What is the Critical Race Theory?

[NATI BENGALS]

Just wondering? Only place I see it mentioned is fauxnews and I only read their sensationalized fear mongering headlines to see what kind of poison they are pumping into the brains of my fellow Americans.

[BmorePat87]

At the surface, it's a academic perspective that attempts to examine how the social construct of race impacts society, usually focusing on the fact that our contemporary notion of race was constructed as a means of reinforcing social stratification and consolidating power through race based discrimination and oppression.

In sociology, it's rooted in the mainstream conflict theory, which is based on Marx's view of power in society (though it does not actually promote Marxism). However, the connection has led many critics of CRT to proclaim it to be Marxist (though, everything is to them).

[Belsnickel]

Yeah, I've seen that CRT is being twisted by rightwing media, ltely, in their latest attempts to rile up the ignorant and naïve.

[Mickeypoo]

(05-14-2021, 09:44 AM)NATI BENGALS Wrote: Just wondering? Only place I see it mentioned is fauxnews and I only read their sensationalized fear mongering headlines to see what kind of poison they are pumping into the brains of my fellow Americans.

Lmao!  Funny you cannot see CNN is just as bad.  

[Mickeypoo]

(05-14-2021, 09:51 AM)BmorePat87 Wrote: At the surface, it's a academic perspective that attempts to examine how the social construct of race impacts society, usually focusing on the fact that our contemporary notion of race was constructed as a means of reinforcing social stratification and consolidating power through race based discrimination and oppression.

In sociology, it's rooted in the mainstream conflict theory, which is based on Marx's view of power in society (though it does not actually promote Marxism). However, the connection has led many critics of CRT to proclaim it to be Marxist (though, everything is to them).

Sounds like it should be an elective college course, not grade school teachings.

[BmorePat87]

(05-14-2021, 12:51 PM)Mickeypoo Wrote: Sounds like it should be an elective college course, not grade school teachings.

As a high school teacher, I completely disagree with you. It's a relevant and important perspective in the social sciences.

[Dill]

(05-14-2021, 09:44 AM)NATI BENGALS Wrote: Just wondering? Only place I see it mentioned is fauxnews and I only read their sensationalized fear mongering headlines to see what kind of poison they are pumping into the brains of my fellow Americans.

Bpat's thumbnail def. is spot on.

If you want to sample a little CRT in action, check out last month's book review of Heather McGhees The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. 
What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together 
http://thebengalsboard.com/Thread-BR1-The-Sum-of-Us-What-Racism-Costs-Everyone-and-How-We-Can-Prosper-Together

[Dill]

(05-14-2021, 12:50 PM)Mickeypoo Wrote: Lmao!  Funny you cannot see CNN is just as bad.  

I can't see that either. 

Which network's primary audience appears to be most misinformed about the Russia investigation, Trump's impeachments, the Biden Crime Family, and the "stolen" election? 

Has anything changed since 2008, when Fox commentators were still insisting Saddam Hussein had WMDs? (Hannity was still doing it in 2016.)

[Stewy]

(05-14-2021, 12:50 PM)Mickeypoo Wrote: Lmao!  Funny you cannot see CNN is just as bad.  

Really?  

When CNN posts opinion, it's labeled as opinion.
When CNN posts an editorial it is labeled as such.
Otherwise they post news with sources (usually multiple), without opinion and when they make mistakes, they correct them and label any correction that was made to the story and why.

Fox = opinion all the time, unlabeled as such to create bias and skew the ignorant masses.

If you want to poke at the liberal press, aim at MSNBC, which is liberal Fox.  CNN actually tries to be a news service.

You sir are willing blind and it is a sad state at how much company you have.  Hail to the sheeple!  Fox will lead you to the promised land!  Ignore the cliff.  Three is no cliff, just green pastures waiting for your aggressive appetite.  Just keep chewin that cud.  Nothing to see here with those blinders on.

[Belsnickel]

(05-14-2021, 04:44 PM)BmorePat87 Wrote: As a high school teacher, I completely disagree with you. It's a relevant and important perspective in the social sciences.

Absolutely. The whole concept of race as we know it was created by certain people to justify the enslavement of others. Civilizations that were seen as equals during the Renaissance and Middle Ages were suddenly seen as less than human and this construct was formed to justify this. CRT helps us evaluate the role of race in our history and examine it with a critical eye, moving us away from the flawed Eurocentric view of the world that has been taught in our country and in many others.

[NATI BENGALS]

(05-14-2021, 12:50 PM)Mickeypoo Wrote: Lmao!  Funny you cannot see CNN is just as bad.  

I feared faux and the damage they were doing since the days of bill o and Glenn beck. It turned out worse than I could have ever imagined.

[BmorePat87]

(05-14-2021, 05:51 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: Absolutely. The whole concept of race as we know it was created by certain people to justify the enslavement of others. Civilizations that were seen as equals during the Renaissance and Middle Ages were suddenly seen as less than human and this construct was formed to justify this. CRT helps us evaluate the role of race in our history and examine it with a critical eye, moving us away from the flawed Eurocentric view of the world that has been taught in our country and in many others.

It also helps to address the need to overhaul social studies curricula, especially those that fail to address non-white Western historical perspective. 

[Wes Mantooth]

(05-14-2021, 10:31 AM)Belsnickel Wrote: Yeah, I've seen that CRT is being twisted by rightwing media, ltely, in their latest attempts to rile up the ignorant and naïve.

I'd be curious to hear how you think it's being twisted and is being used to rile people up.  Honestly, I'm wondering if I'm missing something or if what I've seen isn't representative of what is actually being taught.

Fwiw, what I have seen here and there on Reddit and on Youtube concerns me very much.  It's seems counterproductive, and that's putting lightly.  Instead of creating less racial tensions, and developing more understanding it appears to be doing quite the opposite.

Below is an example of what I'm talking about, which was shared when Coke's racial training was made public. 

[BmorePat87]

(05-14-2021, 06:28 PM)Wes Mantooth Wrote: I'd be curious to hear how you think it's being twisted and is being used to rile people up.  Honestly, I'm wondering if I'm missing something or if what I've seen isn't representative of what is actually being taught.

Fwiw, what I have seen here and there on Reddit and on Youtube concerns me very much.  It's seems counterproductive, and that's putting lightly.  Instead of creating less racial tensions, and developing more understanding it appears to be doing quite the opposite.

Below is an example of what I'm talking about, which was shared when Coke's racial training was made public. 

That's from a course on Linkedin using pieces of Robin DiAngelo's work or interviews, some of it taken out of context and compiled by a 3rd party. It does not represent critical race theory but rather DiAngelo's controversial "White Fragility", which itself has critics within those who advocate for critical race theory. 

"White fragility" is an idea that essentially suggests that there is a resistance and sensitivity from White people when it comes to discussing race, and this unwillingness to confront race related issues hinders progress. It's an aggressive response to the sentiment of: "bringing up race causes more issues/if we didn't talk about race there wouldn't be so many issues", and critics have panned it for treating White people are too monolithic or being condescending to People of Color. DiAngelo may very well fall into her own traps.

I am about to run a D&D session (nerd alert), but I'll reply tomorrow and share some materials that I use in sociology to give you an understanding what I see as high school level appropriate application of the perspective.

[Dill]

(05-14-2021, 06:28 PM)Wes Mantooth Wrote: I'd be curious to hear how you think it's being twisted and is being used to rile people up.  Honestly, I'm wondering if I'm missing something or if what I've seen isn't representative of what is actually being taught.

The last week I have been considering another book review, this time using a text illustrative of Right wing Trumpist social analysis--Michael Anton's The Stakes (2020).

Anton argues that CRT teaches young people to hate America, especially the founding fathers and to blame "everything bad that's ever happened" on White males.   He doesn't bother to explain CRT arguments or really refute them. Rather, Anton just asserts what he considers to be their most insidious results, as part of the larger leftist project of replacing "freedom" with government control. To do that "leftists" must flip our valuation of the "dominant culture" (his term), which is rightfully dominant--but not, he insists, because of any racial privilege, but because it is founded on natural law. Anton's mentor, Charles Kesler, offers a more learned version of this viewpoint in his Crisis of the Two Constitutions (2021). (Kesler served on Trump's 1776 Commission, the right wing answer to the CRT-informed 1619 project. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/18/us/politics/trump-1776-commission-report.html ) 

This is not a new tack, really. In Allen Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (1987)*, he argued along similar lines, but his ire was directed at works like Charles Beard's Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913) (though Beard's argument had lost consensus support nearly 30 years prior to Bloom's book). It is a common belief on the Right that the Founders need to be revered, and leftist/materialist critique of various types undermines that. It entails a view of history at odds with the ethos of professional historical scholarship, which favors reliable factual accounts and logical consistency in interpretation over "patriotic" history. 

So yes, CRT is being "twisted" and used to rile people up, but I grant that the "untwisted" version might rile some people just as much. (It depends on how you view/value the norms of professional scholarship.) Some conservative scholars** associated with the National Association of Scholars are lobbying for state legislatures to step in and mandate curricular changes/limitations to "cancel" courses based on or supportive of CRT. In their view, it may be the only way to stop the left from undermining our freedom of thought.

*i.e., at least two years before CRT had "jelled" yet as an academic movement, pulling together many critical race studies into a coherent, researchable paradigm, and almost two decades before it "trickled down" to journalism and the right wing press.
**e.g., John Ellis The Breakdown of Higher Education (2020). 

[Belsnickel]

(05-14-2021, 06:28 PM)Wes Mantooth Wrote: I'd be curious to hear how you think it's being twisted and is being used to rile people up.  Honestly, I'm wondering if I'm missing something or if what I've seen isn't representative of what is actually being taught.

Fwiw, what I have seen here and there on Reddit and on Youtube concerns me very much.  It's seems counterproductive, and that's putting lightly.  Instead of creating less racial tensions, and developing more understanding it appears to be doing quite the opposite.

Below is an example of what I'm talking about, which was shared when Coke's racial training was made public. 

So, glad I didn't really have to respond. Pretty much what Pat and Dill are saying. I'm a social scientist (public policy is an interdisciplinary field relying on sociology, psychology, political science, economics, and some other things in a more minor way), so when I see theories stemming from the social sciences being critiqued in the media (usually right-wing media) it is almost without fail an erroneous understanding of the theory. It is highly likely to be a misrepresentation of the claims made by the theory, and more often than not is rooted in someone tangentially related to it (or just claiming to be representing it without any real connection) doing something that isn't actually representative of the idea itself.

Long story short, if you are seeing a critique of something in the media that is stemming from the social sciences, it is more likely than not a misrepresentation of the actual idea.

[Wes Mantooth]

(05-14-2021, 08:55 PM)BmorePat87 Wrote: I am about to run a D&D session (nerd alert), but I'll reply tomorrow and share some materials that I use in sociology to give you an understanding what I see as high school level appropriate application of the perspective.

I'm legitmately interested to read some examples.  I understand many of the larger talking points that surround the subject (don't necessarily agree with all of them) but I'd like to see them in practice.

Fwiw, I do think it's important for High School kids (and college) to spend some time on this (racial discussions), depending on what is actually being taught and discussed.  Like it or not, race is a huge issue today.  It's unavoidable.  So I think it's increibly naive to think that there isn't benefit in having younger people explore these issues.   We often talk of the "real world" or preparing kids for it and for better or worse this is it in 2021.

Also, I'd be very curious to hear if you think any of this belongs in the lower levels of education.  I would STRONGLY argue it does not.  I think it's incredibly unhealthy to have these conversations with younger kids.  And that goes for ALL kids (let's say 13 and under).  White, black, asian, etc.

[Wes Mantooth]

I just wanted to point out that whoever developed that 3rd party White Fragility thing for Coke is clearly an absolute moron. Do you know how stupid you have to be to come up with a list of 10 bullet points and use "Be less arrogant" and "Be more humble" in the same list?

It reads like a not terribly bright child, who was scrambling to get paper done and just flung together as munch nonsense as they could to make sure they meant the minimum requirements.

To be less arrogant and to be more humble are one and the same. It's like saying "Be less tall" and "Be shorter".

Who the hell approved this?

This isn't even getting to the obvious problems with it but I found it pretty damn comical.

[Belsnickel]

(05-15-2021, 10:27 AM)Wes Mantooth Wrote: Also, I'd be very curious to hear if you think any of this belongs in the lower levels of education.  I would STRONGLY argue it does not.  I think it's incredibly unhealthy to have these conversations with younger kids.  And that goes for ALL kids (let's say 13 and under).  White, black, asian, etc.

So, you probably wouldn't teach the theory itself, but CRT is going to play a role in the curriculum. Racism doesn't ignore young children, why should they ignore racism? Obviously, how it informs the curriculum will differ based on age, but much like sex ed there should be a foundation that begins at a younger age.

[Dill]

(05-15-2021, 10:37 AM)Wes Mantooth Wrote: I just wanted to point out that whoever developed that 3rd party White Fragility thing for Coke is clearly an absolute moron.  Do you know how stupid you have to be to come up with a list of 10 bullet points and use "Be less arrogant" and "Be more humble" in the same list?

It reads like a not terribly bright child, who was scrambling to get paper done and just flung together as munch nonsense as they could to make sure they meant the minimum requirements.

To be less arrogant and to be more humble are one and the same.  It's like saying "Be less tall" and "Be shorter".   

Who the hell approved this?

This isn't even getting to the obvious problems with it but I found it pretty damn comical.

You might like to peruse this review by John McWhorter, if you don't want to read Di Angelo's book.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/dehumanizing-condescension-white-fragility/614146/

McWhorter recognizes there is such a thing as "white fragility," and doesn't quibble much with the definition, but he
demonstrates very clearly the helter skelter nature of her presentation, even accusing her of 'racism'. 

You don't even have to read the whole review.  Just pick up a couple paragraphs halfway through and you get 
the flavor.  You've hit on something important with your 'be less tall' analogy. That list is impossible to decode and
therefore to apply in practice.