The acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs:

Pregnant women. The word for those people is women. Stop erasing us.

“All you Karens” and “panties in a bunch” right out of the gate. Top class doctoring.

Areas with more people vaccinated are found to have lower rates of infection. I’m tempted to add “You don’t say!” but the Post reports that in fact that wasn’t true until now.

As recently as 10 days ago, vaccination rates did not predict a difference in coronavirus cases, but immunization rates have diverged, and case counts in the highly vaccinated states are dropping quickly.

…

But experts worry that unvaccinated people are falling into a false sense of security as more transmissible variants can rapidly spread in areas with a high concentration of unvaccinated people who have abandoned masking and social distancing.

…

Local public health officials fear the public is tuning out the danger as they see news reports of cratering infections and scenes of reopened bars and entertainment venues across the nation, assuming vaccinations are no longer necessary.

Missouri’s Polk County — where less than a quarter of the population of roughly 30,000 is fully vaccinated — has reported nearly 90 new infections in one week, an increase after several months of decline.

Just get the damn shots, people. This isn’t a game.

Kim Lionberger, director of the [Sweetwater, Wyoming] county board of health, said her staff is doing the best they can to provide scientific facts about the virus and the vaccines. But they are also competing with skeptical residents who prefer affirmation to information and find it from anti-vaccine doctors and questionable reports on Facebook.

“The mentality of people in Wyoming is that rugged individualism where they do their own thing and don’t want people telling them what they should be doing because they are going to do what they want to do,” said Lionberger.

Also known as utter heedless selfishness.

Stachon isn’t sure what she would do if a highly contagious variant tears through the community and some have already been detected. The Wyoming legislature restricted the powers of public health officials like her to put disease control measures in place.

“For me to try to say we need to go back and mask or do anything like that, I would almost think I need police protection,” Stachon said. “It’s just sad. You feel impotent.”

Sad and infuriating. More infuriating than sad, really, because the heedless selfishness harms others as well as the heedless selfish people.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson writes:

The idea that will and money could create success was at the heart of the Reagan Revolution. Its adherents championed the idea that any individual could prosper in America, so long as the government stayed out of his (it was almost always his) business.

Critical Race Theory challenges this individualist ideology. CRT emerged in the late 1970s in legal scholarship written by people who recognized that legal protections for individuals did not, in fact, level the playing field in America. They noted that racial biases are embedded in our legal system. From that, other scholars noted that racial, ethnic, gender, class, and other biases are embedded in the other systems that make up our society.

Historians began to cover this ground long ago. Oklahoma historian Angie Debo established such biases in the construction of American law in her book, And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes back in 1940. Since then, historians have explored the biases in our housing policies, policing, medical care, and so on, and there are very few who would suggest that our systems are truly neutral.

Very few historians, I guess she means. Certainly there are very many people in general who would suggest exactly that, and others who would suggest that no actually our systems are biased in favor of Those People.

So why is Critical Race Theory such a flashpoint in today’s political world? Perhaps in part because it rejects the Republican insistence that an individual can create a prosperous life by will alone. It says that, no matter how talented someone might be, or how eager and dedicated, they cannot always contend against the societal forces stacked against them. It argues for the important weight of systems, established through time, rather than the idea that anyone can create a new reality.

It acknowledges the importance of history.

H/t guest

Course description for Law 266 – Critical Race Theory at UCLA Law.

General Course Description:

Throughout American history, race has profoundly affected the lives of individuals, the growth of social institutions, the substance of culture, and the workings of our political economy. Not surprisingly, this impact has been substantially mediated through the law and legal institutions. To understand the deep interconnections between race and law, and particularly the ways in which race and law are mutually constitutive, is an extraordinary intellectual challenge. That is precisely the project of Critical Race Theory (CRT). This course will pursue this project by exploring emerging themes within CRT. Contrary to the traditional notion that racial subordination represents a deviation from the liberal legal ideal, this body of work recasts the role of law as historically central to and complicit in upholding racial hierarchy as well as hierarchies of gender, class, and sexual orientation, among other others.

It certainly seems like an interesting (and important) subject, and worth exploring. I’m not sure exactly what “a deviation from the liberal legal ideal” means in this context. Is the liberal legal ideal the whole set of principles we are (in theory) governed by, or is it more narrowly legal than that? In other words is it wrong to think Jefferson and co really did contradict themselves by saying all men are created equal while also enshrining slavery in the Constitution?

We will focus on the origins of the critique and the contrasts between CRT and liberal and conservative analytical frameworks on race and American law and society. We will also examine some of the questions and criticisms raised about CRT, from both inside and outside the genre, as well as the impact of the work on legal and political discourses. The point of departure for the course is an exploration of race itself—what exactly is race?—and the role law plays in constructing race and alternatingly ameliorating and perpetuating racism.

CRT refers to a surge of legal scholarship, starting in the late 1980s and blossoming in the 1990s, that challenged conventional anti-discrimination thinking. According to the conventional narrative (then and probably still dominant in legal thinking about racial discrimination), discrimination on the basis of race could be effectively alleviated by expanding constitutional or statutory rights and then allowing aggrieved parties to file claims seeking remedies from governmental or private wrongdoers. In contrast, CRT scholars view racism as institutional and as baked into both American law and society. They have sharply criticized doctrines such as the intent requirement (the idea that discrimination must be intentional in order to be actionable) as overly narrow and reformist rather than structural in nature, to provide just one example.

That seems true to me. Think of redlining for instance. It doesn’t have to be explicitly racist to do its work – you just frame it as a matter of real estate values. Look here, for some reason houses in this area go for much lower prices than houses in this other area, so from an investment point of view you really ought to avoid the lower prices area, which we’ll just color red here on the map so that it will remind you to Stop. If you’re white, that is; obviously if you’re not white those considerations don’t apply.

Not intentionally racist! So then what? We just shrug and move on?

CRT as a course is part intellectual history (the story of the scholarly movement in the legal academy) and part deep exploration of the far-reaching implications of viewing race and racism in this light. We will consider criticisms of CRT, including conservative critiques, but mostly looking at challenges from within the field. We will put CRT into conversation with the most innovative social scientific formulations of racism and “race” as a concept, asking how they illuminate past and present challenges such as: reparations for past race-based injustice; social movements to combat racism; police violence against and incarceration of disproportionate numbers of people (especially men) of color; laws and policies toward migrants. The course will situate racism as operating through and in conjunction with inequality based on class, gender, national (national original and citizenship), and sexual orientation/expression.

A note at the end says the course is open only to students specializing in Critical Race Studies.

H/t twiliter

Has there ever been an NHS badge signifying a pledge to show support for women?

Some NHS staff won’t want to take that pledge because of the way the T bullies and coerces and threatens women. What will happen to them if they refuse? Will they be reported and punished? Will they be fired?

What’s a “true self”? What does it mean for people to be free to be their “true selves”? What does it have to do with the NHS?

Badge up or be fired yeah?

Continuing the effort to pin down what Critical Race Theory actually is, I find an explainer from the American Bar Association (which I figure is establishment enough that it won’t be accused of Marxist postmodernism or modern postMarxism).

CRT is not a diversity and inclusion “training” but a practice of interrogating the role of race and racism in society that emerged in the legal academy and spread to other fields of scholarship. [ Kimberlé ] Crenshaw—who coined the term “CRT”—notes that CRT is not a noun, but a verb. It cannot be confined to a static and narrow definition but is considered to be an evolving and malleable practice.

Yeah that’s not a good start. It is a noun; if you want to have a verb for it then make one. And saying it can’t be confined to a static definition sounds like…what’s the word? Oh yes, bullshitting. [Updating to add: I took her too literally; see Harald’s reading in comment #12.]

It critiques how the social construction of race and institutionalized racism perpetuate a racial caste system that relegates people of color to the bottom tiers.

I see no problem there, and I certainly think that job needs doing. (On the other hand isn’t that something that activists and scholars have been doing for some time? Is it really particular to CRT?)

CRT also recognizes that race intersects with other identities, including sexuality, gender identity, and others.

Uh oh.

Notice that sex – the one that relegates women to the bottom tiers – is hidden in “and others.” Why isn’t sex important enough to be named while “gender identity” is? Maybe the ABA isn’t so establishment after all (or it’s a different kind of establishment).

CRT recognizes that racism is not a bygone relic of the past. Instead, it acknowledges that the legacy of slavery, segregation, and the imposition of second-class citizenship on Black Americans and other people of color continue to permeate the social fabric of this nation. 

But surely it’s not alone in that. The problem here seems to be not that CRT is wild and crazy but that there’s nothing particularly new about it.

Then it gets more specific.

While recognizing the evolving and malleable nature of CRT, scholar Khiara Bridges outlines a few key tenets of CRT, including:

Recognition that race is not biologically real but is socially constructed and socially significant. It recognizes that science (as demonstrated in the Human Genome Project) refutes the idea of biological racial differences. According to scholars Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, race is the product of social thought and is not connected to biological reality.

What are they scholars of? Biology or something else?

Acknowledgement that racism is a normal feature of society and is embedded within systems and institutions, like the legal system, that replicate racial inequality. This dismisses the idea that racist incidents are aberrations but instead are manifestations of structural and systemic racism.

Is that wrong? It doesn’t seem wrong to me. Of course racism is embedded within systems and institutions (in the US at least); it would be strange if it weren’t.

Rejection of popular understandings about racism, such as arguments that confine racism to a few “bad apples.” CRT recognizes that racism is codified in law, embedded in structures, and woven into public policy. CRT rejects claims of meritocracy or “colorblindness.” CRT recognizes that it is the systemic nature of racism that bears primary responsibility for reproducing racial inequality.

Is that wrong? I don’t think so.

Recognition of the relevance of people’s everyday lives to scholarship. This includes embracing the lived experiences of people of color, including those preserved through storytelling, and rejecting deficit-informed research that excludes the epistemologies of people of color.

Oh yes that one – we’ve seen that one before. Standpoint epistemology yadda yadda. That I do think is a crock of shit. By all means embrace lived experiences and storytelling, but don’t claim they’re the same thing as systematic inquiry and testing.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Trying to Figure It Out.

Fair questions.

Or, she concludes, “is it about adding more empty praise to the teaching of history and completing the sanitization of history that already is the case? If so, why?”

Because it’s more cheerful, I suppose.

Open Democracy erases women from a discussion of abortion rights. Much democracy, very open.

“Mum!” “Murderer!” “Give your baby a present – a birthday!” For close to 25 years, pregnant people were harassed by anti-choice protesters as they made their way into the MSI Reproductive Choices clinic in Ealing, west London.

No, not pregnant people, pregnant women. However butch any of them may have been, they were still women. If you can’t say the word “women” you can’t defend women’s rights.

Thanks to successful campaigning by Sister Supporter – a group of grassroots activists that I am part of – this is no longer the case. Our activism has also spread nationally, protecting women from anti-choice harassment outside clinics that provide safe abortion care in Richmond upon Thames and Manchester.

There you go! That’s the word. Use it passim please, not as an afterthought.

Our work continues. According to the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), since 2018 there’s been an anti-abortion presence at 42 clinics across England and Wales. More than 100,000 women and pregnant people, according to BPAS research, were subjected to anti-choice harassment while attending an appointment in 2019.

Just women. Men don’t need abortion rights.

The group did good work. It shouldn’t be obscured by this fad for erasing women.

Sister Supporter is a pro-choice, anti-harassment grassroots organisation that was founded in November 2015 after an Ealing resident, Anna Veglio-White, returned home from university and was shocked that the anti-abortion groups she remembered seeing as a child were still standing outside the clinic, many years later.

That same week, she placed an advert in the local paper with a call to action: come to a pro-choice counter-demo at the weekend. More than 20 local residents turned up with home-made placards, and Sister Supporter was born.

(Sisters are women.)

Over the years, we had holy water thrown on us, were called ‘murderers’ and were told repeatedly that we were going to hell. Our policy in response has been to ‘not engage’. While we managed to block clinic users’ view of the protestors, and vice versa, we couldn’t drown out the sound of their anti-choice chants, prayers and songs.

We also collected evidence to build local support for our campaign and look for solutions. This formed the basis of our petition to Ealing Council, which received 3,593 signatures (more than any previous petition by local residents).

In April 2018, a public spaces protection order (PSPO) – a tool defined in the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014 – came into force, meaning that protesters could no longer go within 100 metres of the MSI clinic.

Well done.

Another pebble added to the pile, or piece of scaffolding removed [standard note that the source is the Daily Mail]:

Kate Grimes, a former chief executive of Kingston Hospital in South-West London, has joined a growing chorus calling on organisations to withdraw from the Stonewall scheme.

…

Ms Grimes accused Stonewall of ‘undermining’ the NHS’s ability to keep patients safe, ‘stifling’ free speech and creating a ‘culture of fear’ among some NHS staff.

And she warned [that] some advice risked ‘opening up NHS organisations to litigation and reputational damage’.

Ms Grimes recalled how she received offensive messages when she came out as a lesbian in the late 1980s, her pride at running one of the country’s leading HIV/AIDS services, and appreciation for Stonewall’s campaign for greater equality.

But she said the charity’s recent lobbying over trans issues had culminated in the ‘incorrect notion’ that a man who identifies as a woman is allowed by law to access female-only spaces. As a result, she added, female patients no longer have access to single-sex accommodation in wards and bathrooms.

‘The implications for patients are significant,’ she added. ‘Female patients are exposed to the distress and dangers of sharing private space with men at a time when they are vulnerable.’

And you know what? Female people should never be forced to share private space with men, even when they’re in perfect health and fully dressed. Private space is private, so it’s kind of definitional that no one should be forced to share it.

Ms Grimes [said]: ‘Hospital workers are losing their rights, enshrined in law, to separate bathroom and changing facilities. Anyone who speaks up may face disciplinary action, as policies are brought into line with Stonewall’s view.’

Who made Stonewall god? It turns out, no one.

Utopia at last: free binders and packers for the people.

Trans students in Edinburgh are being offered free prosthetic breasts and “packers” that help give the appearance of having a penis.

Edinburgh University’s students’ association (EUSA) is paying for “gender-empowering” items that also include breast-binders and compression underwear to hide male genitalia.

“Gender-empowering”? What does that even mean?

For Women Scotland, the women’s rights group, said it was “horrified” to learn about the programme.

It said: “Breast-binding is a dangerous and regressive practice that destroys healthy tissue and causes breathing problems and damage to the ribcage. It restricts young women’s capacity to participate in normal activities and if done for long periods will cause permanent damage.”

But in exchange the young women are “gender-empowered.” Well worth it, I’m sure.

How interesting – Katy Montgomerie doesn’t want men in his spaces.

He doesn’t want men in his spaces, but he does want to be in women’s spaces.

It wears the badge or it gets the hose.

A campaign encouraging Scottish NHS staff to sign a pledge and wear a badge supporting gay, lesbian and transgender people has been criticised after it emerged participation in the scheme will be monitored.

Have Scottish NHS staff ever been encouraged to wear a badge supporting women?

The NHS Pride pledge, devised by Scotland’s health service and the SNP government, with input from the charity Stonewall, launches tomorrow as part of Pride month.

There’s your problem right there. Reject “input” from Stonewall.

The campaign has rankled some doctors and nurses, however, amid leaked guidance from civil servants that health boards should record uptake among staff. A Scottish government briefing passed to this newspaper states that badges should only be awarded to staff who take the pledge and it advises that the numbers of badge-wearers “and basic info on staff groups wearing the badge” should be noted.

Has the NHS ever made such a demand for support of women?

Among the leaked documents is a draft statement for an NHS newsletter by Caroline Lamb, chief executive of NHS Scotland, who says: “I will proudly wear my badge as an ally to progress. I encourage you to do the same.”

How about progress for women? Any thoughts on that? Is it all just “queer” and trans people now?

For Women Scotland (FWS), the feminist campaign group, was contacted by dozens of NHS staff when details of the scheme emerged last week. Some described the pledge as “offensive” while others complained that the campaign “belittles” hard-working NHS staff who strive to deliver patient-centred care irrespective of sexuality and gender. Several NHS trusts in England have adopted the Pride pledge in recent years.

Signing it comes with duties – it’s kind of like enlisting in the army.

Staff who sign it are advised they may sometimes need to call out hate speech, or report incidents of discrimination or acts of verbal or physical abuse “against patients, people who use our services, and staff (including contractor staff)”.

“Abuse” like, for instance, saying “I requested a woman doctor and you’re not a woman”? Like asking to be on a women-only ward? Like telling a patient she can be on a women-only ward?

One GP in Lanarkshire who contacted FWS wrote: “The idea of a group of smug Pride badge-wearers informing on their friends and colleagues sounds more like East Germany in the Stasi days or China during the Cultural Revolution than a liberal Scottish democracy in the 21st century.” The backlash comes amid criticism of Stonewall and its diversity champions scheme, to which hundreds of organisations, including the Scottish government, belong.

…

Susan Smith of FWS said the campaign threatened to discriminate against women and those with gender-critical beliefs, while Malcolm Clark from the LGB Alliance, which was founded in 2019 in opposition to Stonewall’s policies on transgender issues, warned it could be counter-productive. “Frankly, it’s sinister,” said Clark. “This sort of virtue-signalling is almost Maoist in the way it gives a platform for some people to proclaim their political loyalty but puts other staff on notice they are not good comrades.”

Trans women of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your jock straps.

Politifact has an explainer on Critical Race Theory.

The grandfather of the movement was Harvard Law School professor Derrick Bell, who in the mid-1970s voiced frustration at the limited impact of landmark civil rights laws and U.S. Supreme Court rulings of the previous decade. While those changes aimed to broaden access to high-quality education, jobs and housing, they fell short, he said. Laws remained embedded in a set of values and practices that discriminated against people of color, Bell said.

You know, it was the same way with feminism – revived feminism, aka second wave. It was about vastly more than laws – it was about a set of values and practices that discriminated against women. Better laws are a good thing but they’re far from the only thing.

In plain terms, critical race theory holds that racism is part of a broader pattern in America: It is woven into laws, and it shows up in who gets a job interview, the sort of home loans people are offered, how they are treated by police, and other facets of daily life large and small.

Again, very similar to feminism.

CNN also has an explainer. Just listing the headings help explain what the angry Republicans are trying to shove back behind the curtain.

Land was taken

Slavery was the law

Interracial marriage was banned

Voting was restricted

Jim Crow was accepted

Lynching was tolerated

Immigration was biased

Education was curtailed

Good jobs were elusive

Housing was exclusionary

Health care was inferior

That’s CNN’s list, and it’s not difficult to think of more items. Representation in the culture for instance – movies, tv shows, theater, advertising. Representation in government. Representation by unions. Mass incarceration. It goes on and on. Why would we not talk about it? Why would we not teach about it? Why would we try to pretend it never happened?

How to do politics that is serious and honest:

Starting with honest – it’s not honest to say “the anti-trans movement” when he’s talking about Maya and the ruling. It’s not “anti-trans” to defend women’s rights, even when we are defending them in the face of actions and policies promoted by some trans activists.

Also, yes it is about trying to humiliate a person, when he singles Maya out for abuse and lies – when he calls her names and claims she’s doing things she’s not doing. Of course it is. His “honest” is not honest at all.

And then there’s the string of stupid abusive epithets for three prominent gender critics. That’s neither honest nor serious.

He’s very heads I win tails you lose, which is also not my idea of honest.

No, it’s the other way around. Gender critical describes our view of gender, and anti-trans is just an abusive lie. We’re opposed to the magical new dogma that says men turn into women by saying they are women; that doesn’t make us “anti-trans.”

I take issue with its use because it’s inaccurate, and malicious, and coming from a grown-ass barrister who says it and adds a lol.

Yes he’s a barrister but he’s not the only barrister, and other legal peeps are saying he’s violating all kinds of rules.

These tweets –

Solange is according to her profile a retired litigator, so she knows what she’s talking about.

I’d forgotten about Simon Cox. It’s good to forget him; remembering him is not pleasant.

He’s back at it today.

Maya does no such thing, of course.

I still think it’s not a good look for barristers to lie like this in public – not to mention the name-calling.

That’s interesting. He’s a barrister so he definitely knows more than I do about the laws…but I would think saying that Maya deliberately puts trans people “and allies” in danger does indeed appear libelous.

That aside, it’s unmistakably bullying and loathsome.

He’s “in danger” from us, in other words we’re likely to try to kill him.

What a poisonous man.

For some completely mystifying unfathomable reason, there are not many lesbian bars any more.

Rachel and Sheila Smallman spent the summer of 2016 traveling the Gulf Coast, trying to find the best place to open a lesbian bar.

There were queer bars along the coast, but they largely catered to cisgender gay men. The Smallmans visited at least five cities in four states.

Why does PBS say “cisgender”? Can we not just take that as read now? Wouldn’t “gay men” have done the job perfectly well? Would any reader be wondering if they meant trans men too?

On one night, the Smallmans met a friend at a New Orleans gay bar. They were there for about three minutes before some of the patrons and employees started yelling at them to leave because they were women. The couple and their friend hadn’t even had a chance to order a drink.

There you go. No women allowed in gay bars, and there are no lesbian bars, so hahaha wims sucks to be you.

That night strengthened Rachel and Sheila’s resolve to open their own lesbian bar. On Oct. 4, 2019, the Smallmans opened Herz in Mobile, Alabama, turning a straight dive bar into the only women-centered queer bar in the city. The only lesbian bar in Alabama. And one of four lesbian bars in the South.

But when you say “women-centered” do you mean cis women? Well DO you?

he number of lesbian bars has decreased in the past few decades to just 21, according to the Lesbian Bar Project, a collective launched by filmmakers Erica Rose and Elina Street to raise awareness and help the remaining bars survive the COVID-19 pandemic. That number is a drop from the more than 200 lesbian bars in the late 1980s, according to a 2019 report from Greggor Mattson, an associate sociology professor at Oberlin College.

See, back in the late 80s, people still thought women were acceptable. Now everybody knows they’re all terfs or Karens or both.

When the “dramatic decline” in lesbian bars began, the fastest-growing type of LGBTQ bar were those where men and women socialized together. The reasons behind that shift need more research, Mattson said.

Later, “as transgender issues became more prominent, and we began to recognize genderqueer and gender nonbinary folks, bars that seemed to be open to all genders became the dominant kind of LGBTQ+ space,” Mattson said.

That way lesbians get the golden opportunity to be called cis scum by men who identify as women.

Florida has passed a law governing the teaching of history in public schools. What next, a law on what brand of shoes the students must buy?

The Florida State Board of Education unanimously voted to ban teaching ideas related to critical race theory Thursday, making it one of the largest public school systems to fall in line with conservative efforts across the country to regulate certain classroom instruction of American history.

What’s the betting that they even have much idea what it is?

The rule says in part: “Instruction on the required topics must be factual and objective and may not suppress or distort significant historical events, such as the Holocaust, and may not define American history as something other than the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.”

That’s ludicrous. American history is a vast array of things, and “the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence” doesn’t cover them all! It doesn’t begin to cover them all. The principles are very interesting, and worth learning about, but so are other aspects of the history, including that of the indigenous people and yes you’re damn right the enslaved people. Hey you know what, one of the things you can teach about is the tension between the universal principles on the one hand and the genocide of the indigenous people and enslavement of the imported from Africa people on the other.

The move was a victory for DeSantis, who has been a vocal critic of critical race theory in schools. He told board members, many of whom he appointed, by video before the vote that students should be served with fact-based curricula by teachers who should “not be trying to indoctrinate them with ideology.”

That’s so ignorant. What facts? There’s an infinite number of facts, so how do you decide which facts to teach about? You don’t just order a box of facts from Amazon and then distribute them to the students by alphabetical order. You have to organize the damn “facts,” and the process of doing that is called…brace yourselves…theory. You’re teaching a theory no matter what, so it’s idiotic to think critical race theory is some cuckoo in the nest because it’s not a bushel basket of Facts.

DeSantis added: “I think it’s going to cause a lot of divisions. I think it’ll cause people to think of themselves more as a member of a particular race based on skin color, rather than based on the content of their character and based on their hard work and what they’re trying to accomplish in life.”

He doesn’t think that. Even he’s not that stupid. What he thinks is that the “universal principles” version is more flattering to the country and especially to, yes, white people.

In short he has a bad conscience. He (and all the rest of these goons) don’t want the central importance of removal and enslavement and race to be taught because it doesn’t make us look good. That’s the point of life, right? To be made to look good? Shiny goldy hair, shiny blue suit, shiny pale skin?

Critical race theory is a concept that seeks to understand racism and inequality in the U.S. by exploring and exposing the ways it affects legal and social systems.

The horror! Why would we ever want to do that?

It can be done well or badly, as we’ve already seen. Robin DiAngelo is a damn fool. But the fact that Robin DiAngelo is a fool doesn’t translate to all proponents and scholars of critical race theory are fools or that the subject is stupid or evil.

Mississippi being Mississippi:

At first, it seemed a joyous occasion. There was an audible gasp in the room, then boisterous cheering and applause when the announcement was made: Ikeria Washington and Layla Temple had been named 2021 valedictorian and salutatorian for West Point High School.

The president of the local N.A.A.C.P. in West Point, Miss., Anner Cunningham, smiled as the two young women, both standout students, were photographed. “It was a beautiful and proud moment to witness two young, Black ladies standing side by side given such honors,” Ms. Cunningham said.

And moment is what it was, because it couldn’t be allowed.

But almost immediately parents of other students near the top of the rankings raised questions about who should have been honored. Within days, and breaking with longstanding tradition, West Point High School decided to name two valedictorians and two salutatorians — with two white students, Emma Berry and Dominic Borgioli, joining the Black students who had already been named.

Affirmative action for white kids! At last!

There was a lot of fancy footwork about how you count the grades and yadda yadda but the appearance at least is…what it sounds like.

The Washington and Temple families are considering a lawsuit, and they have enlisted the advice of Ms. Ross, the lawyer from Jackson. She questions the methodology used to determine class rank in West Point — saying it makes no sense — and why weighted scores are not used.

“Anybody in education knows that a weighted G.P.A. signifies that a student has taken more rigorous courses than a student with a 4.0 G.P.A.,” Ms. Ross said.

A top grade in an easy course isn’t scored the way a top grade in a difficult course is.

Mississippi is still Mississippi.