Don’t Ban CRT. Expose It. – The Weekly Dish
How on earth could merely teaching students about the history of racism and its pervasiveness in the United States provoke such a fuss? No wonder Charles Blow is mystified. But don t worry. The MSM have a ready explanation: the GOP needs an inflammatory issue to rile their racist base, and so this entire foofaraw is really just an astro-turfed, ginned-up partisan gambit about nothing. The MSM get particular pleasure in ridiculing parents who use the term critical race theory as shorthand for things that just, well, make them uncomfortable when the parents obviously have no idea what CRT really is.
When pushed to describe it themselves, elite journalists refer to the legal theories Derrick Bell came up with, in the 1970s obscure, esoteric and nothing really to do with high-school teaching. If your kid is learning CRT, your kid is in law/grad school, snarked one. Marc Lamont Hill even tried to pull off some strained references to Gramsci to prove his Marxian intellectual cred, and to condescend to his opponents.
This rubric achieves several things at once. It denies that there is anything really radical or new about CRT; it flatters the half-educated; it blames the controversy entirely on Republican opportunism; and it urges all fair-minded people to defend intellectual freedom and racial sensitivity against these ugly white supremacists.
What could be more convenient? NBC News reporter , Brandy Zadrozny, even decried parents attempts to discover through FOIA requests just what their children are being taught and argued this week that, for longtime ultra conservative activists, CRT is the opportunity of a lifetime. CRT, she explains, is not a threat at all, and there is no proof that it is even being taught. It s just a catch-all term repurposed as a conservative boogeyman. She goes on: it harnesses pushback against 2020 s racial justice movement, covid denialism, and depends on a base still energized by Trump and misinformation, looking for political power.
I m sure the MSM will continue to push this narrative indefinitely. They are still insisting, after all, that white supremacy is behind hateful attacks on Asian-Americans, and that soaring murder rates are purely a function of Covid19. And you can see why: this dismissive take is extremely helpful in avoiding what is actually happening. It diverts attention from the stories and leaks and documents that keep popping up all over the place about extraordinary indoctrination sessions that have become mandatory for children as early as kindergarten.
And no, 6-year-olds are not being taught Derrick Bell or forced to read Judith Butler, or God help them, Kimberlé Crenshaw. Of course they aren t and I don t know anyone who says they are.
But they are being taught popularized terms, new words, and a whole new epistemology that is directly downstream of academic critical theory. Ibram X. Kendi even has an AntiRacist Baby Picture Book so you can indoctrinate your child into the evil of whiteness as soon as she or he can gurgle. It s a little hard to argue that CRT is not interested in indoctrinating kids when its chief proponent in the US has a kiddy book on the market.