The engineered panic over critical race theory, explained – CNNPolitics

Spare a thought for critical race theory. It wasn’t always a conservative bogeyman.

Especially over the past several months, Republican leaders have distorted CRT — an academic frame that scholars such as Kimberlé Crenshaw have been using in graduate-level courses for decades to interrogate how the legal system entrenches racism — into a catchall to describe things they don’t like.

 

In this bastardized telling, CRT is whatever Republicans want it to be; it comes in many guises. “Black Lives Matter” is one name for CRT. “Social justice” is another. “Identity,” yet another. “Reparations.” “Ally-ship.” “Diversity.”

 

But to linger on what CRT is, or isn’t, is to miss the more pressing concern: Why have Republicans latched onto a decades-old academic term?

via www.cnn.com

Goodness. It’s hard to know where to begin. “A decades-old academic term?” As if “critical race theory” should make us think of some obscure, irrelevant debate about how many metaphysical angels can dance on the head of a pin. It actually reminds me of a lecture I was enticed to attend at Oxford that was all about “and” and “or”, as in the logic thereof. It was a lot less riveting than I thought it would be. It turned out they worked pretty much as I thought they did.

CRT is indeed every bit as corrosive and for my money, ridiculous as its critics claim, which is not to say many CRT scholars are not perfectly nice people, when they’re not trying to chew away the foundations of everything we hold dear. If you had been living with this decades old academic theory for decades as an old academic, believe me, you would know. It’s like learning that your perfectly insane uncle has been appointed to a high government position. But I, for example, always liked Richard Delgado (one those credited, for his sins, as an original founder of CRT). He was a charming host, had good taste, and was more welcoming to little visiting academics such as I was than were most self-important professors, who were likely to be, say, pretentious air-bags, even if they were not actually racists, perhaps because Richard visited so often himself. But any country that actually adopted CRT or any of its equally deranged cousin ideologies would be a land from which I would, if I was able, run far away from tout suite. And yes, CRT is indeed rather like various philosophies current in the 1960s, as the CNN reporter reports, another period in which a large part of the population lost, temporarily or not, its collective mind.

Fortunately, I suspect parents — and it’s mostly parents who are upset about the teaching of CRT-plus — are not going to buy this defense of “oh, really, the Republicans just want you to panic about CRT! We’re not going to teach your children that silly old theory. Oh, no, we’re just going to teach them, uh, erm, well, other stuff!” Once you’ve got the Mrs. riled up, you’ve already lost the battle. Trust an old married man on this point. All a mom has to do is read any of the books or watch any of the present crop of geniuses on YouTube and she will be steaming. This CRT-sympathizer counter-offensive might have worked if the media had any credibility left at all, but they don’t, not with any but the avowedly progressive and fully woke. But it’s sort of fun to watch the journalists back pedal, if that’s what they’re doing. Never interrupt your enemy while he’s making a mistake.

Who knows. CRT-plus (I rather like that nomenclature!) may triumph in the end and the USA may be bound for a massive reeducation, or in the case of very young people, indoctrination for the first time. Our friends in the PRC must be loving it big time. What will be interesting is to watch parents try to recover their children from the grips of the K-12 school education they have mostly been getting. It must be shocking for Mom and Dad. A bit like going to visit little Susie or Sammy in her or his new apartment in the big city (so expensive!) and finding her or him ensconced in a perfect den of iniquity. Personally, I think it’s a bit too late to make it all good now, but I suppose one has to try.