Page 3 of 3 [ 45 posts ]  Go to page Previous  1, 2, 3

Mr Reynholm
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 19 Feb 2019
Age: 57
Gender: Male
Posts: 1,363
Location: Tulsa, OK

18 Jun 2021, 2:56 pm

To me the premise of CRT is flawed.
If whites are irredeemably racist then what can be done? It is part of their nature and others need to acknowledge such and move on.



Jiheisho
Veteran
Veteran

Joined: 21 Jul 2020
Age: 59
Gender: Male
Posts: 1,507

18 Jun 2021, 2:59 pm

Mr Reynholm wrote:
To me the premise of CRT is flawed.
If whites are irredeemably racist then what can be done? It is part of their nature and others need to acknowledge such and move on.


But you just said you don't know anything about CRT. Misrepresenting CRT does not mean you understand it, just the opposite.



Mr Reynholm
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 19 Feb 2019
Age: 57
Gender: Male
Posts: 1,363
Location: Tulsa, OK

18 Jun 2021, 6:56 pm

Jiheisho wrote:
Mr Reynholm wrote:
To me the premise of CRT is flawed.
If whites are irredeemably racist then what can be done? It is part of their nature and others need to acknowledge such and move on.


But you just said you don't know anything about CRT. Misrepresenting CRT does not mean you understand it, just the opposite.

I know what I have heard. It is just not first hand information. I haven't read any comments on this thread of anyone who has first hand experience with CRT.



techstepgenr8tion
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 6 Feb 2005
Age: 44
Gender: Male
Posts: 24,148
Location: 28th Path of Tzaddi

19 Jun 2021, 3:19 pm

A funny realization hit me earlier about part of CRT and I think it's at least a portion of what's bothered me but I hadn't put my finger on it.

'Whiteness' is defined by hard work, timeliness, epistemic sufficiency, impartiality, evidence-based thinking, etc., and I just realized that they had a terminology for this back in the 1990's as well - it's the three-letter f bomb that was made ample use of in Idiocracy (or the word that Eminem would be on TV 'using so freely') which fell considerably out of favor with the advancement of LGBTQ rights. Seems to be a very similar concept, just a more 'proper'-sounding veneer.


_________________
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” - James Baldwin


Mona Pereth
Veteran
Veteran

Joined: 11 Sep 2018
Gender: Female
Posts: 7,810
Location: New York City (Queens)

19 Jun 2021, 3:43 pm

So we can all see it first hand, I decided to dig up some tutorials on critical race theory.

First, here's a paper about it by Richard Delgado andJean Stefancic.

And here's a study guide.

And here's a lesson on critical race theory on the website of the American Bar Association.


_________________
- Autistic in NYC - Resources and new ideas for the autistic adult community in the New York City metro area.
- Autistic peer-led groups (via text-based chat, currently) led or facilitated by members of the Autistic Peer Leadership Group.
- My Twitter / "X" (new as of 2021)


Fnord
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 6 May 2008
Age: 66
Gender: Male
Posts: 59,750
Location: Stendec

24 Jun 2021, 10:16 am

Here is a commentary on the level of "understanding" of Critical Race Theory by its critics:

Image
Political cartoon by Barry Deutsch


_________________
 
No love for Hamas, Hezbollah, Iranian Leadership, Islamic Jihad, other Islamic terrorist groups, OR their supporters and sympathizers.


Udinaas
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 30 Sep 2020
Age: 27
Gender: Male
Posts: 1,264

24 Jun 2021, 2:00 pm

A good overview of the political context and strategy surrounding the Republican anti-CRT crusade.
https://theweek.com/politics/1001865/critical-race-theory-george-floyd-protests

Quote:
Many school districts across the country are in the grips of a full-blown moral panic, supposedly over something called "critical race theory" (CRT). Fox News has been blaring deranged propaganda about CRT for months. In Loudon County, Virginia (home to many Republican political professionals), angry conservatives deluged a recent school board meeting, and were so loud and disruptive that two were eventually arrested. Similar stories can be found in Maine, Texas, Pennsylvania, and many other states.

This panic, as I've previously written, has nothing to do with the actual arguments of critical race theory scholars. But that raises the question of what it really is about. The answer is the George Floyd protests of last summer and the ongoing surge of anti-racist activism.

Ben Wallace-Wells recently published an excellent profile in The New Yorker of Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist who all but singlehandedly bootstrapped this moral panic. In Rufo's own telling, it all started with someone sending him an annoying anti-racism seminar in July of last year. He then read books by Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi about anti-racism that surged to the top of bestseller lists last year and followed the footnotes therein to older articles about critical race theory. Then he went on Tucker Carlson and delivered a carefully-prepared harangue about CRT; President Trump (of course) was watching, leading to a call from then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. Trump began to attack anti-racist trainings and scholarship, numerous conservative states have passed laws attacking CRT, and here we are.

Rufo straight-up admits that it was corporate and educational anti-racist trainings that motivated his crusade, not critical race theory itself; that the primary reason he selected it as a target was its ominous sounding name; and that he neither knows nor cares about the actual substance of CRT. "Strung together, the phrase 'critical race theory' connotes hostile, academic, divisive, race-obsessed, poisonous, elitist, anti-American," he told Wallace-Wells. At a recent conference, he contemptuously scoffed at "pathetic … angry graduate students" who try to argue with him about CRT or other topics. "I don't give a s**t about this stuff," he said. On Twitter, Rufo frankly admitted that he wants to make CRT into a vacuous smear and fill up its meaning with everything he doesn't like:

The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think "critical race theory." We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) March 15, 2021

NBC News recently reported how a network of conservative activists have taken up Rufo's ideas to whip up a frenzy about CRT in their local school board meetings.

So the moral panic over anti-racism has a strong astroturf element to it. One guy who is completely open about his dishonest intentions inserted himself into the propaganda vortex that circles endlessly between Trump and conservative media, and that was all it took to create shrieking panic in tens of thousands of people.

But the moral panic probably wouldn't have caught fire to quite the same degree if it wasn't hooking into some real problems or conflicts. On one level, it must be admitted that some of the anti-racist politics from writers like DiAngelo have played into Rufo's hands. The corporate diversity seminar where some well-paid consultant lectures white employees to do self-criticism (while carefully avoiding ideas that might harm the corporate bottom line, like improving the welfare state or unionizing the company) is at best not very helpful, and at worst will actually make people more prejudiced.

So the moral panic over anti-racism has a strong astroturf element to it. One guy who is completely open about his dishonest intentions inserted himself into the propaganda vortex that circles endlessly between Trump and conservative media, and that was all it took to create shrieking panic in tens of thousands of people.

But the moral panic probably wouldn't have caught fire to quite the same degree if it wasn't hooking into some real problems or conflicts. On one level, it must be admitted that some of the anti-racist politics from writers like DiAngelo have played into Rufo's hands. The corporate diversity seminar where some well-paid consultant lectures white employees to do self-criticism (while carefully avoiding ideas that might harm the corporate bottom line, like improving the welfare state or unionizing the company) is at best not very helpful, and at worst will actually make people more prejudiced.

Indeed, the individualist, self-obsessed creed of this style of anti-racism strongly smacks of the neoliberal ideology that many critical race theory scholars have attacked. Kimberlé Crenshaw, a foundational scholar in the CRT tradition, told Wallace-Wells: "I've been witness to trainings that I thought, 'Ennnnnh, not quite sure that's the way I would approach it … To be honest, sometimes people want a shortcut.'"

That said, the deeper reason Rufo's anti-anti-racism crusade caught on in conservative politics simply has to be the George Floyd protests. Remember that these were the largest protests in American history in terms of raw numbers. For a couple weeks, the footage of helpless Floyd being brutally murdered by a cop was so shocking that even conservatives were jolted into sympathy. Favorability numbers for Black Lives Matter soared to 61 percent in June of last year.

Moreover, the protests were the reason so many diversity trainings have happened over the last year in the first place. Corporate America was taken aback by the strength and reach of the outrage, and struggled to maintain their brand images or preemptively insulate themselves from accusations of racial prejudice (though to be fair some surely had a genuine commitment to doing something about racism, however clumsy).

There is clearly tremendous potential cultural power in the idea of freeing Black Americans from police brutality and other oppression that they (and other minority groups) suffer. The violence suffered by Floyd and so many thousands of other people is horrifying to anyone with a conscience, and arguments for ending this injustice hook directly into bedrock American ideas about liberty and equality. What racial justice activists are saying today echo the positions of famous national heroes like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Abraham Lincoln.

Conservatives therefore risked being routed in a culture war battle. As Crenshaw said, "This is a post-George Floyd backlash … The reason why we're having this conversation is that the line of scrimmage has moved." A new ideological construct was needed to sweep all this discontent about racial injustice under the rug, and Rufo eventually made one up. As the writer John Ganz argues:

Rufo and his cohort are in the process of creating an ideological space where the signifier "anti-racism" will necessarily imply bloody Marxism, the gulag, the end of American democracy, the seizure of private property etc., but mentions of "racism" will also imply Critical Race Theory, which in their formulation creates the "real racism" through even talking about race. [Unpopular Front]

The intended plan going forward is clearly to leverage this moral panic to conduct Red Scare-style political purges of educational institutions, the civil service, the military, and anywhere else leftists or liberals might be driven out of public life. (After the right-wing propaganda machine kicked into high gear and BLM was smeared around the clock for months, conservative support fell to lower than it had been before Floyd was killed.)

That is the obvious intent of all the (baldly unconstitutional) attacks on the free speech and inquiry of academics passed in so many conservative states — supposed bans on "critical race theory" that are intentionally written so vaguely they would preclude any accurate instruction of American history or racism. GOP members of Congress recently harangued Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley about anti-racist trainings in the armed forces. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently signed a bill that would require surveys of university students and faculty, and threatened budget cuts for any institution found to be "indoctrinating" students — that is, if they disagree with conservative ideology.

The staggering hypocrisy of conservatives who just five minutes ago were whining about campus snowflakes being a threat to free inquiry is indeed galling. But what may happen to America's disproportionately-minority underclass is even more important. Rufo and his allies want to stamp out any attempt to do anything about the epidemic of police brutality and return to the days when poor Black, brown, and quite frequently white people were shot to death by agents of the state and nobody in power cared at all. If conservatives aren't confronted and defeated politically that is what will happen.



Mr Reynholm
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 19 Feb 2019
Age: 57
Gender: Male
Posts: 1,363
Location: Tulsa, OK

24 Jun 2021, 2:08 pm

Can anyone point me to some high profile, influential white supremacist in the country, besides the ones who live in Nancy Pelosi's head?



funeralxempire
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 27 Oct 2014
Age: 39
Gender: Non-binary
Posts: 25,176
Location: Right over your left shoulder

24 Jun 2021, 2:16 pm



Keep in mind that this is three years old and he's been letting the mask slip more frequently.


_________________
"If you stick a knife in my back 9 inches and pull it out 6 inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out, that's not progress. The progress is healing the wound that the blow made... and they won't even admit the knife is there." Malcolm X
戦争ではなく戦争と戦う


uncommondenominator
Veteran
Veteran

Joined: 8 Aug 2019
Age: 42
Gender: Male
Posts: 1,187

24 Jun 2021, 2:38 pm

"Show me these supposed racists!" might mean more if the bar wasn't placed so terribly high. For some reason, some people seem to think that a covert racist isn't really a racist - and that to be a "Real Racist", you have to roam the streets beating and murdering POC, while wearing a hat and shirt that say "white power! POC must die!", and chanting "white power!" - and anything less that than, well, that simply can't be a racist.

Set the bar high enough, and nobody would be a "racist".

The Klan loves them some Tucky C. They think he's good at saying the things they want to say, in a covert enough way that they can deny the racist trappings of their thoughts.



Mr Reynholm
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 19 Feb 2019
Age: 57
Gender: Male
Posts: 1,363
Location: Tulsa, OK

24 Jun 2021, 2:55 pm

uncommondenominator wrote:
"Show me these supposed racists!" might mean more if the bar wasn't placed so terribly high. For some reason, some people seem to think that a covert racist isn't really a racist - and that to be a "Real Racist", you have to roam the streets beating and murdering POC, while wearing a hat and shirt that say "white power! POC must die!", and chanting "white power!" - and anything less that than, well, that simply can't be a racist.

Set the bar high enough, and nobody would be a "racist".

The Klan loves them some Tucky C. They think he's good at saying the things they want to say, in a covert enough way that they can deny the racist trappings of their thoughts.

So they are Secret Racists?
So secret that they don't even realize their own racism themselves?



techstepgenr8tion
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 6 Feb 2005
Age: 44
Gender: Male
Posts: 24,148
Location: 28th Path of Tzaddi

24 Jun 2021, 2:57 pm

Isn't the whole idea that people may or may not be racist but it's aside from the point - ie. the institutions they take part in are amorphously racist, they survive on the institutions as everyone else does, thus indirect racism is baked into their psyches the way non-smokers growing up with smoking parents have a backlog of second-hand smoke tar in their lungs?

The whole point is that if you have a job or spend a lot of time dealing with bureaucracies and you haven't spent five or six years manually searching and cleansing yourself of implicit racism and making that your primary focus in life then it's in you and you haven't begun the work yet (and obviously if you don't believe it's in you that's just how well repressed / hidden it is).


_________________
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” - James Baldwin


techstepgenr8tion
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 6 Feb 2005
Age: 44
Gender: Male
Posts: 24,148
Location: 28th Path of Tzaddi

24 Jun 2021, 3:24 pm

Also if you really need to get 'deep in there' and search for influences and memories you aren't aware of - we have technology for that and we've had it for decades:

Image


_________________
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” - James Baldwin