist is that Oakland CA is planning to pilot a scheme to give $500 per month, tax-free, for 18 months, to 600 low income households which meet the following criteria. Eligible households:
Must have at least one child under the age of 18 living in permanent residence.
Must have an annual income at or below $59,000 per year. 50% of the six hundred available slots will be reserved for families earning less than $30,000 per year.
Must not be white.
Understandably, the third criteria is proving controversial. The reasoning behind it is that the program’s primary goal is not to reduce wealth inequality per se, but to reduce systemic wealth inequality. Because, on average, white households have three times as much wealth as black households, all white households are ineligible for the program.
This strikes me as profoundly bad policy. It would be one thing if the program was targeting Oakland’s six hundred poorest households and all of them happened to be non-white. However, this isn’t what the program is doing. The program is targeting low income families and deliberately excluding low-income white households who would otherwise be eligible.
Now, I don’t live in Oakland, and I don’t know anything much about the city’s demographics. However, my objection rests on two assumptions, both of which I think are reasonable.
Some white households would have qualified for this program, were it not for the third criterion.
It’s likely that some white households probably have lower annual incomes than some of the six hundred non-white households that will eventually receive these $500 p/m stipends
If either of these assumptions are mistaken then, obviously, I’d withdraw my objection. However, some cursory googling (including a look at the most recent census data) hasn’t given me any reason to believe my assumptions are incorrect.
This means the program will deliberately exclude needy white households purely on the basis that other white households are doing better than the average non-white household. In other words, the program’s administrators are using racial group averages to guide their decision making, which is a mainstay principle of CRT.
To me, this program seems almost calculated to stoke inter-racial resentment. Poor white households struggling to pay their bills will see poor non-white households, some of whom are actually better off than them, getting $500 free money every month for a year and a half while they’re excluded purely because they’re white. I can’t imagine they’ll be sanguine about this.
Not only is the notion that we should allocate government benefits based on race part of CRT, not only is the idea that the fact that this is blatantly illegal but local governments should forge ahead anyway part of CRT, but the bigger picture stuff is the most pernicious part of CRT thinking: They aren’t worried about starting racial conflict, driving poor whites into the arms of the Trumpists, poisoning the well against ideas like UBI for generations, etc., because in the minds of CRT all white people are already acting out of purely and maximally white supremacist motives all the time. The notions of “making a white person more racist” or “increasing racial strife” don’t register to a CRT fanatic because in their minds we’re already in a no-holds-barred race war and all white people already spend 24 hours a day thinking of how to screw black people and nothing else.
We can debate some specific aspects about the fairness of distribution. Should a really healthy 70-year old get vaccinated before someone who’s 40 and is required to work in a high risk environment in order to keep a roof over his head? Those are fair questions to ask. For logistical reasons – namely the fact that in a pandemic, time is of the essence in controlling a disease’s spread – the question over which individuals get the doses first is difficult to respond to in real time. Consequently, the rollout is based on assumptions: older people are more likely to have the worst outcomes, so they get it first, which unfortunately means that younger people, many of whom aren’t retired and who have to continue working among people who might have the virus, continue to face risk at the individual level. That’s unfair, but that’s the best that can be done under the circumstances. It at minimum comes closer to ensuring that many people at risk of having the worst outcomes are protected.
Your notions of discrimination and risk are overly-simplistic. For reasons that have been addressed already, black and brown Americans are more likely to find themselves in situations where they are required to continue working in high-risk jobs. They are less likely to be working jobs in which they can telecommute. Many of the vaccine locations are not in areas that are easy for lower income people to access. Information about these programs (i.e. outreach) may not be doing enough to take into account the information channels that people of color use to stay informed. All of these factors have likely contributed to the underrepresentation of people of color who are getting vaccinated.
I mean if we’re going to let smokers to the front of the line because of higher risk then we should let any other identifiable high risk group to the head of the line. The purpose is to save the most lives, Let’s say that over the next month we could expect 5% of black people to die from covid and 1% of white people to die from covid. It makes sense to vaccinate black people first. If we spread it evenly, fewer lives would be saved.
E.g. lets say we had 200,000 doses in a state with a million people that was 20% black and 80% white.
We would expect 10,000 black deaths and 8000 white deaths.
If we used all the vaccine on black people, we would have 0 black deaths and 8000 white deaths.
If we gave half to black people and half to white people we would have 5000 black deaths and 7200 white deaths.
If we gave it out randomly we would have 8000 black deaths and 6400 white deaths.
I’m obviously making up these numbers to make the effect clearer but if we are interested in minimizing the total number of deaths, it make sense to vaccinate black people ahead of white people.
Allocating based on risk is what should be happening. Allocating based on race is an outrageous, illegal act of CRT fanaticism. It’s no different whatsoever from using race as a proxy for inclination to commit crimes and having police profile those races which “on statistical average” contain more criminals. Yeah, dealing with reality in a fair manner that doesn’t use cognitive shortcuts like race is more difficult. If Vermont’s politicians can’t handle following the law that says you can’t make policy decisions based on racial stereotypes, then they should go home and play with their Duplos and we can find smarter people to handle this.
I didn’t do anything.
That’s not my problem. That’s theirs.
I should also note that we’re now on Step 4 of the process after seeing 1, 2, 3, and 4 play out in this thread, and that means the only place to go is Step 5 - “racial hierarchies should be used to make decisions about who lives and dies” will soon be part of the “justice curriculum.”
Would it be fair for your daughter to lose her seat to a poorer less qualified black student?
I’d be OK with my son losing his seat to a poor less qualified (to a degree) black student but when I go to these schools, the black students are frequently not poor.
This might explain some of the difference in outcomes but it does not seem to be enough to explain all of it. If these things were really the only cause of the disparity in outcomes we would see much more of a disparity in outcomes between whites and asians.
To clarify. It was my “fathers”" problems, not mine.
Of course it’s allowable. if there is one group at higher risk than another and the objective is to save as many lives as possible then you vaccinate those who need it most.
Using a lottery to determine vaccinations is as racist as using a lottery to determine who gets accelerated education opportunities.
I think wealth inequality should be addressed based on inequalities in wealth.
For example, I think a very useful program would be a variant of what we had in DC under Michelle Rhee. We should give kids in underperforming schools an allowance based on attendance and behavior. We did a crap ton of experiments on the DC public school system under Rhee to see what would work and paying kids for attendance and good behavior had dramatically beneficial outcomes at underperforming schools (it made almost no difference at higher performing school). I don’t care if those underperforming schools are primarily white black or hispanic. Considerations of race take a back seat to maximizing the potential of the kids that will be paying for my social security and medicare.