What, exactly, is CRT?

[lpetrich]

Not too surprising. Having grown up in a small town myself, I can see how teaching children what abuse and gaslighting look like could be extremely disruptive to social order.

Because i makes bullying less effective?

 

[Politesse]

Not too surprising. Having grown up in a small town myself, I can see how teaching children what abuse and gaslighting look like could be extremely disruptive to social order.

Because i makes bullying less effective?

Exactly. You get children calling the police on the parents, or just leaving town when they turn sixteen. Very disruptive to culture transmission.

 

[barbos]

I agree will Bill Maher pretty much on everything.
Ultra-progressive are ruining it for everybody by overdoing it.

 

[ZiprHead]

 

[ZiprHead]

Surprise! Press stopped caring about Critical Race Theory exact time GOP did

Listen now (7 mins) | Don't act shocked

pressrun.media

Yet suddenly, the topic seems to have disappeared into the ether. “No one is talking about CRT now that the election is over,” tweeted journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of the acclaimed 1619 Project. “That media stopped reporting this made-up controversy speaks to the complicity in the propaganda campaign.”

Using the Nexis database, I searched for articles, columns, or transcripts that mentioned “critical race theory” two or more times and were published or aired this year, and looked at how many of those were produced in December, after the GOP had successfully used its education scare campaign in the Virginia race. The matches confirm there was a massive media drop-off among national outlets. (Local coverage of CRT has remained more consistent.)

For instance, ABC News aired 31 reports on CRT between January and November, then 0 reports in December, according to Nexis. CNN produced 183 segments that mentioned the topic two times or more during the first eleven months of the year, but just one in December. At Politico, the before and after ratio was 48: 1. Dallas Morning News, 69: 2. The Los Angeles Times, 38:0. CNN’s newswire, 88:2.

It’s telling that the trend of turning away from CRT after the votes were counted in Virginia, and all that election punditry quieted down, has been even more pronounced among right-wing media outlets. Fox News aired a staggering 430 CRT segments the first eleven months of the year (or nearly 40 per-month), but just 7 in December.

The Daily Caller churned out 215 items between January and November, and 7 this month. The Washington Examiner has produced 280 CRT updates this year; none in December. The Washington Times: 130, compared to just three in December. And Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post published 60 CRT dispatches, then 0 since November.

It’s clear that following the election, conservatives and journalists came to the exact same conclusion at the exact same time about CRT. That’s because journalists spent most of this year simply regurgitating right-wing lies and refusing to highlight the obvious holes in the race-baiting allegations. (CRT is an academic framework taught at the college level that examines how systemic racism is ingrained in America’s history.)

Benghazi during the Obama presidency was a classic example of how Republicans hijacked the news for months and years on end, and the Beltway press happily playing along.

What’s different with the CRT media charade is that Benghazi actually happened — there was a terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate on Sept. 11, 2012, in Libya, and four Americans did die. By contrast, the CRT controversy was completely made up by Republicans — it’s not taught in schools K-12 — yet the press still peddled it without pause for most of 2021.

For the record, conservatives still care about critical race theory, in the sense that they’re trying to bully educators into not teaching students uncomfortable truths about American history and the role racism has played in it. Republicans across the country are busy today trying to ban books from public schools and outlaw topics teachers can teach.

It’s just that GOP politicians are not making lots of noise about the topic because there are no campaigns to slot the message into to generate phony outrage, like there was in Virginia this fall. That means the media aren’t interested either.

The press played a central, defining role all year in helping spread that phony outrage. Back in the spring, the Washington Post published a 3,000-word look at the GOP’s critical race theory campaign. Yet the Post made no mention that the topic can’t be found public schools. The Post also made no effort to quote any Democrats about a Republican strategy to use the classroom wedge issue to defeat them next year. The Post though, did quote eight Republicans for the article, and marveled at the GOP’s success in creating the CRT controversy.

 

[lpetrich]

As parents protest critical race theory, students fight racist behavior at school - "Heated local debates over critical race theory are feeding into the bullying and harassment of students of color at school, making it harder to stop, parents and experts say."

During the first week of October, Brooklyn Edwards was in the school gymnasium during her lunch period when she said a classmate took a piece of cotton out of his pocket, tossed it on the ground and told her to pick it.

Brooklyn, 15, described the incident a month later at the Johnston County, North Carolina, school board meeting. She said she’d dealt with racist bullying frequently as a Black student at Princeton Middle/High School, in a majority-white small town southeast of Raleigh. Classmates called her racial slurs, she said, including in front of teachers who failed to react. One classmate suggested she kill herself, so she might be reborn as a white girl, Brooklyn said.

“It’s bad enough we have to deal with racism in the real world. We shouldn’t have to deal with it in school,” she told the school board, pleading with them to investigate racial harassment in the district. “I’m speaking up for the ones that are too scared to speak up for themselves.”

After sharing her experiences at the board meeting, “I felt relieved and glad they finally knew what was going on,” Brooklyn said in a recent interview, “but I had a lot of doubt they were going to do anything.”