Florida Critical Race Theory Amendment: Read It For Yourself
The State Board of Education has voted and the Florida Critical Race Theory amendment has became law, restricting the hot topic from public school instruction.
Florida has become the latest state to ban critical race theory, continuing the growing charge by Republican lawmakers against schools teaching about systemic racism.
After hours of debate and public comment Thursday, the Florida State Board of Education unanimously approved the amendment banning critical race theory. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who appointed much of the board, spoke ahead of the meeting, saying critical race theory would teach children “the country is rotten and that our institutions are illegitimate.”
“That is not worth any taxpayer dollars,” he said.The amendment states topics must be “factual and objective,” and specifically prohibits “the teaching of Critical Race Theory, meaning the theory that racism is not merely the product of prejudice, but that racism is embedded in American society and its legal systems in order to uphold the supremacy of white persons.”
The amendment also bans material from the 1619 Project, a Pulitzer Prize-winning initiative by The New York Times that reframed American history around the date of August 1619, when the first slave ship arrived on America’s shores.
In a statement posted to Twitter, DeSantis said the amendment protects students from being “indoctrinated to think a certain way,” mirroring language used by other states and locales that have made similar moves.
“Critical Race Theory teaches kids to hate our country and to hate each other. It is state-sanctioned racism and has no place in Florida schools,” he wrote.
Critical race theory has become politicized in recent months, with opponents arguing the area of study is based on Marxism and is a threat to the American way of life. But critical race theory, according to scholars who study it, explores the ways in which a history of inequality and racism in the United States has continued to impact American society today.
“It’s an approach to grappling with a history of White supremacy that rejects the belief that what’s in the past is in the past and that the laws and systems that grow from that past are detached from it,” Kimberlé Crenshaw, a founding critical race theorist and a law professor at UCLA and Columbia University, told CNN last year.
And yet, across the country, local boards of education and states are pushing against teaching the impact of systemic racism and critical race theory in schools, calling it indoctrination.
Read the Florida Critical Race Theory amendment for yourself here:
Florida Critical Race Theory
Teach the constitution. The constitution protected slavery for 20 years and was structured to protect the power of slave states. No no no!!!!….don’t teach that constitution
Don’t teach racism was/is systematic or that legal systems were built to enact white supremacy. Oh well, can’t teach Reconstruction and it’s aftermath or the KKK or Jim Crow then.Report
At this point, its apparent that the biggest objection conservatives had to Marxist indoctrination was envy.Report
Should the government have this much jurisdiction?Report
I was initially inclined to say no, but I also want the state to be able to say “public schools should not teach creationism” and I do not know how I can allow one without allowing the other.Report
Maybe argue something like “politicians should only represent the will of the *GOOD* people”.Report
If “the government” doesn’t have “jurisdiction” (not the right word, but we can figure out what you mean) to determine what is taught in what some folks like to call “government schools,” then who does?Report
I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that the government is getting involved, then.
Do we know whether the government is representing the people by doing this or is it going against the peoples’ wishes?Report
Well, yes. Do we know if the people, whoever that may include, even have “wishes”?Report
Would polls count?Report
No.Report
Parents showing up at school board meetings?Report
Parents showing up at school board meetings is, of course, evidence of what they think they think, and it is perfectly obvious that a fair number of folks who have no idea what CRT is and, quite properly, had no opinion on it, say, six months ago, have been lathered up about it since. This is a political fact, and it creates incentives for politicians who need to lather the rubes up to virtue-signal. But does it reflect some actual, widespread public opinion that would allow us to say that this is what “the people” wish? I don’t think so.Report
Is there anything, even in theory, that could?Report
Yes.Report
Can you tell me what it would be, if not parents showing up to school board meetings or polling?Report
If I thought anyone here could help provide it, I would.Report
So you want evidence of popular opinion that are not polls and are not stakeholders showing up for the stakeholding meetings and, on top of that, you’re not going to say what you would consider evidence?
That’s a hell of a trick.Report
It’s not a trick. I could write a long, boring comment explaining why, in this case, polls and parents don’t prove much and what else would be needed to fill the gaps. But no one would read it, and rightly so, and nobody here could provide it. It would bore or annoy the reader and do me no good. So why waste everyone’s time?Report
Jeez. I can’t help but notice that we moved from “evidence” to “proof”.
Was I supposed to not notice that?
If you were hoping that nobody would notice that we jumped from evidence to proof, I can come back and erase this comment, if you like.Report
That’s not how I read it, and I wrote it. But in the interests of clarity, I am happy to substitute for “don’t prove much” a phrase like “aren’t particularly good evidence.”Report
I am happy to substitute for “don’t prove much” a phrase like “aren’t particularly good evidence.”
Would you be willing to say what you might accept as “barely sufficient evidence”?Report
No. “Barely sufficient evidence,” whatever that means,
doesn’t interest me, and is unlikely to be of interest to anyone else.Report
I meant “barely sufficient” in that you’d actually see it as worth addressing.
Like, more than polls as evidence of public opinion or more than stakeholders showing up at stakeholder meetings being evidence for it.
What evidence would actually reach the goalposts?Report
That would just get us back to the long, dull post I’ve already talked about, which would bore or annoy readers and not lead to useful information.
I’ve already told Oscar what I think is happening, and it is consistent with the evidence we have so far. Nobody is denying that some people are, or were made to be, sufficiently lathered up about this to make it politically profitable to exploit it. You’re the one who brought up “the people,” which I read as something more broad-based than that. If that is not what you mean, we don’t have an issue.Report
Dude, this has to be the least persuasive rebuttal I could imagine. To ground the discussion in a real world example, there’s a huge battle over this going on right now, in a wealthy DC exurb.
I’m linking to as banal a description as I can find from the local ABC affiliate, but it’s been escalating for months and has gotten even more heated over the last few days. If you google it you can get the ‘nothing to see here’/’everyone is racist!’ view from the WaPo and the ‘this really is a crisis’ view from the Examiner or some similar source. Now, there might be convincing counter-points to the anti-CRT stuff. Hypothetical examples might be:
-this is a weird outlier, and not representative of the thousands of US school districts.
-upon review, the subject matter is not nearly as radical as portrayed.
-there in fact is no new subject matter at all, and the people upset are mistaken.
-the changes to the curriculum are radical, but they are justified on the merits, and here is why.
-this is a bunch of rich people duking it out in an epic example of 1st world problems meeting the narcissism of petty differences.
But this idea that it’s all just made up by right-wing media and circulated to gin up outrage by imbeciles with their brains addled by Fox News is demonstrably wrong. There is in fact a controversy. It makes sense that it and others like it would be highly localized because education in this country is highly localized.
If the most you can say about it is ‘it doesn’t matter because it really only involves a handful of hardcore partisans, no one else much knows or cares’ I would say ok, but if that’s true why comment on anything at all? The masses are mostly comprised of people minimally politically engaged or not engaged at all. By your own logic no political issue matters at all, and we might as well all go along for the ride.Report
Say what you will about “I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain”, it makes you honestly wonder whether such a proof actually existed.Report
If I were claiming a proof, you’d have a point.Report
Yeah, instead you’re just claiming that there is evidence out there that you *MIGHT* accept, you just don’t want to get all long-winded about what it would be.Report
Well, yes. And your point is?
As it happens, though, I got somewhat long-winded about it with Oscar because, as he so often does, he had a substantive point that deserved a response.Report
Well, the insubstantial point that *I* had was merely “if we agree that the government should have its fingers in the pie that is the school curriculum, we shouldn’t be surprised that it’s following public opinion on what ought to be taught”.
Perhaps with a smattering of “Even if we don’t agree that it should have its fingers there, it sure as hell does. From there it’s pretty easy to not be surprised that it’s following public opinion.”
But it’s wacky how some stuff gets pushback and, well, sometimes the best attack surface is “theory of knowledge”.Report
Are you, perhaps, under the impression that someone disagreed with that painfully obvious point? That point was truly “insubstantial.” You’re the one who wandered off into what one might imagine “the people” wished, implicating the question of how we know what they want.Report
I admit: I assume that it’s possible to get the gist… but it requires admitting that polling points us in a direction and seeing what happens when stakeholders show up to stakeholder meetings.
Rather than saying “no, that’s not evidence” and then refusing to say what one would accept as evidence.Report
There you see it, boys and girls. The Jaybird Backtrack in all its glory. It starts when someone points out that a fatuous comment (questioning whether the government should govern government schools) is fatuous and an utterly uncontroversial assertion (Don’t be surprised when governments sometimes do stupid s**t in running government schools. Who here expressed the least surprise? Nobody.) is, well, obvious. Then he opens a new can of worms (what do the people think?) and, when he runs out of things to say about that, reverts to “All I was saying was X, and surely you agree with X?” When no one ever disagreed with X–because X was so trivial that it wasn’t worth saying in the first place.Report
Which brings me back to my two original comments:
“Should the government have this much jurisdiction?”
And then
“I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that the government is getting involved, then.
Do we know whether the government is representing the people by doing this or is it going against the peoples’ wishes?”
And that turned into discussions of whether it was even possible to know things.
My examples of evidence of the government doing what the people want were:
The Polls
Stakeholders showing up to Stakeholder meetings
And you said that you didn’t accept these things as evidence.
For, what it turns out, was a position so very trivial that you didn’t consider it even worth making.
I’m not “backtracking”. I’m merely didn’t go where you wanted me to go and then, when I stayed where I was, you said that I backtracked.
Weird that it was worth fighting against tooth and nail.
(Oh, in the comment thread where Oscar had substantial points, he still has a handful of questions that he asked you. Probably a better use of your time to deal with his issues of substance than whether it’s possible to know things from polls or from stakeholders showing up to stakeholder meetings.)Report
I am content to let people who have not demonstrated reading comprehension problems read the thread and decide for themselves.Report
As am I!
(Which is why I think the whole “arguing against Jay’s stupid trivial points!” versus “answering Oscar’s question which you’ve already acknowledged are substantive” is equally interesting.)Report
Oscar and I are, in his words, “on the same page.” As anyone who read the exchange and comprehended it would be able to figure out.Report
We, too, are on the same page. I mean, you called my point “fatuous and an utterly uncontroversial assertion”!
We agree on it!
Where we disagree is whether polls and stakeholders are representative enough of opinion for meddling politicians to use as a lodestone.
For the record, I think that they are.
(Additionally, Oscar had some follow-up questions for you and you’re responding to me instead of to him, for some reason.)Report
If Oscar thinks I didn’t answer his questions, he is free to say so and I’ll be glad to answer what he thinks I didn’t. The only outstanding thing that even looks like a question is his asking what is wrong with loud noisy minorities being loud noisy minorities. Since I didn’t say there was anything wrong with it — as opposed to identifying loud noisy minorities as loud noisy minorities — I assumed it was a rhetorical question. If I’m wrong, he can tell me. Though I suppose he can figure out my answer and may not bother.Report
I was referring to this comment of Oscar’s here, that you didn’t respond to.
Thanks for responding to me instead!Report
I wasn’t actually expecting an answer to that question. That’s just me flogging my hobby horse of “quit yer bellyaching about the opposition being better at rallying support than you, and do a better job building support”.Report
Oh, fair enough.
(You know, if you start educating children correctly, you can start building support before they’ve mastered math or English!)Report
“Nobody’s saying that Loudoun County Public Schools or other schools are teaching Critical Race Theory 101, like they would teach physics or chemistry,” Prior said. “But it’s a broad lens that’s implemented through how teachers are trained and how those trained teachers teach our children, which is to view America, view our institutions, to view our culture, traditions, and language all based on systemic racism.””
From InMD’s link.
JAYBIRD!!! ALERT!!! He’s doing the “Nobody is saying…” thing.Report
Is somebody denying that some people are kicking up a fuss? I’m certainly not. Indeed, I insist that they are.Report
But this idea that it’s all just made up by right-wing media and circulated to gin up outrage by imbeciles with their brains addled by Fox News is demonstrably wrong. There is in fact a controversy.
If there’s a controversy, it’s a real issue, so maybe the election was rigged.Report
Yea, yea and stupid analogy is stupid.Report
I don’t think it’s a stupid analogy, so we have a controversy.Report
Trump had his day(s) in court. He had no evidence and he lost. That’s good enough for me.
I expect a number of these complaints about CRT or whatever we want to call it will end up in court. If some of them bring in evidence, and maybe even prevail will you change your opinion?Report
Is CRT is causing more than the usual amount of dumbness about race? I’m skeptical, but I suppose I could be convinced otherwise.Report
Is this standard one that is actually in use and accepted by the political class as common method by which to gauge the wishes of the constituency?
I feel like we’ve gone from showing that gravity works by dropping a stone, and proving that it works mathematically.Report
I’m not sure what that means. Politicians often react to small groups, lathered-up over issues that the vast majority has no concerns with. Perhaps equally often, politicians and their friendly media lather up small groups over issues that the vast majority has no concern with and then enact boob bait for the bubbas for their political profit.
I think one or the other of these things has happened here, and that “the people” at large and their wishes have nothing to do with the matter. But I didn’t bring “the people” up.Report
The inverse is also true. Is the public truly interested in having the public school curriculum teaching CRT, or is the push for it to be included being driven by a small group with friendly politicians and media?
Absent a viable means to measure the public will on this, then both sides, those who want CRT included in curriculum, and those who oppose it, are equally invalid representations of the desires of the constituency.Report
I think the reality is that these decisions are made at very low levels of government and by local bureaucracies that for a host of reasons people don’t pay that much attention to until something blows up.Report
I agree, I’m just saying that the standard of “the opposition to this idea is a minority position that is just very loud” is only valid if the the support for the idea can be shown to be a majority position.
Thus you need some way to gauge the support of the public. We typically do that through polls or voting or public involvement during the open discussions. Claiming those methods are lacking means you have no real way to gauge support or opposition to an idea.Report
I don’t disagree with a word of the 2:36 comment. But, as I said, I didn’t bring “the people” into it. 3:22 not so much.Report
If you don’t bring “the people” into it, how can you be sure that idea X has public support? The only way you can discount the opposition as ‘small but loud’ is if you can show that support is ‘large but quiet’.
Otherwise it can be argued that the bulk of the opposition is ‘large but quiet’, and the opposition we are hearing from just happens to be the voice of that majority in opposition.
And of course, it works the other way as well.
You need some manner to determine if you have a ‘large but quiet’ population in support or opposition before you can discount the noisemakers.Report
A “large but quiet population” can be, and often is, a population that has no views on the subject under discussion. They do not hold views opposed to those of the small but loud group. They just don’t care. That is how small loud groups so often get their way.
In this case, I would guess that 90-plus percent of the lay population — those lacking a professional reason to know about CRT — have no idea what CRT is. Of that 90-odd percent, I’d guess that the large majority fit into either of two groups:
(1) People who know they don’t know what CRT is and, appropriately, don’t have an opinion about it, or;
(2) People who don’t even know that CRT is a thing one might have opinions about and, equally appropriately, don’t have an opinion about it.
That leaves a relatively small group that either actually knows what CRT is (and is, therefore, outside the 90-odd percent) or thinks it knows what CRT is. I would guess that this group skews against it, especially the sub-group that merely thinks it knows.
This is, of course, conjecture and I offer it as the basis of a research program for anyone inclined. If the numbers are as I think they are, we’re in small noisy minority territory and a large majority of indifference. There are ways someone with the time and energy and funding could look at this, and polling would likely be a part. But the problem with polling is that sometimes it measures opinions that actually pre-exist the polling and sometimes it creates them by the very act of polling. (There have been a number of polls on non-existent things showing the eagerness people have to express opinions when asked that they never had before they were asked. Like the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide or opinions about non-existent candidates.) A useful check on this would be to find evidence of what people believed a year ago, or two years ago, or five years ago, before the politically-coordinated foofaraw began. I’m not sure how that’s done, but people whose business it is may have ways.
It is often quite possible to find out whether something has widespread public support or is the subject of widespread public opinion for or against. But not always. I have explained why I am skeptical that there is any widespread public opinion, pro or con, on CRT. I could be wrong. Perhaps my estimates of public knowledge concerning CRT, which is the main basis for my skepticism, are off. There are ways to investigate the question, and if someone who knows how to do that does that I’ll be interested in the results. Duelling blog comments are another matter.Report
OK, we are actually on the same page then. Good to know.
Now, towards the issue at hand, we have the Pro-CRT folks, who want some kind of curriculum in the public schools discussing CRT, and the Con-CRT folks who would rather CRT go the way of the Humors Theory of Medicine.
I think we can safely say that both camps are rather small (relative to the population), and that the population outside of those camps is ignorant of or unconcerned with CRT. Therefore both camps are made up of noisy minorities who want to push their agenda through policy, and one of those camps seems to be doing a bang up job of rousing the rabble to their cause.
Which strikes me as less a concern, since instead of trying to quietly implement a policy, they are building public support for said policy. How is that a bad thing?Report
All this assumes that “the people” should be deciding what is taught in schools.Report
Should taxpayers not have a say in the quality of public services?Report
Just to clarify, using Kendi as a proxy, why is the work of someone with no pedagogical expertise referenced on the website for every public school system bordering Washington, DC (including the one I live in!). As best as I can tell he has a BA and PhD in African American studies. He has no background in education whatsoever.
So why is his work being used to train teachers and influencing school administrative decisions? If all we were talking about was a new book on the 11th grade reading list it would be one thing but doesn’t this seem like a lot more?Report
Most schools can’t get teachers to stop calling the Media Center the Library. A couple faculty meetings will result in a diverse group of thinkers — maybe of them doing their job a particular way for decades — to fall in lock step, you not only don’t understand schools, you don’t understand people.Report
The government’s involvement with public education should involve funding, and a mandate that certain subjects, e.g., history or math, be taught. As to what content those courses ought to have, it would seem to me that the educators should determine that since that’s what we’re paying them to do.Report
A charming view with which I have considerable sympathy, even if it disregards the old saying: “He who pays the piper calls the tune.” If I didn’t see the principle so frequently abandoned when someone dislikes what the educators propose to teach, I could take it more seriously.Report
Oh, man, so very true. Let’s hearken back to the ur-top down federal gov’t. meddling in local schools document, “A Nation At Risk”, which culminated in the No Child Left Behind Act.
For an outfit that loves themselves some local government, they’re strangle at peace with centralized efforts to control local schools.
The crimes that have been perpetrated on our country’s public schools over the last 40 years would get the attention of Geneva in a just world.Report
A former Confederate state is rejecting the historical view in the Dred Scott opinion. If only today’s Democrats had the courage to do the same.Report
Does this apply to universities (e.g. Florida State) or only K-12? If the former, then there is also a massive infringement of academic freedom.Report
On the other hand, if the latter, is it such a terrible loss? As far as I am aware critical race theory is covered only in the universities (which per assumption would not be covered by the law).
So, the whole thing would be a pointless exercise in posturingReport
While the Florida Board of Education has quite a bit of control over the state’s public colleges and universities, I believe this provision applies only to the K-12 curriculum. The state board has to be careful with the universities because of outside accreditation. Earlier this year, while the Florida State University Board of Trustees was considering candidates for president, the commission that accredits FSU sent a later to the board advising them that one of the candidates on the (then lengthy) list was simply not qualified, and if he were selected the commission would have to reconsider FSU’s accreditation.Report
For comparison, here is Oklahoma HB 1775, which I think is much better, in that it enumerates specific highly toxic concepts which CRT or Anti-Racist™ (not to be confused with anti-racist) trainers have been caught promoting in the past. This one gets too caught up in vague terminology, which means that on the one hand, it might interfere with legitimate educational goals, and on the other hand it probably won’t be as effective at preventing the kind of thing enumerated in the Oklahoma bill.Report
“It being immediately necessary for the preservation of the public peace, health or safety, an emergency is hereby declared to exist…”
Heh. Sounds like the fearmongering has found a home.Report
Covid, on the other hand? No big deal.Report
Not a huge fan of doing things this way but not sure what normal people are supposed to do when you’ve apparently got cadres of fanatics trying to impose racist struggle sessions wherever they can get away with it.Report
I had never even heard of CRT until last month. This is just a weird culture battle over… what actually happened in history. For instance, in housing, we know that the government redlined neighborhoods that were more likely to be majority black, which led to depressed housing prices and lack of homeownership opportunties for today’s grandparents. To think that didnt have any ripple effects is… oddReport
CRT isn’t simply a conjecture about ripple effects. And it’s not a small, localized battle.Report
To think that didnt have any ripple effects is… odd
That’s the problem, though. As you’re well aware, causal inference is hard, and much of CRT is based on simply hand-waving away all those issues with a simple post hoc assertion. It’s treated as axiomatic that the poor socioeconomic outcomes of the current black population can only be explained by the effects of past or ongoing racism.
The idea that differences in outcomes between racial or ethnic groups can only be explained by the effects of past or present oppression has a certain verisimilitude, but things go off the rails pretty fast if you actually apply it consistently. US-born Japanese Americans are doing better than non-Hispanic whites, rather than worse, as this theory would predict. The ultimate counterexample, of course, is Jews, who suffered more than a millennium of oppression from just about everybody, culminating in the Holocaust, and are now the highest-achieving ethnic demographic in the US. If you apply the standard CRT logic about how this must necessarily be attributable to privilege and oppression, you start to sound pretty Hitlery
There are a lot of really interesting questions here. How long does it take to return to baseline after an exogenous wealth shock? Is it really so implausible that for amounts on the order of a few hundred thousand dollars, this might be less than two full generations? What is the causal effect of parental home equity on the educational achievement and attainment and earnings of children? To what extent is this attenuated by the availability of student loans and need-based financial aid?
These are complicated questions, and everybody’s walking around glibly assuming that the answers are totally obvious and you’d have to be an idiot to think otherwise.Report
Native Americans taught the pilgrims to grow corn.
Now Native Americans are strangely poor and living on reservations,, Clearly a cultural problem among Native Americans, as they used to be such nice, corn-teaching people.
It’s a pity, but what can you do? What happened between pilgrims and now? Oh, according to Florida law — nothing.Report
What would be a worthwhile companion to this post is one that actually defined CRT (since I am pretty sure none of us here are familiar with it).
And a bonus would be actual examples of school textbooks which teach CRT.Report
I found this on the ABA website, and it looks pretty good:
While recognizing the evolving and malleable nature of CRT, scholar Khiara Bridges outlines a few key tenets of CRT, including:
– Recognition that race is not biologically real but is socially constructed and socially significant. It recognizes that science (as demonstrated in the Human Genome Project) refutes the idea of biological racial differences. According to scholars Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, race is the product of social thought and is not connected to biological reality.
– Acknowledgement that racism is a normal feature of society and is embedded within systems and institutions, like the legal system, that replicate racial inequality. This dismisses the idea that racist incidents are aberrations but instead are manifestations of structural and systemic racism.
– Rejection of popular understandings about racism, such as arguments that confine racism to a few “bad apples.” CRT recognizes that racism is codified in law, embedded in structures, and woven into public policy. CRT rejects claims of meritocracy or “colorblindness.” CRT recognizes that it is the systemic nature of racism that bears primary responsibility for reproducing racial inequality.
– Recognition of the relevance of people’s everyday lives to scholarship. This includes embracing the lived experiences of people of color, including those preserved through storytelling, and rejecting deficit-informed research that excludes the epistemologies of people of color.Report
Thanks for that.
Reading this, I wonder what parts of this are objectionable.Report
I don’t think this is the right definition of what’s going on. Maybe that’s the intellectual underpinnings the mental midgets who come up with this stuff cite but the issue is telling children their worth, opinions, and status in society is based on race, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is inherently racist, and evil.
I still am unclear on just how prevalent this sort of thing is at the K-12 level but parents and voters have every right to stamp it out wherever it comes up.Report
Chip and InMD – I think you’re both overlooking how dangerous bullet point 2 is. It doesn’t merely say that some institutions have been racist; it says that institutions are inherently racist. To say “I’m an American” is to say “I’m a racist”. To say that you’re white is to say that you’re a racist, because according to point 1, your racial identity is bound up with the cultural institutions.Report
Maybe? I try to focus on the practicalities of these things. To me an assertion like the one in bullet 2 is so meta and unfalsifiable as to be meaningless. But if post-grads without useful things to do with their time find it profound and in need of debate then whatever. It’s probably not any worse than any other pseudo-intellectual ephemera. Adults can deal with it, and mature ones will eventually see it for what it is.
It’s when we decide to impose blunt, ad absurdum deductions from these ideas on young children, not yet ready to defend themselves, that I have a beef.Report
I can understand preferring to look at where the rubber meets the road. But history shows us that if a philosophy permits a particular kind of ill-thinking, it’s less than a generation before a mob forms under the banner of that thinking. That’s nature filling a vacuum. That’s not even taking envy into account, which can blossom anywhere.
Any overview probably isn’t going to include all extremes or foreseeable consequences. So I can’t proceed from four bullet points to a presidential nominee promising to choose his VP by race. But we can see correlation in the real world, and see a logical connection.Report
My reply was probably too blasé. I do see this stuff as a net negative. A better way to put my stance on this is that there are a lot of dumb, destructive ideas out there. As adults in a free society it’s our neverending job to push back on them, especially in the public arena. But I also try to keep perspective. It’s less important to me that we eradicate things like CRT in particular and salt the proverbial intellectual ground from which it grows than it is that we defend the mechanisms that allow (and IMO guarantee) its long term defeat.Report
I’m not getting “inherently” out of that.
It seems reasonable to say that if race is socially constructed, and if institutions like churches and universities are constructed according to social norms of behavior and social understanding of race, then those institutions will have racism in their structures.
Like for example, the way that giving wine to minors was legal, but peyote was not. The legal and social norms of what substances were beneficial and which were harmful was based on the understanding of which religions were acceptable and which were not, which was itself a reflection of what races were civilized and which were barbaric.
The institution isn’t “inherently” racist, but racism is embedded in what facially seems objective and neutral structures.
I’ve mentioned this a few times, that conservatives themselves can be remarkably articulate on this point, when it is their norms being suppressed.Report
Yes, Chip, I remember that you don’t like conservatives. You don’t have to mention it every comment, and no one’s going to think badly of you for talking to one even if you forget the condemnation every once in a while.
Back to the subject, if racist incidents are manifestations of structural and systemic racism, then a single racist incident is proof of institutional racism, right? I mean, if you can point to anywhere in a culture where something happens that can be viewed as racist (and historically, you can do that for any culture), how is that racism not inherent?
The sociological definition of institution doesn’t merely include police departments or voter registration laws. It includes any system from the trade law that got me my computer to the use of the word “fish” on this site. Without a limiting principle, any racist action passes judgment on all institutions. We can’t be Ordinary Gentlemen anymore because Bob Packwood chased after his secretary. You don’t have to identify what aspect of an institution is at fault to know it’s racist. Bob Packwood, secretary, Defund the Police. It’s that simple and that broad.
And as I noted to InMD, if this were a couple of people rambling on the internet, we could maybe ignore it. But we do have kids being told that they’re the problem because of their race, their sex, whatever. Here’s the theory, here’s its application, and in the middle are teachers saying they’re doing it because of the theory.Report
This has a real “Dogs and cats living together!!1!” vibe to it.
Yes, its very true that “without a limiting principle” things go very badly.
So lets focus on where people are not using limited principles.
Really, where do we “have kids being told that they’re the problem because of their race”?Report
It seems to me like we jumped pretty quickly from “we don’t even know what CRT is” to “oh, this is nothing to worry about”.Report
Next step is questioning the motives of people who oppose it.Report
I think Chip’s question is fair. Do we have evidence of widespread instances of CRT being used in the classroom?Report
I feel like “widespread” is going to be the word that this sub-argument will hinge on but…
Here is our own Dennis Sanders writing about it (and there’s a link to an article about it being taught in Chicago).
Here is a link to a pamphlet about the textbook Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by
Jason Reynolds and Dr. Ibram X. Kendi. It has been adopted in Portland’s schools (and answers the question about whether there are any textbooks that teach this).
And here is the Palm Beach website dedicated to anti-racism with helpful links to helpful materials (including Ibram X. Kendi!).
Widespread?
Well… that’s 3 timezones. But if someone said “that’s only 3 examples! I need 7!”, I’d probably not bother finding another 4.Report
For the heck of it I just googled and his work is cited or referenced on websites for every public school system immediately surrounding Washington, DC. Though in fairness I guess it isn’t always clear how it is applied day to day.Report
Dennis’ piece is interesting reading. I wonder if CRT is a reaction to the promises of the Civil Rights movement going generally unfulfilled for the past 60 years. Black is beautiful has been tried and found wanting, so their must be another reason for the continuing downtrodden state of black Americans.
I will say your examples including 3 time zones feels kind of like one of those conservative electoral maps that gets trotted out to show widespread electoral support for R candidates, but then we find out no one lives in those red areas. By widespread I’m thinking more of state boards of education mandating a curriculum including CRT.Report
All I can find when I google:
state board of education “CRT”
Are articles about state boards of education banning it. Not ones mandating it.Report
Exactly. Sounds like some people are afraid of being “replaced”.Report
I can see CRT being taught one of two ways.
1) Jim Crow was a bad time, and even though we passed the CRA, a lot of the policies that were born before and during Jim Crow are still embedded in the laws, policies, and societal attitudes that exist today. You (the children) are not responsible for putting those things in place, but you do have a responsibility to try and fix these things.
2) Racism is everywhere, in every corner of our society, you can’t escape it, you are (by dint of being part of this society) racist.
I think most folks would be OK with 1.Report
Agreed.Report
I think what’s missing from the debate , of course these days, is the willingness to talk and reach a compromise, which is exactly what #1 would be. More’s the pity.Report
I don’t even know that something like #2 is part of any curriculum being proposed or taught in public schools, but it does exist in some of the writings that are meant for adults, and therefore I think it is reasonable to question whether or not that will bleed into what gets taught in the classroom.
Much like I refuse to accept that the professionalism of the police is a valid check against police abusing their power, I also refuse to accept that the professionalism of the teachers is a valid check against some teachers doing more harm than good.
So limiting principles are a valid point of discussion.
Tossing everything CRT might have to say, on the other hand, is the baby with the bathwater.Report
This gets a bit at what I said to Kazzy above. I don’t have a problem with, say, a new book on the high school reading list adding a perspective into a mix of other perspectives. But I do have a problem with elementary school teachers being trained to embed a lot of these concepts into instruction of young children.Report
The idea that teachers are being trained en masse is just wrong.
Public schools typically have 2-3 professional development days (PDs) per year. Maybe a portion of one day would be given to any sort of DEI training, which may or may not contain shades of CRT.
Typically, state DOEs set curriculum standards, usually phrased as “Students will know…” or “Students will be able to…” basically looking at content knowledge or skills. These are assessed various ways. I’ve never seen a standard that said something COULDN’T be taught. And imagine any “off limits” topics would be handled locally case by case.
Like, we don’t need a state legislature to outlaw teaching Nazi ideology. If anyone’s curriculum went too far, the principal handles it. If they don’t, it’d escalate to the local BOE and/or Super.
As for indoctrination, let’s just stop using that word. Indoctrination is exactly what we want schools to do… we just call it “educating” or “instilling values” when we agree with it and “indoctrination” when we don’t.
Reading these comments, the vast majority of folks here have no idea how schools function.Report
I agree that legislating this isn’t the right approach and I said as much in my first comment on this post (wherever it is).
But I’m really curious how people are supposed to react when we see verifiable incidents that seem pretty disturbing popping up here and there around the country. I even provided a list of explanations I’m open to earlier to CJ (i.e. these are weird outliers, key context is missing, etc.)
However, instead the response whenever challenged seems to be ‘nothing to see here… and by the way even if there was something only a racist would have a problem with it.’ IIRC you are familiar with the DC area and I’m not kidding when I say this is blowing up in all the big VA districts right now (Fairfax, Loudon, Alexandria). It’s on the local news every day. Am I just to assume it all stops at the river, despite the fact that if you dig around the MD district websites you see all the big counties citing the same resources and contractors? And I get it, I’m sure there are plenty of teachers who sit there glass eyed through it the same way corporate America does. But there seem to also be enough embracing it to do some damage.Report
How many schools exist in this country? How many teachers? It’s inevitable some really dumb mistakes are made.
Remember the math worksheet that did arithmetic with buying and selling slaves?
These are local problems which should have local solutions.
I’m fairly ambivalent on all this because the CRT-in-K12 “movement” — such as one exists — is not likely to have a major impact. So a counter CRT-in-K12 movement is similarly of limited consequence. It’s a lot of pot stirring with a pot that is mostly full of water. Meh.
But I am concerned about curriculum-through-legislation. That is a scary proposition.Report
The first is being taught, insofar as structural racism is EVER taught K-12 (which is rarely or barely).
The second is, of course, pretty much entirely invented by nut-picking Twitter and occasional academic articles, and maybe finding one person in one of the tens of thousands of schools in America, and used entirely to gin up eyeballs and outrage.Report
The second is, of course, pretty much entirely invented by nut-picking Twitter and occasional academic articles, and maybe finding one person in one of the tens of thousands of schools in America, and used entirely to gin up eyeballs and outrage.
I think that a general agreement that the nuts picked are, in fact, nuts would go a long way toward establishing consensus.Report
The accusation of nut-picking is the mirror image of the No True Scotsman fallacy.Report
Is it?
So you just get to assert a broad, systemic trend off a few Twitter quotes and academic journals, and what, the burden is on everyone else to prove it’s not systemic?
Convenient. I guess I can use Donald Trump as an example of all Republicans (because between him and a few Congressmen, I’ve got that covered) and you saying that’s not representative of the whole party is a fallacy on your part.Report
Are Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi nuts?
If we can agree that they are, I think that it’ll go a long way toward establishing consensus.Report
How about we restrict any comments about these people, to just those who have actually read them and can speak articulately about them in their own words?Report
I’ve read them.
You haven’t?Report
Can you explain your objections, without having to refer to other people?Report
I can. But I also know that in Dennis’s post (that you commented in), there was a link to John McWhorter’s post (that you claimed to have read) that covers criticisms of CRT.
As such, I find it odd that you’re acting like you’ve never even encountered this discussion before.
Did you not read McWhorter’s essay?
(Jeez… Did you not read Dennis’s?!?!?)Report
You are struggling very hard to avoid making any sort of argument in your own words.Report
I would be happy to… but I’m not under the impression that you are interested in the criticisms against CRT but are, instead, looking to argue against me, personally.
I mean, I’d be down with that…
But I would like you to have done some background reading first.
When I’ll be criticizing Critical Race Theory, I will be criticizing the writings of Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi.
So one of the main things that I’ll want established is that you are okay with me conflating those things. Like, when I post an excerpt from White Fragility, I don’t want a counter-argument that I’m not arguing against CRT, but against Robin DiAngelo.
Are we okay with that?
Anyway, here’s some background reading for you to do.
Here’s a link to Robin DiAngelo’s publications. You don’t have to buy a book and wait for it to be mailed to you, it includes links to articles printed (in peer-reviewed journals!) at the bottom.
I recommend her 2011 article from the International Journal of Critical Pedagogy.
Here’s a link to Ibram X. Kendi’s books section on his website. Here’s a link to his articles in the Atlantic.
When I am going to be arguing against CRT, I’m going to be quoting these two people and arguing against them.
Are these terms acceptable? I’m hoping to avoid “THESE PEOPLE ARE NOT REPRESENTATIVE OF CRT!” counter-arguments.Report
Oh OK.
Well, if you want to know why I think CRT is a great thing, here is a link to a book by Robin D’Angelo.
And here is a link to a book by Ibrahim Kendi.
If you read them, I am confident you will come to see why CRT is a terrific new thing which should be taught in every school.Report
Chip, I am afraid that you don’t understand my comment.
I am willing to argue against CRT. But I will be assuming that CRT is fairly represented by the arguments of Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi (note: misspelling “exotic” names is a microagression).
As such, I just want to establish, beforehand, that when I post an excerpt from one of these two authors and say “I disagree with this and here’s why” that I won’t have you argue that I’m not arguing against CRT but against something else.
Is that cool?Report
Cool, I look forward to it.Report
It’ll be a for real post, not a comment.
So it’ll be a few days.Report
As I began composing the post in my head, I realized that I’m also going to touch on Nikole Hannah-Jones and the 1619 Project.
(Just trying to avoid a “You said you were going to talk about Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi but you’re also talking about Nikole Hannah-Jones?!?” situation.)Report
I feel an old-school 450 comment brawl coming.Report
“You are struggling very hard to avoid making any sort of argument in your own words.”
When communication and anti-communication come together, there is a fiery explosion and chaos that prevents any discourse.
This is, of course, a delight to trolls and those who like to stir the pot, but have no interest in anything else.
Just a random thought that popped into my head.Report
That’s not what I said. Something may be a fallacy and be true. There may be nuts being picked. But also, if you declare that nuts are being picked, and someone finds a quote, you can label the quoted person a nut.Report
Nut picking… ehhh.
I mean, defenders of the police tell us that we don’t need to reform the police, because the stuff we hear about is just the media nut-picking a few bad apples out of the millions of good cops out there.
So while I am fine with the first option, I would want a hard and fast block against the second. Because those nuts are out there, and we are really bad about nipping them in the bud early and often.Report
My question wasn’t, “Where are anti-racism courses being taught”. I would hope there is one in every single classroom in America.
My question was, where do we “have kids being told that they’re the problem because of their race”?
You’re assuming your own conclusions here, that CRT= “kids being told that they’re the problem because of their race” which is simply false.Report
Here, let me copy and paste what you said:
That’s what I was responding to.Report
OK, so if you want to pivot to another question, cool.
What do you find objectionable in any of the links you provided?Report
Pivot? You said that you wanted an actual example of a school textbook that teached CRT.
My comment to someone else entirely? Here is a link to a pamphlet about the textbook Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Jason Reynolds and Dr. Ibram X. Kendi. It has been adopted in Portland’s schools (and answers the question about whether there are any textbooks that teach this).
This is not a pivot, Chip.
As for what I find objectionable in any of the links I provided…
Well, the comment section to Dennis Sanders’ post has some particularly egregious examples of White Privilege. Seriously, if I made them up, people wouldn’t believe them.
When it comes to Portland’s choice of CRT textbook, I think that Mr. Kendi’s philosophy is bad. John McWhorter has some excellent criticisms of Mr. Kendi and I recommend you read him. (Dennis Sanders’ post has some links you can follow!)Report
So, in response to my question, your examples are…the comments section at OT?
Seriously, can you formulate in your own words what you find objectionable to CRT?
Not “Go look at John McWhorter!” or “Hey, lookit this stupid tweet!” but an actual critique of the actual concepts in CRT, and why you think they are objectionable?Report
Your question was “What do you find objectionable in any of the links you provided?”
I pointed out what I found objectionable in the links I provided.
Now you ask:
“So, in response to my question, your examples are…the comments section at OT?”
Well, when it comes to the link to OT that I gave, yes, what I found objectionable was the White Privilege displayed in the comments.
I didn’t really have a problem with the essay.
Seriously, can you formulate in your own words what you find objectionable to CRT?
I think that the philosophy is wrong and bad for similar reasons to John McWhorter. I think that he could do a better job of explaining that I could.
Would you just not rather read a Black writer?Report
There may be less persuasive arguments than “Go read this book and you will agree I’m right”, but I can’t think of any right now.Report
Chip, you weren’t asking me to convince you that CRT is wrong.
I don’t have any illusions that I can.
You were asking “What do you find objectionable about CRT?”
There are essays that have been written about CRT criticism that are more eloquent than anything that I could write. I suggest you read them if you want to know what someone might, in theory, find objectionable about CRT.
Do you have a different goal than finding out what people find objectionable about CRT?Report
People are being told that whiteness is a problem, certainly. Now, you could define whiteness as privilege conferred within a white-centric society or whatever, but “lack of melanin” is also used as a definition. Even if it weren’t, if kids are being told that society gives them things that it doesn’t give people of color, how old do you have to be to distinguish that message from “you’re the problem because of your race”? There are senators who aren’t old enough to work out that subtlety.
As a practical matter, we have kids being told that they can’t respond to accusations if the accusers have different lived experience.Report
Again with the “we have kids”…worshipping Satan, having orgy parties, taking drugs, practicing CRT.
It just never ends.Report
@Pinky
To the extent that what you are saying is happening is happening, I would agree that it is wrong. And I’m not denying that it is happening, but I can confidently say that this is not the norm nor particularly common. But it is becoming MORE common, so I can understand the source of your concern. I do ask that you consider the many places where no such conversations are happening and understand why that is a concern for so many and why that motivates many (certainly not all) to seek more conversations in more places in more schools.
I just wish the response wasn’t, “Just stop talking about this.” I wish it was, “Let’s do better here.”
Ideally, schools are constantly reflecting on their pedagogy and methodology and making improvements. We see this in most curricular areas. Why not let the same process play out here? And, yes, I would include in that limiting the input of those who lack an understanding of education and child/adolescent development. As you point out, young kids can really confuse arrows of causation and description with prescription. So while I agree with the general idea that, “We ought to talk about this with kids younger than we typically do,” I too often cringe at the way we do so because we often fail to account for how those younger kids receive and interpret such complex messages.
I understand a counter to what I offer here would be that ANY children hearing these jumbled messages could be harmed by them. And, yes, that is a real possibility. But at the same time, there are already a slew of jumbled messages going on in schools around race (and other aspects of identity). Why draw the line at THESE? Especially if they could help us work towards a better experience for all?
In short, I’m not in the “full speed ahead with CRT in K12” camp. I’m in the, “We need to do a better job of talking with kids about race” camp. And I think what that might involve is some not-so-great conversations as we make our way to a better place. And I don’t think that happens by politically motivated state legislatures taking certain topics off the table entirely. I also don’t think that happens by overrelying on outsider trainers with little background in education.Report
Two books that I have been told to read if I wanted to understand CRT are Robin D’Angelo’s “White Fragility” and Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist“.Report
AKA “How To Skim Money Off Guilty White Progressives Who Lack Dignity and Self-Respect.”Report
I think it has to do with keeping your school districts/neighborhoods segregated. Sure, we’ll let you have similar (or worse) numbers than Alabama, but you have to do this little dance first.Report
Who said only conservatives get to grift their own?Report
Heh, good point. There is certainly nothing more American than making a buck off our fellow citizens.Report
Yeah my apprehension/fear is that CRT is the leading edge of some kind of pervasive mental kudzu/grift to the left like the “give us monies to save your soul” Christian pastors were to the right in the 80’s.Report
There is lots of money to be made for sure.Report
This all sounds like a move to build positive self-esteem about American history, I thought this was the party that was against low content solely to improve students’ self-esteem.Report
If you teach the real reason Texas seceded from Mexico, Texans might be sad.Report
Remember the 20 minutes where “what’s the problem with Antifa? The US Army in WWII was anti-fascist!” was a real talking point?
“What’s the problem with Social Justice? You’d think that people who like society would want it to be Just!”
Well, CRT has a similar thing going on. Wide-eyed bemusement that anybody could possibly oppose 11th Graders being taught that the Jim Crow era in US history might have had some racism problems. How could anybody possibly oppose teaching children that racism is bad?!?!?!?
Report
And if you’ve never seen the (since pulled!) slides on Whiteness & White Culture put out by the African-American Museum, you should check them out.
Report
Gresham’s Law, but for Morality:
Report
I actually heard an interview on NPR about this and there’s a bit more to the story than this stupid tweet lets on. I didn’t particularly think it was that big of a story, but it was interesting.
https://www.npr.org/2021/06/07/1004076000/to-make-birding-inclusive-some-birds-will-need-new-names-without-colonial-rootsReport
I don’t want to get all “you’re not allowed to solve problem P until you’ve solved problems O, N, M, L, K, J, I, H, G, F, E, D, C, B, and A first”.
I think that if a number of birds have names with colonial roots, that’s something that can be addressed in the same way that Pluto was downgraded from Planet to Dwarf Planet.
With that said, if I wanted to create a narrative that anti-racism is attempting to install a new paradigm where trivial bullshit is held up next to very, very important injustices and doing a good job of discrediting the important injustices, I would have no shortage of help from Mass Media.
I mean, if I wanted to avoid having my school get rid of segregation, I would LEAN LIKE HELL into shit like birds having bad names.
Let’s not talk about the schools. We need to talk about colonial racism when it comes to bird names. Why do you want to avoid talking about colonial racism when it comes to bird names?
Do you not *CARE*?!?!?Report
Does this or any museum dictate curriculum at any school you’re aware of?Report
To the best of my knowledge, I believe that the African-American Museum’s resources and learning activities are entirely opt-in.
Additionally, the museum pulled these particular slides when they were given wide scrutiny on Social Media including being retweeted by Donald Trump Jr.
So, no, I don’t know that this (or any museum) dictates curriculum at any school. They make resources available but, as far as I can tell, that’s an opt-in thing.Report
Unless I misunderstand your point, when the question is “WHAT IS BEING TAUGHT IN OUR SCHOOLS?” then an answer that points to what is being displayed in a museum is, well, not really an answer at all.
But maybe you were attempting to answer a different question.Report
This part is more of a “how is CRT manifesting?” (or failing to).
I mean, if I had an article discussing Disney’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion training and then another article discussing how it got scrubbed after it was made public, you could very easily point out that this training has *NOTHING* to do with what is being taught in our schools.
Nobody makes you work for Disney, after all. If they want you to take DEI training, that’s part of the price of you working for them.
And it’s *NOT* what is being taught in school.
But if I were to criticize Critical Race Theory, it’d wander through stuff like DEI corporate training and not be 100% limited to what is taught in schools.
I do think that if we can establish that CRT contains X, Y, and Z, then a discussion of whether CRT should be taught in schools (or whether we should be surprised when constituents are calling for politicians to ban it), examples of X, Y, and Z will illuminate what people are talking about.
Though, I suppose, saying X, Y, and Z aren’t examples of CRT would probably calm a lot of nerves of people hesitant about CRT.Report
I don’t think it’s that off base to compare the two when they’re based on the same resources.Report
That’s fair.
“What is CRT?”
“Is CRT being taught in schools?”
“Should CRT be taught in schools?”
“Is CRT informing teacher training and thus impacting pedagogy and/or methodology?”
“Should CRT inform teacher training?”
All valid questions. But we should try to answer them independently, to the extent possible.Report
It seems like there is a lot of motte and bailey (thinking about opening the essay with this, actually).
How could anyone be opposed to teaching children racism is bad?
We all agree that teaching them that racism is bad is something that *EVERYONE* should support, right?
Therefore… we should teach CRT.
Wait. What’s CRT?Report
I am unfamiliar with motte and bailey.
But I am familiar with the, “Well we agree on the vague goal so obviously we agree on the specific path to achieving it,” trick.
Here, I’m not even sure we agree on the vague goal.
FWIW, I have spent years doing DEI training of all kinds — even before it was called DEI — and the only place I’ve seen the term CRT used until VERY recently was on these here pages.
So… maybe they’re super sneaky about the manifestation of CRT. Or maybe it’s less pervasive than it seems based on a few horror stories.Report
The 1619 Project is a practical application of CRT (its mentioned in the amendment) and is being taught in schools. It contains false statements and material omissions, and has been condemned by Pulitzer Prize winning historians. Background here from the World Socialist Website
I would not have my kids go to a school that used 1619 materials anymore than I would have my kids go to a school that taught creationism. The 1619 Project is not history any more than creationism is science.
I am not worried about it being taught locally, pretty large and educated Lincoln fans here, black and white. They won’t accept as true that he was a racist who viewed “black people [as] the obstacle to national unity.”Report
Well, you guys know how reluctant I am to disagree with my fellow socialists, but…
Even in the linked article, they identify really only two claims in the 1619 project as false, and the body of the article shows that instead of the claims being unequivocally false, they are merely complicated and disputed.
The fact remains that while the motivations of the colonists who fought in the Revolution were mixed, there was not any real desire on anyone’s part to make abolition a part of the war.
The new nation allowed the preservation of slavery, and the support of slave owners was essential to the Revolution’s success.
And Lincoln’s attitudes towards black people is indisputably “complex”.Report
Also Norwest University historian: I Helped Fact-Check the 1619 Project. The Times Ignored MeReport
Yes, he agrees that the relationship of the Founders to slavery was…complicated.
“The United States was not, in fact, founded to protect slavery—but the Times is right that slavery was central to its story. ”
Which seems about right.Report
To be clear, I’m not defending CRT or any particular curriculum decision. I am opposed through curriculum-by-legislature, specifically “outlawing” certain topics and ideas.
And I’m offering the perspective of a teacher who has been around the block with DEI training a few times.
I can’t speak on the 1619 Project and will not deny some schools are using materials from it. I just don’t think the solution is “outlawing” the teaching of the ideas presented in it.Report
Tillis lives up to expectations:
https://wr.al/1KlaaReport
To step back, Oklahoma passed a bill that I know you read. It didn’t outlaw the teaching of anything, it said that it can’t be taught in a manner that was discriminatory or employed collective guilt on the basis of race or gender. It did not have a provision for private lawsuits, but directed the State Board of Education to promulgate appropriate rules implementing those principles. Maybe they exist elsewhere, but the important point was that the law “shall not prohibit the teaching of concepts that align to the Oklahoma Academic Standards.” I looked those up, and they include this:
“OKH.5.2 Examine multiple points of view regarding the evolution of race relations in Oklahoma, including:
A. growth of all-black towns (1865-1920)
B. passage of Senate Bill 1 establishing Jim Crow Laws
C. rise of the Ku Klux Klan
D. emergence of “Black Wall Street” in the Greenwood District
E. causes of the Tulsa Race Riot and its continued social and economic impact.
F. the role labels play in understanding historic events, for example “riot” versus “massacre””
I don’t believe the law outlaws teaching important topics in Oklahoma.
But I probably disagree with you in general. The idea of professionalizing teaching in the 19th century was that there should be “norms” in pedagogy and curriculum. Is it your contention that if a school wants to teach creationism in its biology class, that’s local choice?Report
No. I think standards are good and necessary. I’d rather see them done more broadly through state DOEs and more specifically at the local level.
FWIW, only 19 states require a personal finance course for graduation.
But this is what we fight about.Report
That is just despicable. Tusla was not a race riot; it was a massacre. It’s like saying the Trail of Tears was a migration.Report
Exactly. What is “permitted” is already white washed.Report
Meanwhile, if anyone wants to get a taste of what “Non CRT” history textbooks look like, here’s a great Twitter thread, with snapshots of the insane version of history being taught in Louisiana.
https://twitter.com/libbybakalar/status/1404467378994376712
Tl;Dr- the slave owners were the good guys.Report
That hasn’t changed much since I was a student in Louisiana Public schools in the 1980’s. We were still studying the War of Northern Aggression.Report
The Louisiana textbook is a good example of structural racism that CRT describes.Report
I think it’s the epitome of the motte and bailey. A Louisiana text book has some backwards redneckery in it. We therefore must embrace a shallow all encompassing theory of everything that justifies racially segregated ‘affinity groups’ in schools in the northeast.Report
That “backwards redneckery” is how the current generation of Louisiana leaders grew up. It reinforces an existing system where conservative white men are the best sort of people. Other southern states are no different structurally in what they are teaching their kids.
But sure, lets throw that example under the bus because northern states like to they they are “better” then us back a$$wards Southerners.Report
I didn’t throw it under the bus. I said it’s the motte. By all means fix the Louisiana text book. It’s bad history and children are poorly served by it. It’s the bailey that’s the problem.Report
It exemplifies the “structural” racism which is the core idea of CRT.
The textbook creates a false revisionist history with all the injustice airbrushed out. People who are taught this history are unable to address injustice which doesn’t exist.
If it makes it easier to understand, pretend this is a Soviet history book describing the struggles of comrades despite vicious counterrevolutionary subversives.Report
Exactly. Louisiana (and Mississippi and Alabama and Georgia and Florida) now have a generation of political and economic “leaders” my age who were taught this as “history,” and often in segregated private schools that arose in the 1980’s as White Flight ramped up when courts ordered schools desegregated. Those “leaders” are unwilling to allow their children to be taught a different, more accurate, version of history because it may destroy they political and economic power they have taken for themselves.
This is how systemic racism perpetuates itself. This is what CRT is all about. and this is why there is such strong push back against it.Report
Politically correct history. Sadly, it has long been this way. I remember the nonsense I was taught 50-odd years ago. Now that someone else’s ox is gored, people (some, anyway) are screaming about it or exploiting it for political gain.
Last week, I was back home for a high school reunion. My niece had just taken her AP American history exam and was talking about it at length. My brother was agog at some of the real history she had at her fingertips, so different from the whitewashed version we had been taught. He said he never knew that stuff. (He, like many others, first learned about Tulsa from Watchmen.) I knew most of it, but had never been taught it until I was an adult.
Sadly, adults are in short supply here.Report
Hopefully, some context…
I work at a progressive private nursery school in a very liberal neighborhood of a very liberal city. Most of our administrators have strong backgrounds in DEI work and after the events of last spring and summer, there was a renewed energy into focusing on these aspects of our program. This was largely supported by our parent body, who were hungry for opportunities to better understand these issues for themselves and for their children. We are about as “woke” as it gets… at least among a community that remains largely white and incredibly wealthy.
What did that look like? Maybe a couple hours total of meetings/conversations on the various related topics. Not a couple hours per week or month. A couple hours over the course of the year. So, of the approximately 1500 hours we’re on site at the school, we spent maybe 3 or 4 being “trained” in this. Practically, what impact did it have in our classrooms? Maybe a few new books were on shelves. Maybe teachers made slightly different decisions about their materials (“Are all my baby dolls white? Or do I have baby dolls of different races/ethnicities?”). Maybe conversations had slightly different language. But by and by, probably 99% of children’s experiences were no different than they had been in the past.
My girlfriend’s school was a little different. They definitely “leaned in” more. They spent maybe 2 hours a month covering the topic. And I believe had an assembly with students on the matter. It didn’t all go well. And some of the less-well-executed moments got spun up by motivated parents into egregious examples, some of which have been cited here (though, of course, those accounts were largely inaccurate but who cares). The amount of time the school spent responding to that spin out probably dwarfed the amount of time they spent “training” teachers. Is that the school’s fault? The spinners’ fault? Probably yes and yes.
In the past, your kid came home and said something about school that seemed wonky, you either shrugged it off or called the teacher or maybe called the principal. Now, you goto the press. And a movement is born.
So, as a teacher who swims deep in the waters of DEI work and wokeness and all that…
The impact of ANY of this on your children is pretty small. There are probably a few positive experiences they’ll have, a handful of neutral, and maybe a couple cringeworthy ones. And this is due in part to the very LIMITED time schools themselves are spending on training and adapting their curricula.
The impact of the response to all this is immense. And likely to be far more costly to schools and kids as a response.
The horror stories shared are local problems that are best solved with local solutions.Report
No fair letting reality intrude.Report
To @InMD specifically, apologize for getting woefully lost in the threads. I don’t think we’re particularly far apart on this issue, perhaps on slightly different sides of a line in the middle. I was riffing off something you said but then greatly expanding on my point.Report
No need to apologize. We probably aren’t that far apart, and anyway I know you come at this from a place of good faith.Report