Anti-CRT Hysteria

[laughing dog]

If Gospel's theory about the Florida legislators' purposes were correct, then why the devil wouldn't the legislators have explicitly included teaching CRT on their list of prohibitions?

Perhaps casting a wide net allows their howling constituents more freedom to go after even more “heretical” teachings, Really, this isn’t hard once you leave your echo chamber.

That's an explanation of why they had a whole list of prohibitions; it's not an explanation of why CRT didn't make the list.

It is a list of possible explanations. The only way to know why the CRT was not explicitly mentioned is to ask the legislators. Apparently you are fishing in the wrong pond.

If they wanted to cast a wide net, well, "X, Y, Z and CRT" is a wider net than "X, Y, and Z".

Actually it is not a wider net when you actually think about it and realize that CRT is included in X, Y and Z (as is just anything that achieves the outcomes listed).

Really, this isn’t hard once you leave your illogic chamber.

I agree.

 

[Bomb#20]

Jon Stewart discusses CRT.

Good bit at 4:49, where he pops up a quote from ABC News saying "New Florida bill would ban feelings of 'discomfort' in teachings about racism in US history", and infers "and Florida has legislation to make it illegal for a white person to feel uncomfortable". I.e., he simply accepted the ABC News headline as factual without checking whether what ABC said was true. Jon Stewart used to be a better journalist than this.

 

[Gospel]

The piece from Stewart was likely done before they changed the wording in the bill. Because it did at some point say something along the lines of cause to feel uncomfortable.


Edit: https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2022/148/BillText/Filed/HTML
(Just search for discomfort)

 

[Jarhyn]

The piece from Stewart was likely done before they changed the wording in the bill. Because it did at some point say something along the lines of cause to feel uncomfortable.


Edit: https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2022/148/BillText/Filed/HTML
(Just search for discomfort)

Of course this is much like what I have been seeing over in Other PD for about a year or so: when language is too obviously saying something fucked up, rather than removing the fucked up parts, they just use language that seems to hide the "error" more deeply.

 

[Gospel]

The piece from Stewart was likely done before they changed the wording in the bill. Because it did at some point say something along the lines of cause to feel uncomfortable.


Edit: https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2022/148/BillText/Filed/HTML
(Just search for discomfort)

Of course this is much like what I have been seeing over in Other PD for about a year or so: when language is too obviously saying something fucked up, rather than removing the fucked up parts, they just use language that seems to hide the "error" more deeply.

And we're all supposed to forget seeing their card when they accidently turn them over at the poker table. Then they try to give up cards to the dealer like we don't know what the other two cards are.

 

[Bomb#20]

Jebus! With liberals like you, who needs alt-right fascists?

Dude, if you are going to give them the keys to the kingdom and defend their actions, what ... do you expect from us?

Three things:

(1) The voters gave them the keys to the kingdom, not I.

(2) Last June, when the shoe was on the other foot in the "Bringing Christian Prayer Back" thread, you were no fan of public school teachers being allowed to force their employer to endure them preaching to schoolchildren.

(3) I expect kneejerk irrationality from you, of course. I expect you to regard the government promoting your opinions as a human right, I expect you to regard the government promoting contrary opinions as a crime against humanity, and I expect you to regard anyone pointing out your double standard as a fascist. When have you guys ever given me reason to expect more objectivity from you?

Your argument is effective the CRT version of the "George W. Bush never said 'Hussein caused 9/11'."

GOP politicians are railing on CRT. The Virginia Governor made it a centerpiece issue when he ran!

Are you yet another of the semiliterates making believe Bomb says "this isn't about CRT! Nobody mentioned CRT!"? My argument introduced empirical evidence against a contention made by another poster; your ability to fantasize about some other hypothetical contention the same factoid could have been offered as evidence for is your issue, not mine.

This ... is happening all across the country.

Since January 2021, 42 states have introduced bills or taken other steps that would restrict teaching critical race theory or limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism, according to an Education Week analysis. Seventeen states have imposed these bans and restrictions either through legislation or other avenues.

A total of 16 states so far have signed into law bills restricting education on race in classrooms or state agencies.

There are currently 19 states that are considering bills or policies that restrict race education in schools or state agencies.

And? You said it yourself: "Yes, 1-6 are things that should be disallowed in any and every classroom in Ohio". So why the bejesus shouldn't there be 42 states, or even 50 states, taking steps to disallow certain ways of teaching about prejudice and discrimination, just as there should be 50 states taking steps to steps to disallow certain ways of teaching about Christianity. Does anyone here oppose 50 states taking steps to disallow certain ways of teaching about Christianity?

It is of course perfectly appropriate for us to examine the steps any given state takes -- the devil is in the details -- and criticize a state that goes too far. But this blanket out-of-hand rejection of government placing limits on government employees abusing their authority over schoolchildren to reproduce their own ideological memes, when the memes in question are ones you agree with, is beyond unreasonable. And every one of you guys would abandon that approach in a millisecond in the case of memes from an ideology you oppose.

You read through the OH legislation and, boy... it is shocking that the GOP didn't pass these bills in the 1960s.

Shocking? Why? The subject hadn't come up yet -- the cultural forces that have been turning academia into a leftist echo chamber hadn't gotten far enough for that. People were telling children they could shield under their desks from H-bombs, not that color-blind policies are racist.

Passed 60 years later... reads like an racist anti-racist bill.

Why does it read that way to you? Because you think color-blind policies are racist?

This is the text of most concern, it speaks to what is forbidden in class with 1-7 really being the same thing repeated over and over again:

(7) An individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual's race or sex;

That guilt bull... again.

They're not all the same thing repeated over and over. Number 1 prohibits teaching children to be racist or sexist. 2 prohibits teaching specified prejudicial stereotypes. 3 and 4 prohibit teaching children to engage in racial discrimination. And those aren't all the same thing, though the distinctions are somewhat subtle. 5 and 6, yes, those are kind of like number 7 over and over.

(10) The advent of slavery in the territory that is now the United States constituted the true founding of the United States;

(11) With respect to their relationship to American values, slavery and racism are anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to the authentic founding principles of the United States, which include liberty and equality.

What ... does this even mean?!

It means "Don't use the 1619 Project".

And here is the real one.

(C) If a student completes a course that includes any of the concepts described in divisions (A)(1) to (11) of this section, that course shall not count towards the requirements for high school graduation specified in section 3313.603 of the Revised Code.

Bingo -- that's the real one. Like I said, the devil is in the details. Each of these state laws needs to be judged on its own merits, not on wholesale hostility to governments failing in some imagined duty to pay people to promote your ideology for you. And on its own merits, the Ohio law is godawful -- because of that clause.

Yes, 1-6 are things that should be disallowed in any and every classroom in Ohio, but of course, it wasn't happening in any systemic nature to begin with, if it were happening in isolated classrooms at all.

The notion that we should only prohibit things happening "in any systemic nature" is ridiculous. If somebody does something he shouldn't, why should the rest of us have to wait until it's happened twenty times before we pass a law against it? How is that fair to the next nineteen people hurt by it?

Issue 7 is such a meaningless and amorphous standard.

Doesn't look meaningless and amorphous to me. Looks like it means if a teacher says "we're going to teach what happened, and how 'what is' is a legacy of 'what was'," this is all well and good; but if that teacher goes on to say "and if that makes you feel uncomfortable, GOOD!", then that teacher needs to be reined in -- and if persistent about it, like a coach who keeps leading students in prayer after being told to cut it out, fired.

9 to 11? They are suggesting credit no be allowed... which means not graduating! But no pressure on the teachers.

Are you suggesting what's wrong with that is pressure on the teachers?!?

The teachers are volunteers. If they can't handle the pressure of knowing the difference between their ideology and their professional duties the same way Christian teachers are used to be expected to, they know where the door is. But the students are a captive audience. The Ohio law punishes students for being preached at and students can't help it if they're preached at. Of course the purpose is to pressure the teachers -- "People respond to incentives. That is the whole of economics; the rest is commentary." -- and the government has every right to pressure its paid employees to comply with policy. But that doesn't make it okay to suppress resistance to the policy by using children as human shields.

 

[Bomb#20]

The piece from Stewart was likely done before they changed the wording in the bill. Because it did at some point say something along the lines of cause to feel uncomfortable.

Ah, that might explain it. Never mind... [/Emily Litella]

 

[fromderinside]

Children. Today's assignment is to trace and identify the actual origins meanings and sources of  Critical Race Theory* including citations and abstracts of previous posters included.

That should mean to you that the snippets above aren't adequate.

Note; I've provided a beginning point for your research. It is your job to recite, enlarge, and interpret your take on that information. Open book, unlimited time within reason

* I recognize the title is not adequate to the task So if you want to adjust to 'A Critical Historical Examination of Race in Modern American Culture' or some other even better title feel free to do so.

 

[Politesse]

It doesn't matter how many CRT reading lists you throw at the problem, their opinions were not arrived at by research in the first place and research cannot therefore resolve their confusion. If conservatives were capable of reading and understanding entire "chapter books" on social theory, they wouldn't be conservatives, would they?

 

[Bomb#20]

It so silly this attempted gaslighting on CRT. CRT, as its creators freely admit, is looking at everything, everything, through a racial lense. That has no place in the public classroom.

Why would looking through a racial lens have no place in any classroom? That would prohibit discussions of racism for example.

No it wouldn't. But at least you acknowledge what CRT is. When all you have is a hammer . . .

I acknowledged nothing. I simply pointed out that your conclusion (regardless of its premise) was utterly untrue.

But you derived your conclusion that Oleg's conclusion was utterly untrue from your own utterly untrue premise that Oleg claimed looking through a racial lens has no place in any classroom. What Oleg claimed has no place in any classroom was looking at everything through a racial lens. Looking at racism through a racial lens does not require one to look at everything through a racial lens; consequently looking at racism through a racial lens in the classroom is perfectly compatible with CRT looking at too many things through a racial lens for it to be appropriate for a public classroom.

 

[Bomb#20]

The law likely doesn’t say CRT in it because they know that CRT isn’t actually taught in lower schools. And because the courts work in provable facts and you can’t just lie in courts they know they would lose any challenges.

For them to know CRT isn’t actually taught in lower schools, they would need to know what CRT is; it has been pointed out upthread that they appear not to. And including "No CRT" alongside the other things they prohibit isn't going to make them lose any challenges; they would simply try to prove in court that a school had violated one of the other prohibitions, exactly as they'll need to do with the law they passed.

By making the language vague they give themselves flexibility in court to make whatever argument they want and hope for a sympathetic judge.

If they wanted the law vague, well, adding "No CRT" would contribute quite a bit of vagueness. Which clauses they actually enacted do you perceive as vague enough to give them flexibility in court to make whatever argument they want?

It seems painfully obvious, from the plain text of the Florida law, that they were trying hard not to be vague about what they were prohibiting; and the theory that they were trying not to be vague neatly explains the otherwise hard-to-account-for observation that they left "No CRT" out of their law in spite of their implacable opposition to what they appear to think CRT is.

 

[Bomb#20]

What obtuseness? I can see how it might look like I keep obtusely overestimating other participants' ability to follow an argument containing more than one reasoning step, but keep in mind I didn't ask any of you to butt into my conversation with Gospel.

This is a public forum. It is pretty "obtuse" for anyone to complain about others "butting" into a public conversation. No one needs your permission to response to a public comment. Really, your response is pretty effing ridiculous.

Where the heck do you see a complaint about others butting in? I pointed out the fact that others butted in as background information pertinent to your contention; but of course for you to have figured that out you'd need to follow reasoning containing more than one step. What I'm complaining about is that certain people who butted in didn't take into account that they were butting in and have the common courtesy to make at least a token effort to understand what Gospel and I were saying to each other.

Have you bloody well considered the possibility that your opinion that it's irrelevant might have been derived from your preoccupation with the debate you talk like you think I was having with you, and your lack of interest in the debate I was actually having with Gospel?

It is irrelevant to the debate you would be having with anyone on the subject. Many posters have posted numerous reasonable and rational possible explanations for its absence which, for some reason, you appear unable or unwilling to accept.

But they weren't reasonable. They were all implausible for reasons I've pointed out.

I also find your new obsession with "progressive" rather amusing. There is nothing inherently with thinking or wanting a legislature to minimize its meddling in areas in which it has little or no expertise.

A legislature has no particular expertise on theology and yet that doesn't seem to stop any of you from wanting legislatures to meddle in whether public school teachers lead students in prayer. There is something inherently progressive about thinking or wanting a legislature to minimize its meddling with the preaching of progressivism while maximizing its meddling with the preaching of Christianity, just as there is something inherently Christian about thinking or wanting a legislature to minimize its meddling with the preaching of Christianity while maximizing its meddling with the preaching of progressivism. Progressives and Christians deserve each other.

What you seem unable to grasp that education is ultimately about preaching some ism. The debates over what which ism is permissible under the Constitution and which ism(s) ought to be taught that are permissible under the Constitution. Anyone who want to ban gov't schools from preaching any religion is either extremely naive/obtuse or is guilty of the same double standard they decry.

Explain that to this guy:

I think the football coach is wrong. It is completely inappropriate behavior. Having a "private" prayer meeting in the middle of the football field after a football match is not private.

So, given that school is built on indoctrination, some indoctrination must be appropriate, but appropriate indoctrination isn't this. So which aspect of this indoctrination is what makes it inappropriate? Is it that the beliefs being inculcated are false, or that they're unscientific, or that they're controversial, or that they're non-secular, or what? For example, suppose instead of pushing Christianity, the coach had been peddling Transcendental Meditation woo. Would that still be inappropriate?

IMO, it is the blatant religious nature of the "woo" that violates the separation of church and state.

 

[Bomb#20]

I'm a computer programmer. That means I spend much of my life debugging software that doesn't work right. ...

That conclusion appears to be derived from reasoning that relies on using the term "CRT" in different senses at different stages. I.e., your "precrime" contention is based on an equivocation fallacy.

I think you're being led astray with your debugging comparison. The problem isn't bugs, the problem is malware.

We are looking at it and rather than seeing a meaningless law we are seeing malware purporting to be meaningless. It's working as designed, not working as labeled.

Who said the law is meaningless? I think you didn't grasp my analogy. I'm not debugging the law; I'm debugging Gospel's reasoning about it.

 

[Bomb#20]

It isn't about what Democrats "mean" or Republicans "mean." Critical Race Theory is very well defined.

I think that’s the nut of it; it is the denial of that fact that Republicans (and apparently B20) hang their collective hat.

If you think it's very well defined, feel free to define it for us.

I’m pretty sure B is doing his best to stay out of that definitional tar pit, but is obviously failing in that effort.

Hey man, lexicography is a subfield of linguistics and linguistics is a descriptive science. The prescriptivists here can please themselves -- it's a free country.

 

[Bomb#20]

... Hey man, I didn't claim CRT is in the schools. I came into this thread to point out the OP was making a propagandistic trumped-up accusation against his political opponents, and people shouldn't do that. That is entirely consistent with the possibility that his political opponents are wrong.

Actually you've demonstrated the OP's point.

Actually, the OP made more than one point.

<some point>

Christopher Rufo, anti-"CRT" activist says this himself!
...
Seeing that <snip>, you are AGREEING with the assertion that <some point>

The whole thing is hysteria, because <snip>

The propagandistic trumped-up accusation against the OP's political opponents I'm referring to was his implication that they made up the connection between CRT and Marxism. I didn't dispute the rest of his contentions.

 

[Elixir]

If you think it's very well defined, feel free to define it for us.

Google is your friend.

Stripped of Republican re-definition for political convenience you'll learn that CRT is;

an academic and legal framework that denotes that systemic racism is part of American society — from education and housing to employment and healthcare.
Further study might enlighten you to the fact that it's not taught in grade school, just as you implied without knowing the definition.... go figure.

 

[Politesse]

I had a go at a slightly more comprehensive but still summarized definition, in our original thread on CRT. I have reproduced it below for Bomb #20's advisement, edification, or amusement:

Concrete it is not; it's more a very general paradigm of thought that has evolved over the last forty or so years through a network of publications by scholars starting arguably with the work of Derrick Bell and a loose network of his students and collegaues at Harvard and other elite American universities, especially Kimberle Crenshaw of UCLA. Its principal ideas are that the social theory of racism implicit in the social planning and legal framework of anti-racism employed through the 1960s (ie., that racism is primarily an individual choice made by socially dysfunctional persons primarily due to scientific ignorance on their part) was inadequate to address deeper, systemic forms of white supremacy that had been hard-baked into American law from the country's founding. CRT tends to focus on systemic, especially legal systems of racial discrimination, and has generally encouraged acceptance and synthesis of burgeoning areas of ethnic studies such as intersectionality theory and social contructivist models of semiotic study. CRT originated in the legal field, but had immediate implications in higher education, in part because the limited nature of tenured university appointments was a critical point of concern and activism for Bell and his students. CRT has thus been well known to those in the academic legal profession as well as to university administrators generally since about the mid-90's. Also around that time, other social sciences started taking an interest in the framework and occasionally interweaving it with the other major theoretical models of the day, for instance, within political science, sociology, and anthropology. CRT also has a historic though indirect connection to the discipline of Ethnic Studies and attempts to install the same at American universities.

All this should be carefully distinguished from what is meant by CRT in contemporary political dialogue; since 2019, essentially any potentially controversial material on race has been at risk of the accusation from the American political Right. This was exacerbated by the publication of the 1619 Project, a journalistic meta-project aimed at educating the public on the history of American slavery, published in connection with the quatercentenary of the advent of Transatlantic slave market. A number of the people who worked on the project also considered CRT to be a major guiding theoretical principle in their research, leading to the accusation that the project "is CRT". Most conservatives believe that a primary tenet of CRT is race essentialism, the idea that race is a biological reality inextricably connected to your personality and beliefs, and that individual Whites should therefore be held personally responsible for the existence of white supremacy, regardless of their views or actions. Whites, in short, cannot help but institute racism, as it is in their blood rather than their mind that the impulse to discriminate arises. While this has nothing to do with the academic school described above and in fact directly contradicts its core idea of race as a social construct, if you don't understand the accusation that is being leveled, nothing about the resulting controversy will make any sense.

Of course, that thread in and of itself demonstrates the bad faith nature of the "why can't someone just tell me in plain words what it is" and "what is your evidence though" rhetorical tropes, since nearly all the people participating in this thread also participated in that one.

 

[Elixir]

Of course, that thread in and of itself demonstrates the bad faith nature of the "why can't someone just tell me in plain words what it is" and "what is your evidence though" rhetorical tropes

QFT
The reek of insincerity is overpowering.

 

[Politesse]

Likewise, from further down that same thread after a few questions had been raised:

Race is fundamentally a social construct, situated within political frameworks that produce inequities between various demographic groups created by cultural categorizations of personal difference based on heritage and entrenched by collective social behaviors and institutions such as the legal system, and the social inequalities thus created both reflect and create the divide. While individual feelings and motivations may be of key interest to individuals, "racism" per se is more than just the some of many individuals' emotions; rather, it is instituted in macro social structures that individuals only encounter the way they usually encounter social institutions: as a small part of a larger system. You are not "family", but you experience family, because you were raised to expect certain familial structures definitions as a result of your culture. You are not "Christianity", but you experience it daily as a social institution that is difficult to avoid. Similarly, you are not "racism". But you were raised in, and live in, a society strongly subdivided by racial categories that have been reinforced by other macro social insitutions such as religion, law, and economics. Because these systems are not in your control, wishing away racism as an individual will be insufficient to address racial inequalities; they have to be addressed on a collective level, and through the lens of the institutions that reinforce them.

That means that if law is to be reformed into something that alleviates rather than exacerbating racial divisions, that will require careful analysis of how race became engrained and codified in law to begin with, and positive action to undo or reformulate all affected areas of law. This will not occur in a vacuum, as law does not exist in a vacuum but exists in constant tension with other macro social insitutions such as gender and religion, and the effectiveness of any planned legal intervention will be partially dependent on the cultural and social norms accepted and understood by the various actors who play a role in that system. These individuals should not be expected to all share identical experiences and perspectives either, given that their life experiences and enculturation can't be assumed to have been identical, and other forms of social categorization such as age, gender, economic class, and so forth heavily influence both how you are understood by others and consequently shape the messages you receive as you are growing up and becoming an adult member of your society. Also because of this, no one individual is really capable of experiencing and understanding the whole system of race unless through conversation with those who have experienced it from different vantage points, making diversity of experience critical in academic and legal contexts. Finally, given the variability inherent to social constructs, a legal framework of emancipation from racism must always be polyvalent, adaptable, and capable of understanding how a legal situation may have been uniquely created by conditions a more general theory of law and race may not have anticipated; it also needs to be ready for changes over time, as racial categories tend to shift in scope and connotation over time in response to the social and political circumstances of the moment.

Whether you "agree" with CRT is irrelevant; as with any academic theory, it's more relevant to ask about whether it is a logically coherent construct that agrees with the observed facts we encounter in the world than whether people "like" it or not.

 

[laughing dog]

What obtuseness? I can see how it might look like I keep obtusely overestimating other participants' ability to follow an argument containing more than one reasoning step, but keep in mind I didn't ask any of you to butt into my conversation with Gospel.

This is a public forum. It is pretty "obtuse" for anyone to complain about others "butting" into a public conversation. No one needs your permission to response to a public comment. Really, your response is pretty effing ridiculous.

Where the heck do you see a complaint about others butting in? ..

The term "butting in" is a complaint. Duh.

Have you bloody well considered the possibility that your opinion that it's irrelevant might have been derived from your preoccupation with the debate you talk like you think I was having with you, and your lack of interest in the debate I was actually having with Gospel?

It is irrelevant to the debate you would be having with anyone on the subject. Many posters have posted numerous reasonable and rational possible explanations for its absence which, for some reason, you appear unable or unwilling to accept.

But they weren't reasonable. They were all implausible for reasons I've pointed out.

You failed.

I also find your new obsession with "progressive" rather amusing. There is nothing inherently with thinking or wanting a legislature to minimize its meddling in areas in which it has little or no expertise.

A legislature has no particular expertise on theology and yet that doesn't seem to stop any of you from wanting legislatures to meddle in whether public school teachers lead students in prayer. There is something inherently progressive about thinking or wanting a legislature to minimize its meddling with the preaching of progressivism while maximizing its meddling with the preaching of Christianity, just as there is something inherently Christian about thinking or wanting a legislature to minimize its meddling with the preaching of Christianity while maximizing its meddling with the preaching of progressivism. Progressives and Christians deserve each other.

What you seem unable to grasp that education is ultimately about preaching some ism. The debates over what which ism is permissible under the Constitution and which ism(s) ought to be taught that are permissible under the Constitution. Anyone who want to ban gov't schools from preaching any religion is either extremely naive/obtuse or is guilty of the same double standard they decry.

Explain that to this guy:

I think the football coach is wrong. It is completely inappropriate behavior. Having a "private" prayer meeting in the middle of the football field after a football match is not private.

So, given that school is built on indoctrination, some indoctrination must be appropriate, but appropriate indoctrination isn't this. So which aspect of this indoctrination is what makes it inappropriate? Is it that the beliefs being inculcated are false, or that they're unscientific, or that they're controversial, or that they're non-secular, or what? For example, suppose instead of pushing Christianity, the coach had been peddling Transcendental Meditation woo. Would that still be inappropriate?

IMO, it is the blatant religious nature of the "woo" that violates the separation of church and state.

Is it desperation or unawareness of the US constitution that prompted the above?