Critical race theory explained

The presentation of truth in new forms provokes resistance, confounding those committed to accepted measures for determining the quality and validity of statements made and conclusions reached, and making it difficult for them to respond and adjudge what is acceptable. —Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well

Critical race theory (CRT) arose among academics beginning in the 1970s as an attempt to explain why progress stalled after major 1960s legislation to protect civil rights was passed into law. America is in a period of civil rights reversals after decades of relentless fascist propaganda attacks and lies, mainly from Republicans and Christian nationalists. The AP writes:

Critical race theory is a way of thinking about America’s history through the lens of racism. Scholars developed it during the 1970s and 1980s in response to what they viewed as a lack of racial progress following the civil rights legislation of the 1960s.

It centers on the idea that racism is systemic in the nation’s institutions and that they function to maintain the dominance of white people in society.

The architects of the theory argue that the United States was founded on the theft of land and labor and that federal law has preserved the unequal treatment of people on the basis of race. Proponents also believe race is culturally invented, not biological.

In 2019, America's fascist right has locked onto CRT as a false, toxic revision of history that is being taught in public schools and poisoning children's minds. The trigger was the 1619 Project, a New York Times initiative that was told a story of American history that put slavery at the center of America’s founding. The slavery-centric founding of America aspect of the 1619 Project has been criticized by real historians (not politicians) as inaccurate. 

The people behind the project, including the academic Nikole Hanna-Jones, have refused to correct their errors. That failure opened the entire project up to attack by extremists on the political and Christian right. That failure is on the people who produced the document. As usual, the fascists have discredited the entire idea and claim that America was and is not systemically racist. CRT has expanded to include various controversial aspects of racism in America today. CRT is now a powerful rallying cry for American fascism to push back against the evils of liberalism and Democrats generally.

In general, the fascists are lying about the corrosive influence of CRT on K-12 public education. AP comments: 

There is little to no evidence that critical race theory itself is being taught to K-12 public school students, though some ideas central to it, such as lingering consequences of slavery, have been. In Greenwich, Connecticut, some middle school students were given a “white bias” survey that parents viewed as part of the theory.

Many Republicans view the concepts underlying critical race theory as an effort to rewrite American history and persuade white people that they are inherently racist and should feel guilty because of their advantages.

But the theory also has become somewhat of a catchall phrase to describe racial concepts some conservatives find objectionable, such as white privilege, systemic inequality and inherent bias.

Critical race theory popped into the mainstream last September when then-President Trump took aim at it and the 1619 Project as part of a White House event focused on the nation’s history. He called both “a crusade against American history” and “ideological poison that ... will destroy our country.”  

So far, 25 states have considered legislation or other steps to limit how race and racism can be taught, according to an analysis from Education Week. Eight states, all Republican-led, have banned or limited the teaching of critical race theory or similar concepts through laws or administrative actions. The bans largely address what can be taught inside the classroom. While bills in some states mention critical race theory by name, others do not.

The hyperbole and lies of the fascist right is loud and clear. This is a new tool that fascist dark free speech merchants are using to instill more fear, anger, hate, intolerance, bigotry and distrust on the radical right. 

Not surprisingly, teachers’ unions, educators and various social studies organizations are concerned that Republican restrictions will wind up (i) allow a whitewash of American history by diminishing the influences that past injustices still exert today, and (ii) have a chilling effect on classroom discussions. CRT scholars see the new fascist laws as "hijacking the national conversation about racial inequality that gained momentum after the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minnesota."

A common fascist criticism of CRT is that it teaches hatred of white people and is designed to perpetuate divisions in American society. One CRT expert, Cheryl Harris, a UCLA law professor, believes that GOP proposals are political and intended to “ensure that Republicans can win in 2022.” Given current fascist Republican and Christian nationalist hardball politics, including the hyperbole and lies, that explanation seems to be right.

_______________________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________________

For the wonks 

A quick scan of a couple of the ~100,000 hits in the research literature on CRT makes it clear why White-centric Christian nationalism hates the CRT concept. Inconvenient history, is inconvenient and that causes cognitive dissonance. For fascist Republicans who aren't all that serious about their Christianity, it is clear why they hate CRT and attack it as ideological poison. Same reason the Christian nationalists hate and attack it. Inconvenient history and too much cognitive dissonance.

This is from a 1995 research paper, Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education:

This article asserts that despite the salience of race in U.S. society, as a topic of scholarly inquiry, it remains untheorized. The article argues for a critical race theoretical perspective in education analogous to that of critical race theory in legal scholarship by developing three propositions: (1) race continues to be significant in the United States; (2) U.S. society is based on property rights rather than human rights; and (3) the intersection of race and property creates an analytical tool for understanding inequity.

In 1991 social activist and education critic Jonathan Kozol delineated the great inequities that exist between the schooling experiences of white middle-class students and those of poor African-American and Latino students. And, while Kozol’s graphic descriptions may prompt some to question how it is possible that we allow these “savage inequalities,” this article suggests that these inequalities are a logical and predictable result of a racialized society in which discussions of race and racism continue to be muted and marginalized.

This is from a 2011 paper, Critical Race Theory (CRT): 

CRT is a body of scholarship steeped in radical activism that seeks to explore and challenge the prevalence of racial inequality in society. It is based on the understanding that race and racism are the product of social thought and power relations; CRT theorists endeavor to expose the way in which racial inequality is maintained through the operation of structures and assumptions that appear normal and unremarkable. 

There is no single position statement that defines CRT. The approach continues to undergo revision and refinement in response to the scholarship experiences of CRT theorists and in relation to new developments in legal doctrine and policy discourse. However, CRT scholars do have in common a social constructivist perspective of race and racism and a commitment to understanding - and opposing - the systems that subjugate people of color.

There are several themes that are central to Critical Race Theory: 

1. Centrality of Racism CRT begins with a number of basic insights. 

One is that racism is normal, not aberrant, in American society. Because racism is an ingrained feature of our landscape, it looks ordinary and natural to persons in the culture. 

CRT regards racism as so deeply entrenched in the social order that it is often taken for granted and viewed as natural. CRT scholars emphasize that racism does not necessarily operate in crude explicit form s but operates in a sociopolitical context where it is becoming more embedded and increasingly nuanced. Racism can be evidenced in the outcome of processes and relations irrespective of intent.

2. White Supremacy 

Understanding the role and power of White Supremacy in creating and reinforcing racial subordination and maintaining a normalized White privilege is central to the CRT imperative to reveal and oppose racial inequality (Crenshaw et al. 1995; Harris 1995). In this perspective ‘White supremacy’ does not relate to the obvious crude race hatred of extremist groups but to forces that saturate society as a whole: 

[By] ‘White supremacy’ I do not mean to allude only to the self- conscious racism of white supremacist hate groups. I refer instead to a political, economic, and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and nonwhite subordination are daily reenacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings.  

This presents a particular challenge because of the taken-for-granted privileges of Whiteness. White scholars engaging in CRT must strive to be aware of and committed to critically interrogating their own racial privilege and unmasking the invisibility of racism.

A fascist Christian GOP attack on democracy and voting: Fix a non-existent problem

The Washington Post reports that an investigation into significant voter and election fraud by Republican lawmakers in Michigan concludes there was none. The investigation's final report was blunt that all the allegations of voter fraud and election fraud were false, had no basis in fact or even understanding of the process of voting and vote counting. WaPo writes:

On Wednesday, a Republican-controlled state Senate committee issued a report forcefully rejecting the claims of widespread fraud in the state, saying citizens should be confident in the results and skeptical of “those who have pushed demonstrably false theories for their own personal gain.”

The report even went so far as to state that people who pushed the election fraud lies should be investigated for committing criminal fraud and prosecuted if the evidence would support a prosecution.

One would think that would be the end of Republican concerns in Michigan about vote and election fraud. One would be wrong. 

Fixing what isn't broken

Immediately after releasing the investigation report, Michigan Republican lawmakers announced that they are going to pass 39 new laws to regulate voting in Michigan. The reason given was that strict limits on voting are necessary to address citizen beliefs that elections are fraudulent. Republicans claim they are making elections and voting even more secure than they are now. 

Thus, despite clearly acknowledging there is no problem with voting and election security, Michigan Republican lawmakers reinforce GOP voters' belief in election fraud by writing and passing new election restriction laws. People who believed all along that there was widespread voter and election fraud will feel vindicated in their false beliefs. After all, if the legislature is passing laws to prevent fraudulent elections, there must have been a reason to do so. 

In essence, fascist Republicans have found a way to reinforce unfounded fears of election fraud by saying it does not exist but also passing laws that are argued to make elections more secure.

This represents a sophisticated attack on voting rights. Most Republican politicians and leaders now understand that the tyrant-wannabe ex-president, and his mouthpiece liars, were lying about election fraud. GOP politicians and leaders can no longer pretend it is otherwise. Given that Republican leaders know that voting needs to be restricted for Republicans to win elections, they have no choice but to limit voting. So they are going to limit voting and rig elections as best they know how. 

The trick Republicans face is how to advantage Republican voters, while suppressing enough Democratic votes to tip elections for republican candidates. How can this kind of selective targeting be done?

From what I have seen so far, it looks like the job can be done by limiting voting access in urban areas to rough parity with rural area access. For example, a new law in Texas limits ballot drop boxes to one per county. In a county with hundreds of thousands of voters, tens of thousands of voters will not have access to the drop box. By contrast, one drop box in a rural county will limit access for lower proportion of voters. More Democratic drop box votes will be suppressed compared to suppressed Republican votes in rural areas.

Tactics that Republicans use to preferentially target Democratic areas also include (i) expanded rights for Republican poll monitors to intimidate voters and poll workers, and (ii) intimidation of poll workers who try to help voters cast their ballots. Republican poll monitors are deployed in urban areas where Democrats dominate. The argument is that Democrats commit vote fraud, not Republicans. The most severe attack comes from laws that give Republicans power to simply overturn election results they do not like. That effectively nullifies all voter power wherever that power is available and exercised.

Republican intent is clear. They see an existential threat in open and accessible voting. That dictates rigging elections to favor Republican candidates as much as possible and to disadvantage Democratic candidates as much as possible. Obviously, some Republican votes will be suppressed as unavoidable collateral damage in a political war of Republican fascism against democracy and the rule of law. 

The big question

The key question is this: How effective will fascist Christian Republican laws be in rigging elections to favor Republicans. We should have some kind of an answer within a few weeks after the 2022 elections. If it appears that Republican voter suppression laws are not effective enough for Republican satisfaction, one can reasonably expect fascist Christian republicans more laws to pass laws intended to be more effective at election rigging. In that case, the results of the 2024 elections will provide more data points for the fascist Christian GOP to use to improve the effectiveness of targeting Democratic votes.

If the 2022 laws and election results prove to be satisfactory, what the party might do thereafter is not clear. That might depend on how American voters react, assuming they react in any significant way.

An example of racism, or an example of poor assumptions?

 Disturbing and disturbed.

I am fully on board with recognizing the injustices of the past, but are there cases where we have gone TOO FAR in calling something an injustice? Or calling something racism?

Here is why I am posting this:

Watched an episode of New Amsterdam the other night and one scene disturbed me.

My common law wife found the scene acceptable so we had a discussion (debate even) about it.

One of the doctors mentioned traveling on a subway and was perturbed when a white male chastised a black mother because her child was causing a ruckus and disturbing the other passengers.

This doctor - who is white - felt that if his young daughter had made the same ruckus the white male wouldn't have said anything, therefore CONCLUDED that the white male was a racist - and actually called him that.

I was thinking WTF? I may have told the parent off as well if their child was disturbing other passengers or causing a scene, and I wouldn't have done it because of color either.

Two things bothered me about this scene:

The automatic assumption that the white male was racist, while at the same time, painting (unintentionally - hence bad script writing) children of black mothers as disruptive. Talk about stereotyping.

Was the doctor right though? Are white people more prone to chastise a black parent than a white parent? OR is this an example of where a fictional TV drama wanted to write something about injustice towards blacks, and completely FLUBBED IT?

Your thoughts?

Thoughts on defenses against tyranny

American democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties are pretty close to falling to Republican fascism and Christian Nationalism. Therefore, it is timely to consider some thoughts that experts who study the fall of democracies to demagogues, dictators and autocrats have about defenses against the rise of demagogic autocracy and tyranny. 

In his short 2017 handbook on resisting the fall and dealing with it when it comes, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century, history professor Timothy Snider writes about language, how we use it and how to help keep minds from being trapped by language tricks that tyrants and demagogues routinely deploy to deceive, distract, divide and manipulate nations and groups of people. 

Philology: the branch of knowledge that deals with the structure, historical development, and relationships of a language or languages

This is from lesson 9, Be kind to our language. Snyder writes:

Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey the thing everyone is saying. .... Read books.

Victor Klemperer, a literary scholar of Jewish origin, turned his philological training against Nazi propaganda. He noticed how Hitler's language rejected legitimate opposition. The people always meant some people and not others (the president uses the word in this way), encounters were always struggles (the president says winning) and any attempt by free people to understand the world in a different way was defamation of the leader (or, as the president puts it, libel).

The effort to define the shape and significance of events requires words and concepts that elude us when we are entranced by visual stimuli. Watching televised news is sometimes little more than looking at someone who is looking at a picture. we take this collective trance to be normal. we have slowly fallen into it.

More than half a century ago, the classic novels of totalitarianism warned of the domination of screens. the suppression of books, the narrowing of vocabularies, and the associated difficulties of thought.

Staring at screens is perhaps unavoidable, but the two-dimensional world makes little sense unless we draw upon a mental armory that we have developed somewhere else. When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework. To have such a framework requires having more concepts, and having more concepts requires reading.

What to read? Any good novel enlivens our ability to think about ambiguous situations and judge the intentions of others. .... One novel known by millions of young Americans that offers an account of tyranny and resistance is J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. If you or your friends or children did not read it that way the first time, then it bears reading again.

Some of the political and historical texts that inform the arguments made here are "Politics and the English Language" by George Orwell (1946), The Language of the Third Reich by Victor Klemperer (1947), The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt (1951), .... Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev (2014). 

What is Snyder saying?

My read is that Snyder says authors like George Orwell, Ray Bradbury and others noticed a narrowing or 'degradation' of both language and knowledge or point of view generally (always?) accompanied the rise of 20th century demagogues and dictators. This makes a lot of sense. Framing issues in different ways often requires different words or phrasing, e.g., estate tax vs death tax, illegal immigrant vs undocumented worker (or, illegal employer). Exposure to multiple frames of an issue tends to free the mind to see different points of view. That tends to humanize and legitimize different points of view and the people who espouse them. 

Snyder's suggestion regarding the Harry Potter book is to reframe the book and read it as a fight between demagoguery and tyranny vs. truth and distributed power, roughly democracy or at least governance with less violence and coercion.[1] 

As discussed here before, framing issues in politics is a very powerful tool of persuasion. A specific frame tends to trap minds into seeing and thinking about issues as the speaker wants the audience to see and think. Politicians are expert at playing the frame game. Smart politicians know that if they "step into an opponent's frame" by engaging directly with the opposing frame, they usually lose the persuasion game (explained in the post the link goes to).

When considering listening to Fox News or engaging with fascist GOP and other toxic politics sites such as Town Hall or Breitbart, Snyder's point becomes clear. Those sources are very disciplined. They all use the same frames and same limited language. They repeat their propaganda points using the same language over and over and over. The minds of people who are siloed into this world of demagoguery and lies tend to be trapped because they are not exposed to other competing frames, facts or reasoning. For those people, there is only one world view and political opposition is illegitimate. Or as Christian nationalists see it, there is only their world view frame and all else is against God.

Question: People tend to not read books about politics and the science about human biology and behaviors that drive politics. It is boring for most people. Is Snyder's suggestion to read books too diffuse (or 'academic') to be helpful to most people who are unaware of his reasoning and the underlying biology and history? 

Footnote: 

1. In my opinion and based on my political morals, truth and distributed power or democracy  vs. demagoguery and tyranny mostly boils down to the endless fight of good against evil. 

That belief is based on most people's self-professed belief in democracy, even in tyrannies. For example, the original North Korean dictator named the country Democratic People's Republic of Korea in 1948. It still goes by that name, despite it not being anywhere close to a real democracy in the sense of average people having any power via voting or any other mechanism. The country is better named Dictatorlandia or something akin to that.