What is the Critical Race Theory?

[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).