Critical race theory in national curriculum promotes 'victim

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cyberdad
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10 May 2021, 4:55 am

I see nobody here is addressing the academic credentials of CRT :roll:

So if anyone cares to google the answer -
Point 1. CRT grew from the observable fact that despite legal challenges and civil rights advocacy (often violent) in the 1960s that white supremacy is still the bedrock of American society

Point 2.The central assumption of the field of CRT is —that personal narratives from people of color should be central to academic study of oppression. The assumption here is that white conservative academics are unable to be unbiased or objective due to a conflict of interest as they are invested in point 1 that they are part of the establishment that is the foundation of the oppression of ethnic minorities, particularly black people.

The premises are rather simple and it bemuses me why there are pages of posts opposing it when it is an established academic curriculum in all the major Ivy league universities in the USA.



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10 May 2021, 5:24 am

cyberdad wrote:
Point 2.The central assumption of the field of CRT is —that personal narratives from people of color should be central to academic study of oppression.


I can't say how this kind of thing plays out in the halls of academia. I'll leave that to people who have experience in that area. However, may I ask, what do you think about the non-Ivy League, ordinary people on the internet who twist this concept into a pretense to bully people and silence opinions they disagree with?

I'd assume that on matters of race, we would be expected to listen to what a person of color has to say. So why is it, when veteran animator Floyd Norman, a black man, wrote a post defending a controversial Disney film that has been accused of racism, the comments were full of people trying to explaining why his race didn't count. He grew up in a place that was too nice. He didn't experience the right kind of prejudice to have a valid opinion on the subject. Too many white people had shared his post and that proved it was wrong. People actually said these things about him.

And on Feminist issues, I assume that we would be expected to listen to a woman's opinion on the subject. So why is that when author Margaret Atwood, a woman, wrote an Op-Ed piece that was critical of Feminism, the comments were full of the same sort of thing. She's a privileged white woman. Ask PoC women, they'll tell you she's wrong. The very fact that she's able to have an Op-Ed piece in the newspaper proves that she's too privileged to have an Op-Ed piece. Etc., etc.

Now, you can agree or disagree with these people's opinions all you want as far as I'm concerned. I just don't understand why the idea is that we have to listen to a person because they're from the "correct" group to have an opinion...unless that particular person happens to have the "wrong" opinion.



Last edited by vividgroovy on 10 May 2021, 6:30 am, edited 3 times in total.

slam_thunderhide
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10 May 2021, 6:12 am

cyberdad wrote:
I see nobody here is addressing the academic credentials of CRT :roll:

So if anyone cares to google the answer -
Point 1. CRT grew from the observable fact that despite legal challenges and civil rights advocacy (often violent) in the 1960s that white supremacy is still the bedrock of American society


You can go on all you like (in underline!) about “observable fact” as if you were discussing the laws of the natural sciences, but your statement is still meaningless.

To paraphrase my previous post: your complaints about “white supremacy” being the bedrock of American society have no logical end-point. There will never come a point where people like you stop making these claims. To people like you, there will always be “more work that needs to be done”.

cyberdad wrote:
Point 2.The central assumption of the field of CRT is —that personal narratives from people of color should be central to academic study of oppression. The assumption here is that white conservative academics are unable to be unbiased or objective due to a conflict of interest as they are invested in point 1 that they are part of the establishment that is the foundation of the oppression of ethnic minorities, particularly black people.


Another ridiculous paragraph. The fact is there is nobody in society who is free of bias on a subject like this, whether it’s white conservatives, “people of color” (who stand to gain from being granted more concessions in the fight against “the legacy of white supremacy”), or white liberal virtue signalers (who usually have nothing else to feel morally superior about).

Since you so often make such a noise about this subject, I think it would be useful for the rest of us if you could let us know which of these groups you belong to.

cyberdad wrote:
The premises are rather simple and it bemuses me why there are pages of posts opposing it when it is an established academic curriculum in all the major Ivy league universities in the USA.


And you finish off your post with this ridiculous appeal to authority. If you have such blind faith in humanities as an academic discipline, then I suggest you familiarize yourself with the Sokal affair. Anyway, I bet if we were discussing some of the “academic racists” (Carleton Coon, Arthur Jensen, Hans Eysenck etc) who have worked at some of the world’s leading universities, you’d change your tune and start telling us their work couldn’t be trusted.



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10 May 2021, 5:21 pm

Credentialed means that you should give more weight to that person than to some Joe Schmoe off the street. It does not guarantee the credentialed person or even the credentialed consensus is above criticism, it does not mean they are immune from biases of their life experiences, time, and place. Most credentialed people believed autism is a rare childhood disease caused by refrigerator mothers. They were successfully challenged by those know nothing heathen parents.


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11 May 2021, 1:53 am

vividgroovy wrote:
However, may I ask, what do you think about the non-Ivy League, ordinary people on the internet who twist this concept into a pretense to bully people and silence opinions they disagree with?.


Ivy league universities in any country set the benchmark for academic credentials that's all. There are ordinary people who accept CRT and don't bully anyone or silence other opinions.

The "T" in CRT is a theory so it is always open to peer rebuttal.



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11 May 2021, 2:04 am

slam_thunderhide wrote:
your complaints about “white supremacy” being the bedrock of American society have no logical end-point. There will never come a point where people like you stop making these claims. To people like you, there will always be “more work that needs to be done”.

The aspirational end point is based on MLK's famous quote that a person is judged on their character not the colour of their skin.

slam_thunderhide wrote:
The fact is there is nobody in society who is free of bias on a subject like this, whether it’s white conservatives, “people of color” (who stand to gain from being granted more concessions in the fight against “the legacy of white supremacy”), or white liberal virtue signalers (who usually have nothing else to feel morally superior about).

Well this is true but PoCs (like blacks, native Americans and hispanics) have specific characteristics relating to lower income, lower quality of life and lower lifespan which are linked to racism. A counter-argument is the relative success of immigrant groups entering the US, however it should be noted that immigrants from Asia or parts of Africa are selected because they are highly qualified/educated and have the necessary tools/skills to overcome barriers and succeed.

slam_thunderhide wrote:
Since you so often make such a noise about this subject, I think it would be useful for the rest of us if you could let us know which of these groups you belong to.

I'm just open minded

slam_thunderhide wrote:
I bet if we were discussing some of the “academic racists” (Carleton Coon, Arthur Jensen, Hans Eysenck etc) who have worked at some of the world’s leading universities, you’d change your tune and start telling us their work couldn’t be trusted.

I'm actually a big fan of Eysenk. Coon's separation of races is biologically 100 years out of date, he never understood population genetics and assumed that races of mankind evolved separately (a common mistake white supremacists made). Coon (and pretty much any person from his era) would be horrified to learn that all humans evolved in Africa.



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11 May 2021, 2:06 am

ASPartOfMe wrote:
Credentialed means that you should give more weight to that person than to some Joe Schmoe off the street. It does not guarantee the credentialed person or even the credentialed consensus is above criticism, it does not mean they are immune from biases of their life experiences, time, and place. Most credentialed people believed autism is a rare childhood disease caused by refrigerator mothers. They were successfully challenged by those know nothing heathen parents.


Exactly correct AS. But If somebody doesn't pose the question and form a theory (in the first place) then there's nothing to deconstruct.



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11 May 2021, 1:18 pm

Critical Race Theory and the ‘Hyper-White’ Jew

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Because current social justice ideology (“critical social justice”) is heavily influenced by critical theory of various kinds, including critical race theory (CRT). Despite its laudable goal of opposing racism and white supremacy, CRT relies on narratives of greed, appropriation, unmerited privilege, and hidden power — themes strikingly reminiscent of familiar anti-Jewish conspiracy theories.

To make matters worse, the expectation of solidarity between social justice allies allows anti-Zionists to use the latent antisemitic themes of CRT to propagate a false narrative about Israel without opposition from within the movement. This magnifies the existing anti-Jewish nature of the social justice project.

The subtlety is that, instead of targeting Jews directly, the target of critical social justice is “whiteness.” But this does nothing to protect Jews. In 2018, when Hasidic Jews were victims of a wave of violent attacks — a precursor to another cluster of bloody attacks to come a year later — Mark Winston Griffith, the executive director of the Black Movement Center in Crown Heights, told The Forward that some black Americans see Judaism as “a form of almost hyper-whiteness.”

Race is the locus of power in the critical social justice worldview, which holds that the dominant group — white people — will, when it serves their interests, conditionally invite minority groups into “whiteness.” When people (such as “light-skinned Jews”) can “gain the benefits of whiteness by dropping ethnic markers of difference,” as California’s Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum teaches, those people gain “conditional whiteness.”

The above is from the lesson, “Jewish Americans: Identity, Intersectionality, and Complicating Ideas of Race,” which instructs students that, “to the present day,” Jews continue to change their names (in other words, drop ethnic markers) and benefit from whiteness. At a time when the moral imperative is to “be less white,” there is no identity more pernicious than that of a once powerless minority group that, rather than joining the struggle to dismantle whiteness, opted into it.

In the critical social justice paradigm, that is how Jews are viewed. Jews, who have never been seen as white by those for whom being white is a moral good, are now seen as white by those for whom whiteness is an unmitigated evil. This reflects the nature of antisemitism: No matter the grievance or the identity of the aggrieved, Jews are held responsible. Critical race theory does not merely make it easy to demonize Jews using the language of social justice; it makes it difficult not to.

This is not merely theoretical. The CRT lens, and the theories with which it is suffused, are brought into corporations and nonprofits through diversity trainings and imposed on students across the country through campus activism, student-life programming, and even course curricula.

One “critically informed” social-work curriculum teaches that the notion of Jews “pulling themselves up by their bootstraps” is a “myth.” Instead, having “become white,” Jews benefited from federal programs that allowed “Jews and other European immigrants to be recognized or rewarded.” In other words, these social-work students are not taught that antisemitism is a conspiracy theory about Jews gaining unmerited success and power. They are taught that Jews, having been initiated into whiteness, have gained unmerited success and power.

Why does current social justice theory target Jews?

According to Kendi, the leading scholar of antiracism, “racial inequity is evidence of racist policy,” and “racial inequity over a certain threshold” should be “unconstitutional.” This obviously presents a particular problem for Jews, who represent roughly 2 percent of the U.S. population. A much higher proportion of Jews than non-Jews attend college. Jews represent an outsize share of winners of major awards, like Nobel prizes. As of 2020, seven of the 20 wealthiest Americans were Jewish. In virtually every major American industry and institution, Jews hold leadership roles disproportionate to their overall demographic numbers.

American Jews have generally looked upon Jewish success in the United States as evidence of the country’s fundamental (if far from fully realized) commitment to the principles of tolerance, fair play, and recognition of individual merit. But, according to critical social justice ideology, that explanation is not just false. It’s racist. Jewish success can be explained only by Jewish collusion with white supremacy.

Again, this is no accident. Critical social justice is not an extension of liberal or progressive politics, or even a critique of such politics. It is, as its more sophisticated proponents readily admit, a form of anti-liberalism. In Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic explain that “unlike traditional civil rights, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.” Concepts like the rule of law, merit, reason, knowledge, and even truth are seen as fictions constructed by the “white cisheteropatriarchy” that are used to perpetuate injustices against BIPOC groups (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color).

Arguments against this view are rejected out of hand. Logical analysis — or any independent thinking that questions the theory’s pivotal presuppositions — is evidence that the questioner is ideologically suspect and requires either education or ostracism. In fact, logic is itself seen as a tool of white supremacy, thereby invalidating it as a legitimate way of making a case. Perhaps this is how people who subscribe to critical social justice ideology can be blind to the inherent antisemitism within it. They must adopt the doctrine as a belief system rather than doing the critical thinking necessary to work through its internal logic.

Simply put, the “critical social justice” movement, informed by critical theory, represents an assault not just on core concepts of liberal democracy, but also on the epistemology that undergirds it. That’s something that ought to concern anyone, Jewish or not, who cares deeply for freedom and reason. And it should also concern everyone who wants to see true social justice succeed.

Bolding=mine


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11 May 2021, 7:19 pm

Interesting article. The author is entitled to his opinion. He obviously reacted very negatively to basic cultural sensitivity training on campus

1. The author asks that jewish people give up victimhood.
My response to this is that CRT states that it's up to the individual to decide if they still feel persecuted. It is naive of him to think anti-semitism doesn't still cause trauma to jewish people. He doesn't get to decide how people feel.

2. He believes Jews don't see race
My response is that this is self-evidently wrong. Jews in America identify as white, Israeli identity is coupled with whiteness. Ask any Falasha or Bene Israeli and they will roll their eyes at his comments.

3. He says he feels Jews are cancelled and unable to speak without being cancelled,
My response- he has not provided any evidence of this other than his own feelings are hurt.

4. He says CRT relies on denigrating critical thinking?
My response - CRT is an academic concept and is subject to the same scrutiny as any other theory. Again he provides no evidence of censorship or prevention of critical thinking or free speech?

5. CRT does not offer solutions
My response - He clearly does not understand CRT since the basis of the movement leading to the establishment of CRT in universities in America (what he is really objecting to) is based on the unfinished work of the civil rights movement started in the 1950s and 60s. The mission/objective is i) social inclusion and ii) social equality,

6. Jewish social justice and Jewish culture is ideally suited to coexist with a liberal, pluralist society premised on the equal dignity of each individual.
My response - he concludes with a non-sequitur. His premise perhaps is that CRT does not recognise the dignity of white people and Jewish people perhaps? I think it's his attempt to justify his arguments by finishing with a statement that can't be questioned as if this gives him some sort of high moral ground



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11 May 2021, 11:00 pm

cyberdad wrote:
There are ordinary people who accept CRT and don't bully anyone or silence other opinions.


I don't mean to suggest that everyone who accepts CRT is a bully. Likewise, as an atheist, I'm aware that there are many religious people who don't use their religion as a pretense to force their views onto others.

However, I do think CRT, by your own definition --

cyberdad wrote:
Point 2.The central assumption of the field of CRT is —that personal narratives from people of color should be central to academic study of oppression. The assumption here is that white conservative academics are unable to be unbiased or objective due to a conflict of interest as they are invested in point 1 that they are part of the establishment that is the foundation of the oppression of ethnic minorities, particularly black people.


-- opens the door to this sort of behavior by creating a group of people -- the Privileged -- who are defined as being too biased to make a legitimate argument. Thus, if somebody disagrees with you and you don't actually want to address the reasons why, all you have to do is put them in the Privileged category and they're automatically wrong. This is why I have a hard time believing that CRT is working towards your stated goal --

cyberdad wrote:
The aspirational end point is based on MLK's famous quote that a person is judged on their character not the colour of their skin.


-- when it's seemingly all about defining people by what group they're placed in and not the content of their arguments.

And as illustrated by my previous post, you don't have to be a white cis het male to get put in Privileged, Therefore Wrong category. If somebody wants to, they can find excuses to bump you into it.



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11 May 2021, 11:42 pm

ASPartOfMe wrote:
Critical Race Theory and the ‘Hyper-White’ Jew
Quote:
...In the critical social justice paradigm, that is how Jews are viewed. Jews, who have never been seen as white by those for whom being white is a moral good, are now seen as white by those for whom whiteness is an unmitigated evil. This reflects the nature of antisemitism: No matter the grievance or the identity of the aggrieved, Jews are held responsible. Critical race theory does not merely make it easy to demonize Jews using the language of social justice; it makes it difficult not to...


...Bolding=mine


The article discusses a number of topics that I know little about, such as the current college experience and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If it isn't already obvious, I tend to view most things through the lens of my special interest, Arts and Entertainment. (That's my bias.)

However, this brings up a trend I saw in the online Broadway fan community: critics of the musical "Rent" harboring a passionate hatred of the character Mark Cohen as a symbol of White Privilege, because he was raised in the suburbs and then "chose to be poor." In their view, this character is not merely a bad person, but one of the worst people ever in the history of fictional characters. He is usually placed in contrast to a homeless PoC character who did not "choose to be poor," despite the fact that nothing about her backstory is ever stated in the text of the play. One person went so far as to say that Mark must always be cast with a white actor in every production because his "white savior complex" is so central to his character.

Mark is Jewish and this almost never comes up these discussions. His creator, Jonathan Larson, was also a suburban-raised Jewish man who moved to New York and "chose to be poor" in pursuit of his theatrical career.



Last edited by vividgroovy on 12 May 2021, 12:53 am, edited 1 time in total.

cyberdad
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11 May 2021, 11:49 pm

These are valid points and CRT can be (and probably have been) abused in order to further other agendas.

There is the every present problem that members of the oppressed minorities (or their allies) don't know how to articulate or advocate for themselves or on behalf of others using evidence based information.

When something that appears to be offensive is said in public or published in the media or on television then there is a "knee-jerk": tendency to demonitise/discredit or punish the perpetrator rather than flag the offending material (and the source) for review by some regulatory body. I am all for inquiry and investigation not cancellation.

Careful scrutiny leading to revision or ban is my preference.



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12 May 2021, 12:47 am

vividgroovy wrote:
ASPartOfMe wrote:
Critical Race Theory and the ‘Hyper-White’ Jew
Quote:
...In the critical social justice paradigm, that is how Jews are viewed. Jews, who have never been seen as white by those for whom being white is a moral good, are now seen as white by those for whom whiteness is an unmitigated evil. This reflects the nature of antisemitism: No matter the grievance or the identity of the aggrieved, Jews are held responsible. Critical race theory does not merely make it easy to demonize Jews using the language of social justice; it makes it difficult not to...


...Bolding=mine


The article discusses a number of topics that I know little about, such as the current college experience and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If it isn't already obvious, I tend to view most things through the lens of my special interest, Arts and Entertainment. (That's my bias.)

However, this brings up a trend I saw in the online Broadway fan community: critics of the musical "Rent" harboring a passionate hatred of the character Mark Cohen as a symbol of White Privilege, because he was raised in the suburbs and then "chose to be poor." In their view, this character is not merely a bad person, but one of the worst people ever in the history of fictional characters. He is usually placed in contrast to a homeless PoC character who did not "choose to be poor," despite the fact that nothing about her backstory is ever stated in the text of the play. One person went so far as to say that Mark must always be cast with a white actor in every production because his "white savior complex" is so central to his character.

Mark is Jewish and this almost never comes up these discussion. His creator, Jonathan Larson, was also a suburban-raised Jewish man who moved to New York and "chose to be poor" in pursuit of his theatrical career.


Not a thing wrong with embracing a life in the arts - - that is, dirt poor as long as you can make art.


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cyberdad
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12 May 2021, 2:23 am

Kraichgauer wrote:
vividgroovy wrote:
ASPartOfMe wrote:
Critical Race Theory and the ‘Hyper-White’ Jew
Quote:
...In the critical social justice paradigm, that is how Jews are viewed. Jews, who have never been seen as white by those for whom being white is a moral good, are now seen as white by those for whom whiteness is an unmitigated evil. This reflects the nature of antisemitism: No matter the grievance or the identity of the aggrieved, Jews are held responsible. Critical race theory does not merely make it easy to demonize Jews using the language of social justice; it makes it difficult not to...


...Bolding=mine


The article discusses a number of topics that I know little about, such as the current college experience and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If it isn't already obvious, I tend to view most things through the lens of my special interest, Arts and Entertainment. (That's my bias.)

However, this brings up a trend I saw in the online Broadway fan community: critics of the musical "Rent" harboring a passionate hatred of the character Mark Cohen as a symbol of White Privilege, because he was raised in the suburbs and then "chose to be poor." In their view, this character is not merely a bad person, but one of the worst people ever in the history of fictional characters. He is usually placed in contrast to a homeless PoC character who did not "choose to be poor," despite the fact that nothing about her backstory is ever stated in the text of the play. One person went so far as to say that Mark must always be cast with a white actor in every production because his "white savior complex" is so central to his character.

Mark is Jewish and this almost never comes up these discussion. His creator, Jonathan Larson, was also a suburban-raised Jewish man who moved to New York and "chose to be poor" in pursuit of his theatrical career.


Not a thing wrong with embracing a life in the arts - - that is, dirt poor as long as you can make art.


A true artist or academic is not driven by money :wink:



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12 May 2021, 2:30 am

Kraichgauer wrote:
Not a thing wrong with embracing a life in the arts - - that is, dirt poor as long as you can make art.


cyberdad wrote:
A true artist or academic is not driven by money :wink:


This is why I found it baffling that a "starving artist"-type character should be so reviled on a discussion group for fans of the performing arts.



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12 May 2021, 3:45 am

vividgroovy wrote:
Kraichgauer wrote:
Not a thing wrong with embracing a life in the arts - - that is, dirt poor as long as you can make art.


cyberdad wrote:
A true artist or academic is not driven by money :wink:


This is why I found it baffling that a "starving artist"-type character should be so reviled on a discussion group for fans of the performing arts.


Which one?