Catapulted from obscurity
The battle continues.
In reality Cardona doesn’t meddle with curriculum decisions.
Peppered with questions Thursday about whether he supports “critical race theory,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said that his department will leave curriculum decisions to state and local officials.
“It’s important that I reiterate at every opportunity I have that the federal government doesn’t get involved in curriculum,” he said during a hearing before the House education committee Thursday.
But he didn’t completely sidestep the issue of how racism should figure into classroom discussions, a question that has engulfed state legislatures and local school boards across the country over the last few months.
Credit: Fox News and Trump.
Just months ago, critical race theory was known only as a line of academic thought that argued that racism is deeply embedded in American society.
And therefore shaped many if not all institutions in American society.
The phrase was catapulted from obscurity by the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo, who claimed that critical race theory had infiltrated the federal government and public schools. At Rufo’s urging, President Trump issued an executive order barring the concept in federal agencies. (Biden quickly rescinded it.) In the telling of critics like Rufo, critical race theory and ideas associated with it overstate the degree of racism in American society and encourage judging individuals based on their race.
As opposed to what? Our long history of not judging individuals based on their race? Come on. Ignoring it or pretending it’s long over is not reasonable or justifiable.
Rufo and others in conservative media — as well as the experience of some parents in their local schools — have helped galvanize a far-reaching backlash to a host of efforts to address racism in schools and acknowledge racism in American history. The Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, recently released a toolkit for parents to combat “woke schooling.”
Ok but then can we also combat comatose schooling? Can we meet in the middle somewhere?
My concerns are that:
1) public schools are going to get fucked by this
2) Republicans are going to do better in elections (even before attempting to overturn results)
3) history curriculum will not be improved in its correlation with reality
4) the Kendis of the world will consider themselves fully vindicated and double down hard in places they remain powerful
Leaving everything as it already is would probably do less harm than this dumb culture war fight is likely to do so and more likely than not the myth of American “exceptionalism” is going to be reinforced. GG forging the bad guys’ weapons for them DiAngelo/Kendi.
This is simply not a fair presentation of the issue, and not a fair presentation of why many are opposed to the CRT-infused teaching currently spreading in K-12 schools.
It reminds me of the puff pieces in mainstream media that say “all she wants is to participate in the sport that she loves”, implying that anyone opposed is simply hateful, and omitting any fair statement of why many would oppose “her” request.
By the way, there’s a worthwhile discussion of the whole CRT debate by Glenn Loury and John McWhorter here (the CRT stuff starts at about 20 mins, and they define CRT at 49 mins).
What makes it worthwhile? Are they both opposed to it?
I’d like to have and see a discussion on it by people who actively work in it, study it, and can explain it without polemics or referring to it as cultural marxixm or some conservative well-poisoning term such as neo-racism. Do they do that here? Why should I invest the time?
To be fair to Coel, I think the following is indeed a real concern:
I’m nowhere near knowledgeable enough to hold a strong opinion on CRT one way or the other, although I have to confess that any talk of other people’s “epistemologies” or “ways of knowing” does indeed seem like a bit of a red flag to me. It could well be case that there are legitimate criticisms to be made of CRT, even if the hysteria whipped up by Republicans is not it. It could even be true that their criticisms of CRT, or parts thereof, have real merit even if their reasons for latching on to those legitimate criticisms are both opportunistic and self-serving, and even if what they want to put in its place is orders of magnitude worse. After all, people arrive at the right conclusions for the wrong reasons all the time.
Or, for all I know, maybe CRT is as sound as thermodynamics, and the criticisms are all Trumpist propaganda. In the current cultural climate, it is probably still better to listen to the criticisms and decide for yourself that it’s Trumpist propaganda rather than trusting anyone else to fairly represent what other people are saying. After all, we have seen where that kind of thinking leads…
This is quite good (and about as neutrally presented as you’re likely to get on this topic):
A Straightforward Primer On Critical Race Theory (and Why It Matters)
Thank you, Coel.
What I see happening now, and the way that Rufo presents it, is that any discussion of racial relations in the US both historical and current, is cultural marxism based on CRT; and very little actual discussion of this nature is being presented to parents who flood the schoolboards with complaints and threats about teaching it to their precious children. It’s being presented as telling white people that they should hate their race and flagellate before BLM. I think it is being used as bogeyman following the racial unrest that is due to not only the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor’s killing, but many issues that can rightly be attributed to systemic racism such as the razing of the Rondo Neighborhood in St. Paul to build a freeway (when other right of way options were available).
A superintendent was pushed to resign for a program on racism (in rural Minnesota) after he had received hate mail and phone calls from angry parents who insisted that the schools were teaching CRT when they weren’t teaching it at all. Rufo and Fox and others are trying to prevent the accurate accounting of racial history in the US, at a time when we really should be catching up to reality. Even as the Residential Schools’ dead bodies are being found in Canada, racism’s cruel history in the US is being pushed to be whitewashed, again.
I think that is in fact what is behind the propaganda about CRT, to make teaching about race untenable.
Personally think it’s more a cynical tactic to take back the suburbs, harm public schools, and let the Republicans talk about race without being successfully called out as racist.
…and dumbass “progressives” are fucking handing them the knife.
While I believe that I am probably more concerned than others on Ms Benson’s comments pages regarding CRT and its influence and presence in pedagogy; nevertheless, like some others who have concerns, I see no need for legislation. If there is ‘reverse racism’ in the classroom, then it is still racism and most places already have laws about that. Some places even have constitutions;)
So despite my concerns about the contents of teaching curricula, I find the sudden concern of the political right to be suspicious. I feel that legislation here might be some kind of advance manoeuvre to achieve something as yet unstated that everyone here would detest. But then I am a bit paranoid!:)