Critical Race Theory B- what is it, and why NOT teach it?

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If you know what exactly CRT is, and are opposed to teaching it, here is your space to explain what it is, and to explain why you are opposed to teaching it.

where can one find any actual public school curriculum on it?

CRT seems to be an angle to teach that the US has *systemic racism*.

CRT seems to make generalizations: White people (evil, privileged, racist) // Non-white people (VICTIMS).

I would like to see CRT advocates tell people....

"STOP BLAMING OTHERS FOR YOUR PROBLEMS!"
"STUGGLE, LEARN, and OVERCOME"
"OWN YOUR FAILURES"
"YOU'RE NOT A VICTIM (except, maybe of your own stupidity)"

CRT is annoying because it appears to be messages of victimhood, and not empowerment.

From what I have been able to find, Its is based on the 1619 Project that correlates The United States founding to the arrival of the first African slave in America. Which is demonstrably false.
It also teaches Marxism. Instead of class being what separates the oppressors from the oppressed it is race.

I saw the long and short version over in thread A so here's...

The Fundamental Version:
All Whites are racist and therefore EEEEEEEEEEVIL.

What you are proposing is not education, its called brainwashing.

Education is the teaching of accurate information in an objective and factual manner.

Systemic racism in the US is a real phenomena
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/us-s ... ?r=US&IR=T
https://time.com/5851855/systemic-racism-america/

MAGA philosophy is the based on pseudoscience and perpetuation of stereotypes designed to maintain an unequal society

guys, I'm European and fairly uneducated on CRT - I know the rough ideas and that it's hotly debated in the US and I'm quite grateful for these two threads. Also: the guys in thread A are doing a much more convincing job than the guys here in thread B. I mean: they're actually answering to the thread's main question and making good points. All I'm reading here is snark, and accusing someone who's claiming to have been treated unfairly of "victim-mentality". It's your job here to explain how they have been treated *fairly*, and not that it's a character flaw to think you have been treated unfairly. I can't tell if they have been treated fairly or not, but all you're telling me here is that they're bad people for claiming it. That's not an adequate response to the accusation of unfair treatment.

I think thread B is a second opportunity for anti-CRT folk to put their case forward.

Thread A was a lot of hyperbole and no substance.

Damn that's an oversimplification.
Let's try this: (I'm too tired to be brief)
Hi, I'm roronoa79. I'm white. I'm racist. That doesn't (necessarily) make me evil. You're probably also racist, and that doesn't make you evil. I was raised in a racist society, so I internalized at least some racist beliefs by default. Part of growing up is rationalizing the good and bad of society around us. Virtually everyone is racist to some extent in a racist society. That does not make them evil.

I'm sure you already think this, but racism is not exclusive to whites. Whites are just the primary benefactors of racism, and have historically shaped race relations to their benefit. Blacks can be racist against native Americans. Asians can be racist against Latinos. Jews can be racist against Indians. And vice versa. That doesn't automatically make them evil either.

"If we're all racist, and that alone doesn't make us bad people, then when does being racist make one a bad person?"
As long as you're self-aware about these things and are open to the possibility that you are racist in ways you aren't aware of, then that's okay. If you are racist, and someone not of your race says that something you are doing is racist, (especially if you are white), you need to listen to them without getting defensive. The vast majority of the time, they know exactly what they are talking about and are not blowing it out of proportion.

Being racist is a problem when you are consciously, intentionally racist; or when you are unconsciously racist in a situation when you should be able to recognize that you are being racist. Do not be dismissive of those who tell you you are racist just because you are not trying to be. We are not completely aware of ourselves--we can be things or have traits without knowing it. When we ignore people outside our racial(/religious/gender/whatever) group who tell us that something we do or think is harmful--that is when it becomes a problem. That is how otherwise decent, intelligent, selfless people can uphold racism.

Saying that every racist is evil is like saying every sinner is evil. We all sin. That alone does not make us evil. It makes us imperfect. We do not need to flagellate ourselves like we are worthless or irredeemable. We just need to be vigilant, open-minded, and willing to change. Thinking otherwise is downright puritanical.

I think what has most people bothered by it is the way the praxis is being used, ie. authoritarian techniques against authoritarian opponents, and that particular game is something most people don't want to get dragged into. Finding broad agreement that a lot of our laws have been racist and have had racist and classist implications for a long time isn't difficult, it's more the idea that someone's going to be teaching their kids ideas that can't be questioned in a manner that overshoots the mark and creates a whole new set of problems is what's setting people off right now.

Okay, what first hand evidence can you give that CRT that says this that white people are just evil and racist? Everyone has racial bias, it is just a thing, and probably cannot be attributed as something nebulous like being evil, outside of maybe who would rather not change anything or maybe even make things worse. And having privilege over others because of race, or other things, is not a far out concept.




The problem is that not everyone is on an even foot with these things, like only being the only one responsible for failures. It is like looking at a bunch of people that were raised in poor families and telling them off for not being as successful as people that were raised in a rich family.

That dogma you are quoting maybe helped some, but it is ignoring real systematic issues. And it has been so long since the problems like civil rights were supposedly fixed, but there are still issues that are still happening today, that just ignoring them isn't fixing it. How many more people have to die from unequal treatment based on race by the police, before it gets to become equal? Are those lives worth it? And what other discrimination exists? It wasn't and isn't too hard to find black people talking about how they have been treated differently based on their skin.

Please show me one example where one element of the CRT curriculum where information has been gathered that is not falsifiable?

This relies on critical analysis of sources for history. The American founding fathers assumed slavery would be a permanent feature of American society so meticulous records were kept of slaves, their names, age, gender as they were classified as property or chattel. Farmers kept inventory of cattle, stock animals and slaves for taxation purposes and this information has always been available in archives waiting to be unearthed for historic study.

There are numerous diaries where the slave owners kept of what they did to slaves. Luckily many of these have ended up in museums where they should be but I am sure thousands upon thousands of personal diaries have been locked away by embarrassed descendants or burned. Third newspapers have literally thousands of references to slaves, natives, blacks and what was published gives a good picture of the mindset of people at that time. Books both fiction and non-fiction also provide sources for historians.

All historic information is subject to critical review, but in an objective and unbiased manner not tainted by "white guilt" bias that seems to be the only defence the anti-CRT people have to oppose CRT.

So age-wise it would need to be taught in a level of detail commensurate to age and level of development in other areas, and for grade school kids the core distillation would need to be that we live in a world where, sadly, much of world history has been steadily throttled by abuses of power, imperialism, the Americas were products of empire that gained independence, and as we've gained in technology (as a species globally) we've tried to be a bit better to each other than we have in the past. It's perfectly fair to point out to children, teens, and young adults, that domination of groups has often fallen along lines of race, that slavery was terrible, and that much of what black America went through up through even the 80's was awful (slavery to Jim Crow to Great Society to crack epidemic and drug wars).

All of that said there is something of a Scientology social activism flank of this which does say that 'In every instance, every social event - racism happened, where was it'. It also makes the suggestion that people have the obligation of spending their lives searching themselves for racism, and if they don't believe it's there it means that they've hidden it that well from themselves. That part's poison, not just to social cohesion and quality of education but it damages and pejoritizes the very history that CRT would hope to convey. That part of it has no place in public school curriculums, especially grade school.

It sounds like we'd both agree that anyone who actually treats their students that way, especially elementary school students, has no business teaching it in a public setting (anyone who'd say that people espousing the later with a megaphone are nonexistent right-wing boogeymen only needs to have a very solid, alive, and breathing Robin DiAngelo pointed out to them and understand as well that she has a lineage of authors she's drawing from).

But does that flank actually exist as you are describing, or is it mostly made up to try in discredit the whole thing?

Introspection is still important. I have previously caught my mum sharing memes against Muslim people with the implication that they don't belong, and when I brought it up that it was racist she lost her mind in saying that she "isn't like that", which was kind of cringe. Bias like racism is something that can exist within everyone, even people themselves part of different groups/races, and is honestly rather embarrassing when people say something like they can't have done a racism or hold racist bias, because they don't do or think other racist things. Being a racist generally isn't something someone just is, rather it specific thoughts or feelings they hold. And then you get people who refuse to do the introspection, and then get confused when they find out that they did or said something wrong.

It is not saying that you have to pedantic in "spending their lives" (unhealthily) looking for racism in everything they do. But if someone refuses to maybe look at their own beliefs and consider there might be some unfair and unconscious bias there might be the seeds of bigotry there: obstinate or unreasonable attachment to a belief, opinion, or faction; in particular, prejudice against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group.

There is just no actual evidence that CRT is teaching something unhealthy, especially to grade schoolers. Rather it kinds of looks like some people really attached to their belief or opinion and don't a critical eye put to them, and so convinced a whole bunch of people that CRT invents racism, or maybe is just super negative minded. They would rather showing happy slaves who were just part of the family, rather than being treated as just property and could be sold and raped. It wasn't hard to find people in CPAC literally saying that black people were happier as slaves than they are now where divorce and abortion is a thing.

I mentioned Robin DiAngelo above, she and others like here are making fairly good money as corporate sensitivity trainers. Companies have been, for the past few years, using such speakers and their classes as a way of covering PR liabilities.


This is where I think it's set to rub a lot of people the wrong way. What you said here is true of a lot of people, it's not true of everyone. There are a lot of people who are high self-monitors for all sorts of reasons, including trying to navigate the world on the spectrum and their lives not having the affordances for slop that other people's do. What this amounts to is people who can't tell the difference between types of people, level of cognition, their key metric here is race, and thus would tell everyone across the board within that metric that they're in the same predicament of having no insight into how their own minds work. That sort of narrow technocratic approach gets illiberal if one then takes it with religious zeal. You can then add the extended definition of racism - that if they benefit from the institutions, capitalism, etc. then they're perpetuating racism by having cordial relations with a racist system.


So this is the kind of miasma that the US is infected with right now:
https://merionwest.com/2021/07/14/revie ... ce-racism/

I know people tend to be fond of assuming that pretty much any disagreement with the particulars is either thinly-veiled conservative bigotry or deep confusion, you get a good sense of why that's not the case.

This is why I'd also say that I see no confusion or contradiction in saying that I'm for as many people as possible understanding our history, how ugly the human condition has been on our shore and others historically and how it impacts our culture and others today, and at the same time I don't think 'critical consciousness' is the tool that we'd want to take ourselves into the future with - outside of accelerationists perhaps.


You'd have to define 'unhealthy'. The idea that the fundamental fabric of the US is racist and that all institutions and every trace of cultural 'whiteness' would need to be removed for it to be otherwise could be deemed healthy or unhealthy based on agreement or disagreement. It really doesn't take much work to run into the evidence that the source books that a lot of this is based on are pretty politically radical in their objectives, and most people aren't radicals. The question maybe then - should they be radicals and is it a problem that they're not radicals? Again, that's an open question but I think the fairer question is - radicals for what, to what end, and what likelihood of success?

What does the existence of corporate sensitivity trainers prove anything? I think that it is pretty obvious that a number of trainers in making money are kind of just filling a capitalist market of corporations who just want to make more money, and thus put in what they see as an expenditure to avoid PR problems. But especially again, what does someone like her have to do at all with what is being taught in education?




I am not quite sure what you are trying to say here. Are you trying to say that some people maybe need to self reflect, but others are just being misunderstood for reasons like being on the spectrum, so there shouldn't be any push for people to self reflect because some people who are being misunderstood might get grouped together as bigots or something? I think that there is a misunderstanding that people are called racist because they might benefit from a racist system, because that is stupid.




What is wrong with the book? How is it a miasma? Have you read it? At least from that article, kind of sounds like it is talking about How things people think can be helpful can still do harm. Kind of like if people thought that they were being nice to people on the autistic spectrum, but were still treating them like children by smiling and talking to them in an overly loud and clear voice while saying they are so special and smart. It an come across as patronising.

Do you not agree that people can do more harm by thinking that they are being helpful, but are going about it wrongly? I think that there might be a bit of projection by the people who are saying that someone like her is passing judgements on people, when really she is saying more like we need to have a discussion and not just assume that we are right about everything.

I still can't see what is actually the problem with the critical consciousness thing, because people are assuming that it passes judgement on people in particular. It would be like pointing to any particular person in history and saying that they had racist beliefs, where one person snaps back in saying "are you saying they are evil" while the other goes "no s**t they have racist beliefs, they existed in a particular point in history". CRT and is like doesn't pass judge on saying that George Washington was just straight up evil because he had slaves, but it does maybe says that maybe we should be a bit critical in some aspects that might be influenced by not great things, and how they might have impacted the future. How do you take lines from people who said that all people are equal, when they didn't think that all people were fully people?




Almost everything is influenced by some level of bias. You can't get a hamburger without some sort of bias that eating cows is better than eating horses. Cultural "whiteness" as something needed to be protected is dumb, since it is historically defined by what something/someone is no rather than what it is. A few generations ago the Irish were not considered white, and a lot of people don't include Jewish folk as white. It is one big strawman that there is some attack war against 'whiteness' or being white.

Whenever someone says that there is some agenda to remove whiteness because they made Captain America black or something, it is a misrepresentation of something like diversity. A book about 'white fragility' isn't an attack against white people, it is against fragility. Just like Martin Luther King Jr's speech calling out the "white moderate" as the greatest stumbling block for equality, it was not aimed to attack white people as a generality, rather the people who said they would agree with the idea of equality but keep saying that steps towards it are too radical.

People get so wrapped up in their own experiences, that they get uncomfortable when told that it is not the same as others. They think that reason will just win in the end if things are left alone, while history is rife with showing that the radicals are often needed to make changes, even if a lot of people will say that makes them uncomfortable. Not to say that every radical is a good radical, the best are generally the ones who can it up with reasoning, but so many of the anti-CRT people are basing their opinions just on feelings that it makes them uncomfortable and they could imagine that it is actually going too far.