Watch this short video and learn who is promoting and funding the attacks on “critical race theory.”
Very few of its critics can define CRT. Most seem to think it means teaching about racism today. They prefer to believe that racism ended with slavery. They are wrong.
Numerous states have passed laws banning the teaching of critical race theory, even though they can’t define what it is.
It’s meant to squelch all teaching about racism, past and present.
P.S.: the original post had some grammatical errors. I apologize. I wrote it on my cell phone while traveling in an Amtrak train. Forgive my poor editing.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Indeed. A travesty on everything we SAY we believe in. But jutt keep people ignorant. Informed scholarly research of our history might wake some people up. Keep “those people” in their place and of course for native Americans, genocide never happened. Ken Burns has a documentary coming up on genocide here. I for one look forward to seeing it.
“keep people ignorant.” A lot being said in those three words
The “right wing grievance industrial complex” is my new favorite term. This video is a clear and concise summary of the contrived outrage and concern for young people among right wing blowhards. It’s all a politically motivated smoke screen to gain votes and privatize public schools.
“right wing grievance industrial complex”……How very apt. Even to the extent some are making it their profession and thus profiting from prejudice and ignorance.
A teacher was just fired for this in Missouri (her contract was not renewed). The kids had read an award-winning book about a young man who experiences police brutality, and the teacher had downloaded and used an accompanying handout leading kids through a self examination on the subject of privilege. This, to the moron parents and senior district administrators, was “critical race theory.” And, ofc, Governor DeWTF of Flor-uh-duh has signed a bill that threatens to cut off state funding to public universities if they are found to be teaching “CRT.”
The Thought Police are here, and they are really, really stupid.
Governor DeWTF is my new favorite nickname for DeathSentence.
heehee. My attempted reply identifies wordpress issue with your post. It’s about that acronym embedded in what is now my new favorite nickname for Gov DeathSentence.
Ahhhh! You have solved the mystery, my shero!!!
Robert, Please supply a source for that teacher. I searched a bit and didn’t find anything. Thanks!
https://www.salon.com/2022/04/13/fired-over-crt-missouri-high-school-teacher-accused-of-teaching-critical-race-theory-loses-job/
Muchas gracias. Will check it out to see which district it was.
https://www.ozarksfirst.com/local-news/local-news-local-news/why-greenfield-missouri-school-officials-decided-not-to-renew-a-teachers-contract/
Again, Thanks!
The supe adminimal, perhaps unknowingly, gave the teacher a reason to challenge their decision, since more likely than not the district did not follow it’s own procedures in not renewing her contract. . . the first of which is never give any reason for non-renewal. Any adminimal worth his/her/its salt should know that you never ever give a reason for non-renewal.
I’ve been attacked in a similar fashion over what I taught/said in class and I was smart enough (even without tenure at the time) to make sure that what I did was tied to the curriculum and could prove it. I let them know that I understood the game they were playing (it was a board member who didn’t like what I did) and that I don’t play those kinds of games. The principal backed off because, #1-I gave him the correct answer to take to that board member and the supe adminimal and #2-they were going to have a shit storm on their hands if they didn’t back down.
Ms. Morrison should let them know that she is getting a lawyer involved.
Don’t call Governor DeSantis stupid if you don’t want to go into moderation. Do call Governor DeSantis stupid if you insist upon the truth.
Hmmm. I guess it wasn’t the word stupid that triggered WordPress.
Ron DeSantis has an undergrad degree from Yale and a law degree degree with high honors from Harvard. He is hardly stupid whether you agree with him or not.
This fact reflects very poorly on both Yale and Harvard.
Well, given the kinds of legislation that he supports and the reasons that he gives for supporting it, I wouldn’t call him “softly stupid.” LOL
Joking aside, your point is well taken, Ms. Fischer. DeSantis is not Trump-level stupid, and he is not Trump-level ignorant, either. And I fully expect him to be our next president.
Oh, NO, NO, NO, Ron DeSantis as our next prez!!!!! Too horrible to contemplate or even imagine. The guy is a putrid lying bunko artist of the worst order, he’s a smarter Trump, an amoral far right wing schemer and plotter. His first order of business will be tax breaks for the rich which will then trigger screams for cuts to the ACA, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.
Ron DeSantis is not stupid, I agree. He is vicious, unprincipled, lacks ethics or morals.
I am not happy with myself for having called DeSantis “stupid.” That I did so is my knee jerk reaction to constantly finding myself saying, “what the holy ____” every time I hear him talk about a piece of legislation that he is proposing. But this was inappropriate.
Here’s what I think will happen, Joe Jersey: He will be elected, and the Republicans will control the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the Presidency, and they will attempt to roll back voting rights, as DeSantis is even now trying to gerrymander away two black congressional districts in Florida; to outlaw abortion and gay marriage; to promulgate a national nationalist curriculum; to legalize using the military against protestors, and much else. And they will have a fight on their hands at a level that they can’t even dream of. This they will respond to with escalatory violence. Fasten your seatbelts. Turbulence ahead.
The laws you describe, Bob, are not stupid. They are mean, anti-democratic, reactionary, and vicious.
agreed
This blog constantly and deliberately distorts what most critics of CRT believe. I read a wide diversity of publications with opinions across the political spectrum, and I have yet to come across a conservative essay that favors whitewashing the history of America’s racial sins. Yes, in a vast country of 330+ million people there is a small percentage of diehards who favor such whitewashing, just as there is a percentage of people on the Left who favor suppression of speech that disagrees with their beliefs. Graduate level CRT isn’t being taught to K-12 kids, but its simplified version is in many schools.
The essay linked below is written by a conservative who opposes both whitewashing and pushing CRT on K-12 students. A key sentence: “Nobody critical of CRT believes that America’s history should be whitewashed—Texas’ bill “banning” CRT explicitly compels teaching “the history of white supremacy…and the ways in which it is morally wrong”. I await the ad hominem attacks that are 95+% of the comments on this blog.
https://www.newsweek.com/what-critical-race-theory-critics-are-actually-criticizing-opinion-1602747
OK. I have a question, then. Suppose that I tell a college-level class, “Racism was the Original Sin of the United States.” Have I, then, committed Thought Crime?
Racism was indeed the original sin of the United States. No well-informed, fair-minded person disagrees with that point. I don’t object to presenting CRT – including its simplified K-12 versions – as one way to think about America’s racial history. What I object to is presenting CRT as the ONLY non-racist way to think, trying to coerce everyone to buy into CRT.
You and I agree about that, Karen. Milton had it right about the grappling of truth and falsehood. So, isn’t that why we shouldn’t have laws telling people what they can’t teach?
In the wrong hands the anti-CRT crusade can be a witch hunt for any teacher that teaches factual history. The right has been trying to convince parents that public schools teach leftist propaganda. If there is any truth to this notion, I never saw any propaganda in my more than three and a half decades in public schools. The real intent of anti-CRT is to rile up parents and sow seeds of mistrust and discord in public schools to distract from all the underhanded privatization.
Absolutely correct. This is simply a weapon in their war to eliminate public schools.
Karen promotes the Koch script.
Her comment provides evidence for a claim made in the video about attempts to deflect. Americans who value the common good and oppose the Gates/Koch… oligarchy are advised in the video to recognize CRT as a deflection from the sinister, billionaire goal of privatization. Karen deflects on cue.
Unfortunately, people on the right think that any honest account of racism in history or today is CRT.
A note about Karen’s rhetoric. I’ve never seen or heard a decent person use the term ad hominem attack. The only times the term is trotted out is when a deplorable uses it as a lame attempt to gain a position of offense.
In terms of the content of Karen’s comment, I disagree. Ilya Shapiro should be denied the right to speak in publicly funded spaces.
Karen and I are equal to Shapiro. Our nation affords us that right.
White men at events like private Koch events can label us “lesser”, perpetuating the discrimination of the past. They can say we are only 3/5ths human. They can say as Peter Thiel (funds VD Vance for Senator) does, that women voting in a capitalistic democracy is an oxymoron. But, when all citizens including blacks and females, pay for and spend money to maintain public forums, no one should be permitted to espouse those views that call out Jewish people, women, men, blacks, whites, browns, Catholics, etc. as lesser nor, to suggest denial of equal opportunity (protected class status under U.S. law).
Since taxpayers have made religious organizations the 3rd largest U.S. employer, civil rights employment law should apply to their employees, in contrast to the SCOTUS ruling from the conservative Catholic majority .
There are benefits to free speech, Linda.
Also, I would hazard most commenters here have used the term “ad hominem attack.”
I support free speech, but also the importance of presenting a contrary view. Racist speech is vile; denial of the reality of the Holocaust is vile. Let them speak, and let them be refuted.
Linda, you show once again that you have had little exposure to opposing views, and you make clear that you do not favor free speech. I’ve heard the term “ad hominem attack” or a variant hundreds of times in my lifetime from people all across the political spectrum, including in college when a very openly liberal professor said that employing ad hominem is a logical fallacy. I give you first prize in a contest: for the most fanatical left-wing person I’ve ever come across online.
Don’tcha just love it when someone like Karen tells people they’re making ad hominem attacks, and then attacks someone like Linda — ad hominem. By the way, Charles Koch is a school reform founder. You like how I add homonym attack? No? Too bad.
It’s my sense of humor. Having a sense of humor can be good, especially involving education. Learning is best when everyone is having fun, methinks. Happy springtime celebrations, everyone!
Decades ago, the first person I heard use the term ad hominem in order to deflect and to shift attention from his moral laxness was an insurance salesman who subsequently admitted that he had sold whole life insurance to people who needed term insurance. He admitted he did it because he received higher commissions.
Reiterating- the term, ad hominem, is the go-to argumentation device for people who have marginally-engaged consciences, if any.
Linda
The only people I have heard use term ad hominem attack are doing so as they are making ad hominem attacks. It goes with their personality of feeling constant grievance.
Right wingers inhabit hypocrisy.
And then there are the ad hominy attacks, which involve using a peashooter.
So, for example, should The University of Florida not be allowed to hire or host Professors Tony Greenwald (University of Washington), Mahzarin Banaji (Harvard University), Brian Nosek (University of Virginia), Bethany Teachman (University of Virginia), or Matt Nock (Harvard University) because of their involvement with Project Implicit and with compiling results from the Implicit Bias Scale? For that seems to be what the new Florida law is saying. And what of a professor who is avowedly Marxist?
My take, a university is supposed to be a place where competing ideas can contend. So, hire the Libertarian prof. Hire the Marxist one. And let them duke it out.
The Five Tenets of CRT
There are five major components or tenets of CRT: (1) the notion that racism is ordinary and not aberrational; (2) the idea of an interest convergence; (3) the social construction of race; (4) the idea of storytelling and counter-storytelling; and (5) the notion that whites
have actually been recipients of civil rights legislation.
from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED506735.pdf
Is the university that employs a professor who professes these ideas to be defunded? For that is what the new Florida law suggests.
Whatever happened to the idea of a university as a free and open forum in which people of opposing views (Milton Friedman and Michael Harrington, for example) can teach and debate their views?
“I object to . . . presenting CRT as the ONLY non-racist way to think”
I agree. I am ALL IN with the idea of presenting the opposing points of view of legal colorblindness and critical race theory, which challenges the validity of that legal framework.
But that’s not what the spate of anti-CRT legislation around the country does.
Karen Wood…thank you, Finally, a voice of reason. We cannot erase history, but we don’t want to create a new narrative. We want the truth. This oppressor, oppressed stuff, does nothing but spread division and anger…them and us. It does nothng to improve our society, education or values NOW. Conservatives are afraid of the Marxism that is behind the promotion of CRT
CRT has nothing to do with Marxism. It is about finding the truth and telling it.
Do you think that racism is all over? Finished? Done?
Then we don’t agree.
We need to acknowledge its roots and its presence in our laws and practices.
We need to fulfill the American dream.
April, it is only possible to see the history of the United States as not one of oppressive race relations if one is almost completely blind to that history, from genocide against the native population and a Constitution that counted blacks are partial persons to slavery to Jim Crow to systemic racism throughout the country today, seen in matters like black people with the same credit scores getting higher interest rates if they try to buy homes to blacks being much more likely to be ticketed or arrested for the same infractions to blacks getting longer prison sentences for the same crimes. CRT has NOTHING whatsoever to do with Marxism. Educate yourself.
April, here is The Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, in his own words:
“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races—that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.” –Abraham Lincoln, Letter to George Robinson, 1855
Lincoln hated slavery, but he thought white people superior. In other words, he was, by any reasonable definition, a thoroughgoing racist. There is an enormous gulf between the myth and the reality of this history. Give me the reality, warts and all. This is a waystation on a long, long road up from colonial white supremacist beliefs and values, and we still have a long, long way to go. CRT is part of the academic debate on how to get there.
Karen and April will be shocked when the next right wing action is implemented- an attack against birth control. And, they will be shocked again when their votes are taken away. They believe voter suppression is limited to black people. They’ll be shocked each time women lose another right at the hands of Republican men in the legislatures and executive branches.
I doubt they will be shocked.
April and Karen want to ignore Black and women’s history at a time when the GOP is attacking the rights of both groups.
History- “The record number of women serving as governors simultaneously, was achieved in 2004, 2009, 2019, 2021 and 2022.” The number is 9 women (and 41 men). If Democratic female governors are excluded, the number in 2022 is 3 GOP women governors.
From 1925 when the first female governor was elected to 2022, only 18 Republican women have been governors. The GOP has done little to advance female political leadership and they have done much to weaken the power that women should be able to exert in a democracy.
Linda, if you are going to comment publicly you should at least make the effort to be well-informed. The belief that Republicans want to take away the rights to birth control and for women to vote is beyond absurd. Several years Planned Parenthood published a survey that showed something like 98% of American heterosexual, sexually active women of child bearing age (excluding teenagers) had used birth control at some point in their lives; that figure included 90+% of Catholic women. So 90+% of American women – not counting the men in their lives – will support banning birth control and vote for politicians who support that?
And how many American women – i.e. the majority of the voting age population – favor taking away women’s right to vote? How many American men favor doing that? In your nutcase mind, many do, but in reality few do.
Apparently, Republicans think it’s acceptable to remove voting rights from black people.
Karen,
Pew reports (5-6-2021) that almost 60% of Americans favor legalized abortion. Yet, here we are.
Information about Obria and the USCCB can be found at Vox, 8-29-2019 and at WaPo, 7-22-2019. Wikipedia has an entry for the Obria Group. The clinics exclude hormonal birth control products favoring abstinence and the rhythm method (fails 25% of the time).
There are 6 conservative Catholic judges on SCOTUS who have the authority as the majority to prohibit the sale of reproductive medicine including on-line sales.
The Federalist Society, specifically Leonard Leo, was responsible for the appointment and confirmation of most of those judges. Leo has 9 children.
Karen— Whether or not a lot if not most women use birth control has nothing to do with it.
Here’s some coverage on Republicans’ attack on birth control. A 7/1/21 Vogue article by Molly Jong-Fast begins “Republicans have started to blur the lines between birth control and abortion in the hopes of making it harder for American women to get both birth control and abortions.” It reports on a Missouri statehouse discussion of proposed legislation, featuring falsehoods conflating medications that prevent pregnancy—birth control and emergency contraception—with medications that end pregnancy. On 6/24/21 Rep MTGreene repeated the same falsehoods in objecting to a bill ensuring veterans can get free contraception through the VA.
The trend started before that: in 2010 the Tea Party fought Obamacare by saying IUDs, Plan B, and contraception itself were “the biggest expansion of abortion in the nation.” Hobby Lobby in 2014: SCOTUS struck down the ACA contraception mandate for private for-profit corps with “religious objection,” thanks to the 5-4 majority held by conservative and Catholic justices.
I find it hard to argue with the author’s opinion that “Republicans want to blur the line between birth control and abortion because they want the power to control what happens to women’s bodies.”
While the video does not mention the Catholic church’s significant role in the Koch’s privatization plan, there is a frame in the video which provides an indication via a placard that is held up.
In a follow-up video, the video’s creators could identify the link between Ryan Girdusky (1776 PAC) and Pat Buchanan. They could cite Jefferson’s warning, in every age and country, the priest aligns with the despot. They could expose the influence of Catholic universities in privatization plotting. They could draw the connection – Ilya Shapiro, (made infamous for his lesser black female comment), the Koch network and Georgetown Catholic University.
They could use the article, “The new official contents of sex education in Mexico: laicism in the crosshairs” (3-3-2021, Scielo site) for background info.
The right wing’s “creepy new obsession” is Hungary. The Catholic Vote site praised the nation’s strong man, Viktor Orban. Hungary is near the bottom out of about 30 countries in the European Union as measured by the Gender Equity Index. Since 2010, the country has moved down 3 places in the rankings.
Tucker Carlson loves Hungary, the exemplification of an admirable society because of Viktor Orban’s “traditional family values.”
Orban considers Ukraine’s Zelenskyy an enemy.
Zelenskyy’s democratic values threaten oligarchy in Eastern Europe. He ran on an anti-corruption platform.
Charles Koch has a stranglehold on the Republican Party. The Party guarantees oligarchy (and, discrimination against women and POC). Koch relies on men like Tucker Carlson to provide support by all means necessary.
Koch continues business operations in Russia.
The swathe of ignorance which is sweeping The Right in Government in the USA reminds me of a joke which was going the rounds in the 1970s in the then USSR’s client state of Czechoslovakia.
Question: “How many secret police does it take to keep surveillance on a suspected dissident?”
Answer: “Three. One to write the report on the dissident’s activities. One to check the details of the report for possible sympathy for the dissident. And one to keep an eye on the two literates for being suspected intellectuals,”
Look I am devastated. I recently learned that most cowboys did not look like John Wayne.
Do you think that is an easy pill to swallow? Or another way to put that is the South does not end at the Mason Dixon line. Lofgren would argue that the Nascarization of Ohio (Michigan ,Western NY and Penn ….) is the migration of that toxic Southern Culture North.
No need to improve the standard of living of workers when Oligarchs can fight a culture war instead.
Pat Buchanan framed the religious right’s attack against American liberty as a “culture” war.” The wording creates the pretense that conservative religion isn’t the origin and that the campaign has more support than it does. Koch’s metaphorical kin, Chuck Todd of Meet the Press, furthers the device to assure GOP votes.
No need to improve the standard of living of workers when Oligarchs can fight a culture war instead.
Nailed it, Joel!
The GOP isn’t content thwarting women’s advancement within their own party. Iowa Judge Scott Beattie (appointed by a Republican) decided, based on 3 petition signers who made insignificant errors on the documents signed by thousands, that Abby Finkenauer couldn’t run in an Iowa Democratic primary. We can speculate that Beattie was protecting 88- year- old Chuck Grassley (R) from competition. Btw- the Iowa Supreme Court overruled Beattie recently.
Grassley voted to restrict UN funding for birth control policies, to prohibit …crossing of state lines for abortions, etc. (the NRLC gave him a 100% rating). He voted no on Jackson’s SCOTUS confirmation. He opposed stem cell research which makes the development of vaccines more difficult.
He’s loved by women-loathing oligarchs.
Media reported that In the weeks leading up to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Koch Industries gave campaign donations to politicians like Chuck Grassley. (The limited number of Dems who received the donations subsequently gave the money to Ukrainian aid organizations.)
Excellent video. More Perfect Union is a welcome addition to media coverage.