Opinion Texas' ban on critical race theory in schools proves the GOP still doesn't understand MLK's message

[essie]

I'm German, and it made me feel bad about my family. I always wondered if they knew. My grandfather was stationed in Poland, and not once in my life did my grandparents talk about the war. Not one time.

There's a great art book called Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home by Nora King that explores what it means to grow up in Germany post WWII and how we learn from history.

 

[Loiosh]

I don't think we need to dismantle colleges to promote the trades, just build more trade schools and give more access to the trades that can start after high-school

And maybe degrees and education in general don't have to be so expensive.

Why should it matter if people spend a few years getting what appears a frivolous degree?

The smartest guy I knew in college spent in a few years getting a doctorate in philosophy before going on to get degrees in law. While he was studying philosophy I asked him why he was doing that, it seemed like such an enormous waste of potential, and he said "when I'm living in a box behind the supermarket I'm going to want to have a profound understanding of WHY I'm there."

Fucking loved that guy.

When we were in high school together he was pretty shy and a professor tried teasing him into answering a question. "C'mon, Bill, first prize is a kiss from Tina." He immediately replied: "What's second prize, two kisses?" It took me a sec to get the joke and most didn't get it at all.

 

[Social Warlord]

CRT is identity based Marxism. It teaches young people that they are oppressed/oppressors and gives them a target to destroy.

It is specifically designed to weaken America and create internal conflict.

Keep pressing forward.

 

[PolishHeadlock2]

Disapproving of something unfounded an untrue in many key ways is not the same as being scared of learning something new.

You can reframe and misrepresent all you want but that will not accomplish anything, aside from getting a bunch of likes from all the leftists on this board. If that's your goal, then fine, mission accomplished. But if you want to make a case and win someone over you should dispute their actual argument, not your intentionally gnarled caricature of it.

My point stands

 

[Sketch]

While the West focuses on CRT, the Chinese brush up on their math skills.

 

[Ruprecht]

I'll be disappointed if this continues to the extent I have to read the seminal texts on Critical Race Theory so I know exactly what it actually is.
Unfortunately local pundits and politicians are now commenting on it, so it might happen.

 

[Diogenes of Sinope]

No he didn't, you're just dumb

MLK advocate people be judged by the content of their character, not their skin. CRT claims people's character is dictated by their race.

cute dubs though

 

[Loiosh]

Disapproving of something unfounded an untrue in many key ways is not the same as being scared of learning something new.

You can reframe and misrepresent all you want but that will not accomplish anything, aside from getting a bunch of likes from all the leftists on this board. If that's your goal, then fine, mission accomplished. But if you want to make a case and win someone over you should dispute their actual argument, not your intentionally gnarled caricature of it.

To be fair, shouldn't you be making the case that this is unfounded and untrue?

It sounds like some people are rejoicing at the banning of a subject being taught based solely on "intentionally gnarled caricatures of it."

 

[Loiosh]

CRT claims people's character is dictated by their race.

Does it?

 

[nostradumbass]

Why are you against the "free market" bro?

Glad you put "free market" in quotes to recognize the closed game with billions in subsidies and special legal protections given to them by the government.

How many billions of dollars does this restaurant take from the government?
https://forums.sherdog.com/threads/...se-her-son-doesnt-fit-the-dress-code.4116631/

 

[GoldenWolf87]

The author

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_M._Kruse




Texas this week became the latest state to ban the teaching of critical race theory. The author of the bill, Republican state Rep. Steve Toth, has insisted that the measure was wholly in keeping with the vision of Martin Luther King Jr.

“It echoes Dr. King’s wish that we should judge people on the content of their character, not [the color of] their skin,” Toth told a reporter this month.


This talking point is apparently the new Republican orthodoxy. At a campaign rally last year, then-President Donald Trump claimed that “critical race theory is a Marxist doctrine that rejects the vision of Martin Luther King Jr.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis likewise asserted that critical race theory was “basically teaching kids to hate our country and to hate each other based on race,” adding: “It puts race as the most important thing. I want content of character to be the most important thing.”

In making such comments, Republican officials reveal that they don’t really understand critical race theory — and don’t really understand Martin Luther King Jr., either.

Despite the moral panic from conservative politicians that it was designed with “kids” in mind, critical race theory has largely been limited to law schools and advanced graduate programs. (As many joked on social media, if your “kids” are really being taught critical race theory, you should be proud they’re in law school.)

Moreover, far from stressing that race is “the most important thing,” critical race theory challenges the idea that race is a thing at all. It starts with the premise that there is no biological or scientific justification for racial categories and that race was a socially constructed invention — a fiction, but one that has nevertheless been written into our laws and legislation.

Those who work on critical race theory are baffled by the seemingly deliberate mischaracterizations of their work. Kimberlé Crenshaw, the noted law professor at UCLA and Columbia and a pioneering scholar in the field, dismissed Trump’s and DeSantis’ specific claims as “false and slanderous.” As she explained in a recent interview, “Critical race theory just says let's pay attention to what has happened in this country and how what has happened in this country is continuing to create differential outcomes, so we can become that country that we say we are.”

Contrary to Republican cries that this scholarship is “un-American,” Crenshaw asserts that “critical race theory is not anti-patriotic.”

“In fact, it is more patriotic than those who are opposed to it, because we believe in the 13th and the 14th and the 15th Amendment,” Crenshaw says. “We believe in the promises of equality. And we know we can't get there if we can't confront and talk honestly about inequality.”

Talking honestly about inequality, it turns out, was a special point of emphasis for Martin Luther King Jr. He devoted a considerable amount of his activism and authorship doing it. But the limited knowledge that Trump, DeSantis and Toth all have of King’s work apparently begins and ends with that one line about “character.”

To appreciate this reality, and to see how wrong those are who see MLK and critical race theory as diametrically opposed, look no further than two iconic moments the Texas law encourages teachers to use: “Martin Luther King Jr.'s ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’ and ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.”

In his landmark address at the March on Washington in August 1963, King did note his hope that “one day” his children would be judged by their character and not the color of their skin, but that was only one line in a more nuanced address.

More important, while King looked ahead to that day, his vision remained firmly fixed on the realities of racism and discrimination in his own time; he devoted the bulk of his address to identifying and articulating them. King chronicled the ways African Americans faced systemic patterns of discrimination and inequality, from “the unspeakable horrors of police brutality” to the discriminatory public and private policies that put African Americans on “a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.”

“We’ve come here today,” King patiently explained again, “to dramatize a shameful condition.”

In his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail, which he wrote four months before the March on Washington, King had already sounded out these same things, in greater length.

The letter, which was King’s response to chiding from moderate white ministers, patiently explained that the first “basic step” in his activism was the “collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist.”

Asserting that “privileged groups” fail to see how others often lack the same privileges and therefore dismiss their complaints, King rattled off for them — and us — a litany of the systemic and structural inequalities that faced African Americans, including police brutality, voting discrimination and an unequal economy that locked “the vast majority of your 20 million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society.”

Notably, King spent a great deal of the letter outlining how “the unjust law” — which he defined as “a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself” — worked to prop up those racial and economic inequalities. The racist intent or racial impact of such legislation might not be overt, King noted. “Sometimes a law is just on its face,” he wrote, “and unjust in its application.”

Civil rights activists like King adopted the word “demonstrations” to characterize their protests, because they sought to demonstrate the realities of segregation and discrimination in undeniable terms. In the letter, King explained that he sought to expose the hypocrisies in Jim Crow laws and demonstrate the inequalities they obscured.

“We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive,” he wrote. “We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.”

King’s summons to identify and illuminate the racial, economic and political inequalities in American life runs counter to the conservative culture war against critical race theory and related publications like The 1619 Project. (In full disclosure, I am one of several historians who have written chapters for the project’s forthcoming book.)

Politicians like Trump, DeSantis and Toth are certainly welcome to believe that we should not, in fact, acknowledge the deep roots of racism in American society and how that shaped the nation around us, but they shouldn’t invoke the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. when they do so.

At the very least, they should follow their own recommendations and study what the civil rights icon actually wrote and actually said. It seems they might be in for an education of their own.

Not surprising to see that Liberal Journalists would be overwhelming upset with the banning of CRT. While using a single quote from MLK. While claiming that MLK would be in favor of CRT. I am pretty sure if MLK was alive here today he would be agaisnt it if he saw the textbooks of it.


But seeing how this opinion is from MSNBC i am not surprised.

 

[GoldenWolf87]

https://www.edweek.org/leadership/what-is-critical-race-theory-and-why-is-it-under-attack/2021/05

Is “critical race theory” a way of understanding how American racism has shaped public policy, or a divisive discourse that pits people of color against white people? Liberals and conservatives are in sharp disagreement.

The topic has exploded in the public arena this spring—especially in K-12, where numerous state legislatures are debating bills seeking to ban its use in the classroom.

In truth, the divides are not nearly as neat as they may seem. The events of the last decade have increased public awareness about things like housing segregation, the impacts of criminal justice policy in the 1990s, and the legacy of enslavement on Black Americans. But there is much less consensus on what the government’s role should be in righting these past wrongs. Add children and schooling into the mix and the debate becomes especially volatile.

School boards, superintendents, even principals and teachers are already facing questions about critical race theory, and there are significant disagreements even among experts about its precise definition as well as how its tenets should inform K-12 policy and practice. This explainer is meant only as a starting point to help educators grasp core aspects of the current debate.

Just what is critical race theory anyway?
Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that racism is a social construct, and that it is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.

The basic tenets of critical race theory, or CRT, emerged out of a framework for legal analysis in the late 1970s and early 1980s created by legal scholars Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado, among others.

A good example is when, in the 1930s, government officials literally drew lines around areas deemed poor financial risks, often explicitly due to the racial composition of inhabitants. Banks subsequently refused to offer mortgages to Black people in those areas.

Today, those same patterns of discrimination live on through facially race-blind policies, like single-family zoning that prevents the building of affordable housing in advantaged, majority-white neighborhoods and, thus, stymies racial desegregation efforts.

CRT also has ties to other intellectual currents, including the work of sociologists and literary theorists who studied links between political power, social organization, and language. And its ideas have since informed other fields, like the humanities, the social sciences, and teacher education.

This academic understanding of critical race theory differs from representation in recent popular books and, especially, from its portrayal by critics—often, though not exclusively, conservative Republicans. Critics charge that the theory leads to negative dynamics, such as a focus on group identity over universal, shared traits; divides people into “oppressed” and “oppressor” groups; and urges intolerance.

Thus, there is a good deal of confusion over what CRT means, as well as its relationship to other terms, like “anti-racism” and “social justice,” with which it is often conflated.

To an extent, the term “critical race theory” is now cited as the basis of all diversity and inclusion efforts regardless of how much it’s actually informed those programs.

One conservative organization, the Heritage Foundation, recently attributed a whole host of issues to CRT, including the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, LGBTQ clubs in schools, diversity training in federal agencies and organizations, California’s recent ethnic studies model curriculum, the free-speech debate on college campuses, and alternatives to exclusionary discipline—such as the Promise program in Broward County, Fla., that some parents blame for the Parkland school shootings. “When followed to its logical conclusion, CRT is destructive and rejects the fundamental ideas on which our constitutional republic is based,” the organization claimed.




(A good parallel here is how popular ideas of the common core learning standards grew to encompass far more than what those standards said on paper.)

Does critical race theory say all white people are racist? Isn’t that racist, too?
The theory says that racism is part of everyday life, so people—white or nonwhite—who don’t intend to be racist can nevertheless make choices that fuel racism.

Some critics claim that the theory advocates discriminating against white people in order to achieve equity. They mainly aim those accusations at theorists who advocate for policies that explicitly take race into account. (The writer Ibram X. Kendi, whose recent popular book How to Be An Antiracist suggests that discrimination that creates equity can be considered anti-racist, is often cited in this context.)

Fundamentally, though, the disagreement springs from different conceptions of racism. CRT thus puts an emphasis on outcomes, not merely on individuals’ own beliefs, and it calls on these outcomes to be examined and rectified. Among lawyers, teachers, policymakers, and the general public, there are many disagreements about how precisely to do those things, and to what extent race should be explicitly appealed to or referred to in the process.

Here’s a helpful illustration to keep in mind in understanding this complex idea. In a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court school-assignment case on whether race could be a factor in maintaining diversity in K-12 schools, Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion famously concluded: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” But during oral arguments, then-justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said: “It’s very hard for me to see how you can have a racial objective but a nonracial means to get there.”

All these different ideas grow out of longstanding, tenacious intellectual debates. Critical race theory emerged out of postmodernist thought, which tends to be skeptical of the idea of universal values, objective knowledge, individual merit, Enlightenment rationalism, and liberalism—tenets that conservatives tend to hold dear.

What does any of this have to do with K-12 education?
Scholars who study critical race theory in education look at how policies and practices in K-12 education contribute to persistent racial inequalities in education, and advocate for ways to change them. Among the topics they’ve studied: racially segregated schools, the underfunding of majority-Black and Latino school districts, disproportionate disciplining of Black students, barriers to gifted programs and selective-admission high schools, and curricula that reinforce racist ideas.

Critical race theory is not a synonym for culturally relevant teaching, which emerged in the 1990s. This teaching approach seeks to affirm students’ ethnic and racial backgrounds and is intellectually rigorous. But it’s related in that one of its aims is to help students identify and critique the causes of social inequality in their own lives.

Many educators support, to one degree or another, culturally relevant teaching and other strategies to make schools feel safe and supportive for Black students and other underserved populations. (Students of color make up the majority of school-aged children.) But they don’t necessarily identify these activities as CRT-related.

As one teacher-educator put it: “The way we usually see any of this in a classroom is: ‘Have I thought about how my Black kids feel? And made a space for them, so that they can be successful?’ That is the level I think it stays at, for most teachers.” Like others interviewed for this explainer, the teacher-educator did not want to be named out of fear of online harassment.

An emerging subtext among some critics is that curricular excellence can’t coexist alongside culturally responsive teaching or anti-racist work. Their argument goes that efforts to change grading practices or make the curriculum less Eurocentric will ultimately harm Black students, or hold them to a less high standard.

As with CRT in general, its popular representation in schools has been far less nuanced. A recent poll by the advocacy group Parents Defending Education claimed some schools were teaching that “white people are inherently privileged, while Black and other people of color are inherently oppressed and victimized”; that “achieving racial justice and equality between racial groups requires discriminating against people based on their whiteness”; and that “the United States was founded on racism.”

Thus much of the current debate appears to spring not from the academic texts, but from fear among critics that students—especially white students—will be exposed to supposedly damaging or self-demoralizing ideas.

While some district officials have issued mission statements, resolutions, or spoken about changes in their policies using some of the discourse of CRT, it’s not clear to what degree educators are explicitly teaching the concepts, or even using curriculum materials or other methods that implicitly draw on them. For one thing, scholars say, much scholarship on CRT is written in academic language or published in journals not easily accessible to K-12 teachers.

What is going on with these proposals to ban critical race theory in schools?
As of mid-May, legislation purporting to outlaw CRT in schools has passed in Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Tennessee and have been proposed in various other statehouses.

The bills are so vaguely written that it’s unclear what they will affirmatively cover.

Could a teacher who wants to talk about a factual instance of state-sponsored racism—like the establishment of Jim Crow, the series of laws that prevented Black Americans from voting or holding office and separated them from white people in public spaces—be considered in violation of these laws?

It’s also unclear whether these new bills are constitutional, or whether they impermissibly restrict free speech.

It would be extremely difficult, in any case, to police what goes on inside hundreds of thousands of classrooms. But social studies educators fear that such laws could have a chilling effect on teachers who might self-censor their own lessons out of concern for parent or administrator complaints.

As English teacher Mike Stein told Chalkbeat Tennessee about the new law: “History teachers can not adequately teach about the Trail of Tears, the Civil War, and the civil rights movement. English teachers will have to avoid teaching almost any text by an African American author because many of them mention racism to various extents.”

The laws could also become a tool to attack other pieces of the curriculum, including ethnic studies and “action civics”—an approach to civics education that asks students to research local civic problems and propose solutions.

How is this related to other debates over what’s taught in the classroom amid K-12 culture wars?
The charge that schools are indoctrinating students in a harmful theory or political mindset is a longstanding one, historians note. CRT appears to be the latest salvo in this ongoing debate.

In the early and mid-20th century, the concern was about socialism or Marxism. The conservative American Legion, beginning in the 1930s, sought to rid schools of progressive-minded textbooks that encouraged students to consider economic inequality; two decades later the John Birch Society raised similar criticisms about school materials. As with CRT criticisms, the fear was that students would be somehow harmed by exposure to these ideas.

As the school-aged population became more diverse, these debates have been inflected through the lens of race and ethnic representation, including disagreements over multiculturalism and ethnic studies, the ongoing “canon wars” over which texts should make up the English curriculum, and the so-called “ebonics” debates over the status of Black vernacular English in schools.

In history, the debates have focused on the balance among patriotism and American exceptionalism, on one hand, and the country’s history of exclusion and violence towards Indigenous people and the enslavement of African Americans on the other—between its ideals and its practices. Those tensions led to the implosion of a 1994 attempt to set national history standards.

A current example that has fueled much of the recent round of CRT criticism is the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which sought to put the history and effects of enslavement—as well as Black Americans’ contributions to democratic reforms—at the center of American history.

The culture wars are always, at some level, battled out within schools, historians say.

“It’s because they’re nervous about broad social things, but they’re talking in the language of school and school curriculum,” said one historian of education. “That’s the vocabulary, but the actual grammar is anxiety about shifting social power relations.”

When you inject CRT and white fragility in the teachings of the youth its not a good thing.

 

[GoldenWolf87]

Does anyone noticed how MSNBC isn't reporting or showing there are some teachers and parents revolting agaisnt CRT in school board meetings? that really shows u.

 

[GoldenWolf87]

Does it?

If your from Eastern Europe you would be targeted based on your ethnicity. Not race.
This CRT is completely BS stuff but hey this is what Biden voters voted for.

Eastern Europeans have faced discrimination before in the past but they arent important either right? i know some Iraqis from Iraq a few years back. High School students they weren't targeted based off their religion nor race but rather their ethnicity.

It was still wrong. The issue with CRT is that it only touches the small things. But never does talk about the actual discrimination's.

 

[WhiteMousse]

To be fair, shouldn't you be making the case that this is unfounded and untrue?

It sounds like some people are rejoicing at the banning of a subject being taught based solely on "intentionally gnarled caricatures of it."

I can and do make cases about the validity of CRT.

That is not the point of my post and you should have been able to derive that by reading it and the post I'd quoted.

The point is not whether or not CRT is true or false. The point is, someone (not me) asserted that it is invalid, and his response was to say that he is nothing but a frightened child afraid of learning.

Do you think that is a good faith argument? Is that the kind of framing or logic that would incentivize the exchange of ideas, for the purpose of converging at the best possible conclusion?

 

[Loiosh]

I can and do make cases about the validity of CRT.

That is not the point of my post and you should have been able to derive that by reading it and the post I'd quoted.

The point is not whether or not CRT is true or false. The point is, someone (not me) asserted that it is invalid, and his response was to say that he is nothing but a frightened child afraid of learning.

Do you think that is a good faith argument? Is that the kind of framing or logic that would incentivize the exchange of ideas, for the purpose of converging at the best possible conclusion?

I see you dismissing him for dismissing others.

 

[Diogenes of Sinope]

Does it?

Yep
https://nypost.com/2019/05/20/richa...lture-training/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

My sister is a teacher. This stuff was a mandatory part of her training. She also told me that the guy who was training the group of new oncoming teachers told her to her face that he had a distrust of white women so that’s why he was mean to her. Just blatantly told her that lol.

for the record my sister is a sjw.

CRT Is simply a subjective radical perspective On race inequalities; A post modernist approach to the subject. There’s no objective or research back findings in any of it. In fact it claims that objectivity is a corner stone and white supremacy.

 

[MaxMMA]

Stopped reading at "race is a social construct."

Lol, some people have far too much time on their hands.

 

[Loiosh]

Yep
https://nypost.com/2019/05/20/richa...lture-training/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

My sister is a teacher. This stuff was a mandatory part of her training. She also told me that the guy who was training the group of new oncoming teachers told her to her face that he had a distrust of white women so that’s why he was mean to her. Just blatantly told her that lol.

for the record my sister is a sjw.

CRT Is simply a subjective radical perspective On race inequalities; A post modernist approach to the subject. There’s no objective or research back findings in any of it. In fact it claims that objectivity is a corner stone and white supremacy.

I just finished watching a 90 minute debate about CRT between educators and activists, the object wasn't to "win" but rather express why they were pro or con and maybe find some common ground.

One of the common criticisms was that it was not only too subjective and lacking foundational definition, it also tried to resolve problems that were varied and nuanced with a single blunt force solution.

I know nothing about CRT and remain without an opinion one way or the other, but I suspect that is also true of the vast majority of it's critics. I think people celebrating the banning or CRT are doing so mostly out of ignorance, but at the same time I appreciate that if a subject is to taught, there should probably be a strong consensus amongst educators on the subject matter, and they should be able to express that consensus publicly and succinctly.

I think that the younger the student, the more important that standard is, and I'm not suggesting that standard should exist in universities where students have more agency and the maturity to make these choices themselves.

 

[Loiosh]

Stopped reading at "race is a social construct."

Lol, some people have far too much time on their hands.

You don't think it is?

There is more genetic variation within a racial group than between them.