MIDDLEBORO: ARE YOU LISTENING? Why Conservatives Want You To FEAR Critical Race Theory

 

Right Wingers have found their newest boogieman: Critical Race Theory. Brett Erlich, TYT's Director of Programming, breaks it down. Watch Happy Half Hour Wednesdays at 8:30pm ET / 5:30pm PT on https://www.twitch.tv/tyt

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Critical Race Theory Is the Right’s Latest Obsession. They’ll Have a New One Soon.

 

TomDispatch 

Carl Beijer at Jacobin puts in context the Right's fixation on critical race theory.

—Erika

You don’t hear much about it anymore, but about a decade ago the US right was absolutely obsessed with the book Rules for Radicals and its author, Saul Alinsky. If, like most people, you haven’t bothered to read Rules, it’s mostly just a guy giving some general advice to people involved with local activism. A lot of it is hilariously banal and intuitive — stuff like “keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions.” Some of it is the sort of meaningless mysticism you find in books like The Art of War for the Modern Retail Manager: for example, “if you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside; this is based on the principle that every positive has its negative.”

There is also some good but pretty innocuous advice here as well, like Alinsky’s point that you should find ways to make activism fun so that people don’t get burned out. In general, however, I don’t think there’s much here that you wouldn’t learn from a year of working in a leadership role in any small political organization.

Hilariously, this is not how the Right understood Rules at all.

The standard take was that Alinsky had written some kind of dark tome that laid out the satanic ambitions of the Left — and our nefarious strategies for achieving them. If you did not know about Rules, then you could really never really know what we were up to, since the enemies of the Right were liars, and secretive, and carrying out alien intellectual theories that no normal person would ever think of. But if you knew about Rules, then you would instantly understand what all of these demonic weirdos were up to — and you’d be able to stop them.

For years, a mainstream premise in right-wing rhetoric was that you could interpret just about anything leftists did as following the orders laid out for them in their handbook, Rules for Radicals. This was true not just of leftists but of liberals as well — from Parenti to Pelosi to your next door neighbor Pete.

Mercifully, around the end of the Obama era, this line finally became passé on the right — but by then, a new one had started to gain steam. Rhetoric about something called “cultural Marxism” had been floating around for a long time by then, but in the mid-2010s, it moved from AM talk radio platforms like The Michael Savage Show into the mainstream. Around the same time, this rhetoric also began to concentrate around a specific fixation on the Frankfurt School.

But once again, the Right’s analysis did not actually seem to have very much to do with the actual texts in question. You did not see a lot of commentary about how policymakers were reading Erich Fromm’s discussion of the Protestant work ethic, or how the praxis of Bernie Sanders was informed by Barthes’s semiotic theory of mythology. Nor, of course, did you see much talk on the right about how the Frankfurt School is in many ways at odds with some basic points of orthodox Marxism.

Instead, the mysterious Frankfurt School mostly played the same role in our discourse that Rules for Radicals did a few years before. In both cases, we were presented with relatively obscure texts which, if you understood them, exposed all kinds of profound occult truths about the otherwise unknowable machinations of leftists.

Matt Bruenig has written a nice little explainer about critical race theory (CRT) — that is, about what CRT actually is. But this, of course, does not answer a second, equally interesting question: why in God’s name is the Right obsessed with this?

At this point, the standard answer on the Left seems to be “racism,” but that really only explains why CRT is on the table as one of many things that reactionaries could get mad about. If you want to know why the Right is melting down about CRT in particular, I think the history I’ve sketched out above provides us with a good explanation.

Every few years, the American right discovers a relatively obscure text or theory that, we are told, lays out the secret governing plans and doctrines of the anarchomarxistliberaldemocrat conspiracy. This narrative coalesces spontaneously because it does all kinds of useful things for the right:

It reminds us that we cannot trust socialists to tell us what they are really up to. That’s why there is usually a “gotcha!” inflection to this narrative; CRT is something that has been “exposed.”

It characterizes socialist politics as bizarre and alien. They don’t rely on plain old common sense and simple values like ordinary Americans do; their politics revolve entirely around secret texts written in unreadable academic gibberish.

It explains away the Right’s persistent failure to defeat socialism and fix society, even though they have the truth and the silent majority on their side. It turns out that defeating us just required a crucial piece of intelligence that was missing in the past, forcing the right to try to defeat the Death Star without knowing about its exhaust vents.

This last point also explains why particular iterations of this narrative eventually fall out of favor. You can only say so many times that we can defeat socialists by learning about Rules for Radicals before folks on the Right start asking, “why haven’t we won yet?”

JACOBINMAG.COM

Critical Race Theory Is the Right’s Latest Obsession. They’ll Have a New One Soon.

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Leonard Pitts Jr.: No mystery why conservatives find education dangerous EDUCATION! EDUCATION! EDUCATION!

 

EDUCATION! EDUCATION! EDUCATION!

Ed Mahan:

There is no mystery why conservatives find education dangerous. A 2015 Pew Research Center study quantified that the better educated one is, the more likely one is to hold liberal beliefs. But I’d argue, contrary to what conservatives seem to feel, that’s not because of bullying professors shouting left-wing dogma. Rather, it’s because once you learn how to think, you’re less susceptible to thin reasoning and easy answers. And increasingly, that’s all conservatism’s got

MSN.COM

Leonard Pitts Jr.: No mystery why conservatives find education dangerous

I owe a lot to Gary Mahoney.

© TNS Ron DeSantis pictured in Orlando, Florida, on Aug. 7, 2020.

He was the campus conservative back in the middle ’70s, when I was a student at the University of Southern California and we went at it hammer and tongs a few times on the opinion pages of the Daily Trojan. I no longer recall the details of our disagreements. What I do remember is realizing that he was good and that I had to up my game — tighten my reasoning, sharpen my logic — if I hoped to stay in the ring with him.

© Provided by Tribune Content Agency Leonard Pitts.

He made me better in the same way college itself did. Nearly five decades later, I value those years less for any specific thing I learned in class than for the fact that I learned how to think. Not “what” to think, but how, i.e., how to gather and evaluate information, how to analyze and extrapolate from it, how to defend my ideas in the scrum of intellectual conflict.

That’s a lesson students will be denied if Republicans like Ron DeSantis get their way. Last week, Florida’s governor signed a bill requiring the state’s public colleges and universities to survey students and faculty on their ideological beliefs. The aim, he claims, is to prevent schools from “indoctrinating” students. DeSantis has hinted that those failing to show “intellectual diversity” will face budget cuts.

You may gauge the sincerity of his commitment to that diversity by the fact that this comes two weeks after he pushed to ban the teaching of critical race theory — an academic framework originated by legal scholars over 40 years ago. Like other states where similar restrictions are becoming law, Florida seeks not to further intellectual diversity, but to prevent it.

Meaning, it aims to protect kids raised on mom and dad’s steady diet of Fox “News” and Breitbart from the shock of having any ideas they’ve thereby imbibed challenged in the outside world. Which is hypocritical on its face. After all, conservatives once — not unreasonably — chided liberals for trying to bubble-wrap students with trigger warnings and safe spaces. Now they use force of law to do the very same thing.

It should go without saying that it’s none of the state’s business what you or I think. It should be likewise obvious that this law will stifle debate and muzzle instructors and is thus antithetical to the mission of our colleges and universities.

There is no mystery why conservatives find education dangerous. A 2015 Pew Research Center study quantified that the better educated one is, the more likely one is to hold liberal beliefs. But I’d argue, contrary to what conservatives seem to feel, that’s not because of bullying professors shouting left-wing dogma. Rather, it’s because once you learn how to think, you’re less susceptible to thin reasoning and easy answers. And increasingly, that’s all conservatism’s got.

That may not have been true — or at least, may have been less true — decades ago. But back then, the right had some intellectual underpinning, had yet to devolve into the twitching id of perpetual resentment now on daily display. I mean, is anyone overawed by the profundity of Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene? How about Louie Gohmert? Or even Ron DeSantis?

An opinion one can’t defend — using actual facts and recognizable reason — is an opinion not worth having. At some level, conservatives must know they fail that standard, so they work to undermine it instead, to make the world safe for ignorance.

Teach your children well, the songwriter said. But this is the opposite of that.

I like to think Gary Mahoney would agree.

(Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald, 3511 NW 91st Ave., Miami, Fla., 33172. Readers may contact him via e-mail at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)

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Opinion: A message to GOP congressmen: In D.C., critical race theory is simple truth-telling

Wash Post columnist, Colbert I Long, expresses the truth as he has experienced it. I will take his truth. The GOP congressmen trying to use race as a weapon? Not so much.

__________

Opinion by

Colbert I. King

Columnist

June 25, 2021 at 3:41 p.m. EDT

As though they didn’t have enough pressing national issues on their plates, five Republican congressmen — Glenn Grothman (Wis.), Ralph Norman (S.C.), Bob Gibbs (Ohio), Pat Fallon and Ronny Jackson (both of Texas) — have introduced legislation to ban the teaching of critical race theory in D.C. public and charter schools.

Grothman, the bill’s chief sponsor, said in a news release that, through critical race theory curriculum, “students are being taught that they are defined by the color of their skin, not the content of their character.” “This neo-racist ideology,” warned Grothman, “should have no place in our public education system, especially in our nation’s capital.”

Set aside for a minute the confusion over just what is critical race theory. Understand, also, that D.C. schools don’t teach critical race theory but do provide anti-racist training for educators and classroom discussions of systemic racism.

Concentrate, instead, on the “neo-racist ideology” that Grothman alleges critical race theory teaches. Such an ideology held a firm grip on D.C. public education, as well as the entire nation’s capital, for decades. This was long before academics began examining how systemic racism has shaped American public policy.

I have intimate knowledge of the experiences that informed notions about racism’s incarnation in the legal systems and policies of 19th- and 20th-century Washington, D.C.

Whether or not Grothman wants this fact taught, the truth is many Black people in D.C. and in the Deep South were raised under state-sponsored racism.

We attended public schools, lived in neighborhoods, went to movie theaters, ate in restaurants, prayed in churches and were laid to rest separated from White people, by law and custom. This focus on group identity — a practice purportedly loathed by apostles of conservatism — was not a mutually agreed upon arrangement. White people made those decisions, including to engage in the practice of denying equal job and housing opportunities.

And those judgments have had devastating consequences. The International Monetary Fund stated in a 2020 report on the economic cost of discrimination in the United States: “Racism has restrained Black economic progress for decades.”

The telling of this history is not for the purpose, as charged by Grothman and critical race theory critics, of stoking cultural conflicts or “to set American against American.” It is simple truth-telling.

Many of us don’t need critical race theory to know who did what to whom: who looked us in the face and said there were no job openings, declined mortgage requests, ignored skills and downplayed qualifications. Who otherwise stacked the deck, giving preference to the whiteness of skin.

Grothman suggests the retelling of American history is divisive. He implores schools to tell the story that “share[s] the wonderful gift we all have, to live the American Dream if we work for it.”

That Dream stared me in the face as I read pages of The Washington Post when I was a 1960 teenager looking for work:

“BOYS-WHITE Age 14 to 18. To assist Route manager full or part-time. Must be neat in appearance. Apply 1346 Conn. Ave. NW.”

“STUDENTS Boys, white, 14 yrs. and over, jobs immediately available. Apply . . . 724 9th St., N.W.”

“SALESMAN, white. With a successful background in sales or one who feels he could be successful if given the right opportunity and training.”

The Dream is there, “if we work for it,” preaches Grothman. “If we only had a chance,” we prayed.

America, Grothman said, is seen as the land of opportunity throughout the world. “CRT, however, teaches school children,” he said, “that America is a horrible country.”

I was not taught that. Neither were my public-school-educated children or my school-age grandchildren.

But I know that students being taught about the lack of affordable housing and racial housing patterns in their city will have to learn that the 1948 Washington Real Estate Board Code of Ethics dictated that “no property in a white section should ever be sold, rented, advertised or offered to colored people,” as explained by Wendell E. Pritchett of the University of Pennsylvania Law School in a 2005 paper about the system.

I was 9 at the time. Those weren’t empty words. The Code was strictly enforced over the years, forcing Black people in the District to pay higher rents in the limited areas to which we had access and where housing was noticeably inferior. Students would learn that the results of that discrimination are reflected in this city’s single-family zoned majority-White neighborhoods.

Classified ads from The Washington Post, 1960. (The Washington Post)

Now, this isn’t a matter of teaching children how bad we are. But it does teach how bad things came about. A look at history also explains why the school system’s Eurocentric focus forced Black educators to take it upon themselves to introduce Black history to ensure we knew about our role in America’s growth and development.

Hopefully, out of today’s educational processes will come students intellectually and socially mature enough to understand that critical examination does not equal demonization — and that in life’s dealings, truth trumps fiction every time.

And, congressmen, call it what you will.

WASHINGTONPOST.COM

Opinion | A message to GOP congressmen: In D.C., critical race theory is simple truth-telling

Washington, D.C.'s children should learn a

 

Top US Officer Gen. Milley Schools GOP Reps. on Critical Race Theory, Need for Military to Study Society: “I Have Read Marx and Lenin”

 

TomDispatch

Today, Juan Cole tells a fascinating tale of how, recently, "the Republicans only managed to get slapped across the face with Das Kapital by the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff." Check it out out. Tom

"The Republicans in Congress really miss the days of red baiting and the Communist threat. Dick Nixon made his bones running against leftist labor unions, intimating to then-conservative San Francisco burghers that insurrectionary Communists were hiding under their beds. The party won elections by making people afraid of workers, of minorities, of people who might not respect the status quo.

Then in 1991, quite cruelly, History arranged for the Soviet Union to collapse and for Russia to go Neoliberal, and the poor US GOP was left without anything to run against. Bill Clinton probably benefited from that. Then the crazed Bin Laden pulled off 9/11, and many Republicans got down on their knees and thanked Almighty God that they had a substitute for the Communist Manifesto now, in the form of the sharia or Muslim canon law. Unfortunately for them, over time Muslim Americans just didn’t prove a very good foil. Most of them are mainstream Americans, a third are Republicans, and many are physicians and scientists. Nowadays 70 percent of Americans have a favorable view of them.

Then the GOP tried to make their bogeyman something called “antifa,” (antifascism) but the FBI looked into that and concluded it didn’t exist as an organization but was more an attitude on the part of a small number of activists. Also, I’m not sure targeting anti-fascists would really make you popular with anyone but self-identified fascists.

So after the Black Lives Matter movement was reinvigorated last summer, Republicans, whose party had been captured by Trumpist white supremacists, discovered yet another substitute for the dearly departed Communist Manifesto, in the form of Critical Race Theory.

These ideas developed out of critical legal theory. It argues that race is a social construct, and that many social and governmental practices are systemic in producing and reproducing racial inequality. For instance, families that went to Harvard have an easier time getting their children into Harvard because legacy admissions are favored. But in 1974 Harvard only enrolled nine Black students in a class of 468. If you systematically favor the children of alumni, you structurally favor whites over Blacks.

An even better example is home ownership, from which African-Americans have often been excluded, and which is a major way to build up wealth. See Charles Potter’s review of Kimberly Amadeo’s Home Equity and the Racial Wealth Gap: How Government Housing Policy Deepened the Racial Wealth Gap. Just as one of many examples of the way government policy engineered Black inequality, Potter observes,

“In 1934, the National Housing Act established the Federal Housing Administration to insure mortgages. It used the HOLC ratings to exclude Black neighborhoods, a process known as redlining. Without insurance, banks wouldn’t lend to anyone in those neighborhoods, regardless of their credit scores. Between 1934 and 1968, 98% of home loans went to white families.”

Critical Race Theory takes a systematic view of these practices, some of them governmental, rather than focusing only on individuals.

The current Republican drive against CRT alleges that it is taught in K-12 schools, but it isn’t. It is more a graduate school thing. But even the GOP do not think they are in charge of graduate education at our great universities (or at least the universities will be happy to disabuse them of this illusion), so they have to make their campaign against the poor school teachers who have no idea what the het-up Republicans are talking about.

The Republicans caught up in this anti-CRT fervor appear to be trying to play a reverse racism card. Since CRT alleges that white have engineered a systematic dispossession of Blacks, the theory is slamming all whites, they say, and would make white children feel guilty about their whiteness. Aside from the fact that the theory is not taught to children, you could make the same argument about the teaching of slavery. Should we cover that one up, too, lest whites get blamed for it? History as taught in school is in any case not a legacy blame game. Contemporary whites are not guilty of slavery, unless they think it was a good idea or idolize slaveholders.

So blustery Trumpists in Congress tried to get hold of the officer corps of the US military over this issue on Wednesday. The notorious Matt Gaetz, who is under an FBI investigation for alleged sex with a minor and trafficking of sex workers, continued to try to take refuge in white supremacy by berating Gen. Lloyd Austin, the Secretary of Defense, for having an aide who is a “critical race theorist.” This is sort of like Joe McCarthy in the 1950s saying he had a list of 100 Communists in the State Department. Except that Gaetz is even more vile than McCarthy.

The officer corps (90% of which votes Republican) is trying to clean out the neo-Nazis and white supremacists in its ranks (some active duty personnel participated in the Jan. 6 insurrection). Gaetz actually browbeat Austin for doing this, making a stand for Neo-Nazism in the ranks.

So after Gaetz’s time was mercifully up, Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA), a distinguished veteran, wanted to give Gen. Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a chance to respond to Gaetz. The Rev Blog has the transcript:

Ms. Houlahan: (05:13)

… Mr. Chair, and thank you gentlemen, for joining us today. I know my time is very precious, but I would like to yield some of my time to General Milley, because I know that he had some comments that he wanted to make when Representative Gaetz was talking, as well as Mr. Waltz, about a similar subject of the stand down and race theory. Would you like a minute or so to comment on that? Do you remember what your line of questioning, your thought was there?

General Milley: (05:37)

Sure. First of all, on the issue of critical race theory, et cetera, I’ll obviously have to get much smarter on whatever the theory is, but I do think it’s important actually for those of us in uniform to be open-minded and be widely read.

Actually, as you will see if you read on, Milley knows exactly what CRT is.

And the United States Military Academy is university and it is important that we train and we understand. And I want to understand white rage and I’m white, and I want to understand it. So what is it that cause thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the constitution of the United States of America? What caused that? I want to find that out. I want to maintain an open mind here, and I do want to analyze it. It’s important that we understand that because our soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, and guardians, they come from the American people. So it is important that the leaders now and in the future do understand it.

I’ve read Mao Zedong, Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist. So what is wrong with understanding, having some situational understanding about the country for which we are here to defend? And I personally find it offensive that we are accusing the United States military, our general officers, our commissioned, non-commissioned officers of being quote woke or something else because we’re studying some theories that are out there. That was started at Harvard Law School years ago. And it proposed that there were laws in the United States, antebellum laws prior to the Civil War that led to a power differential with African-Americans that were three quarters of a human being when this country was formed. And then we had a Civil War and Emancipation Proclamation to change it. And we brought it up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It took another a hundred years to change that.

So look, I do want to know, and I respect your service. And you and I are both Green Berets, but I want to know, and it matters to our military and the discipline and cohesion of this military. And I thank you for the opportunity to make a comment on that.

Ms. Houlahan: (07:31)

Thank you, general.

I’m not sure any university president has defended freedom of thought and inquiry as cogently as Milley did here. His forthright proclamation to the Republicans that he has read Marx no doubt resulted in some of the GOP snowflakes having a fit of the vapors, as I live and breathe.

And, he explained to them what critical race theory is: “That was started at Harvard Law School years ago. And it proposed that there were laws in the United States, antebellum laws prior to the Civil War that led to a power differential with African-Americans that were three quarters of a human being when this country was formed.”

And yes, systemic forms of denial of wealth accumulation to African-Americans did start with slavery, which made them property and unable to own it. So Milley is exactly right.

In their desperate search for a replacement for the red-baiting tactics of yore, the Republicans only managed to get slapped across the face with Das Kapital by the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff."

https://www.juancole.com/.../officer-critical-military.html

JUANCOLE.COM

Top US Officer Gen. Milley Schools GOP Reps. on Critical Race Theory, Need for Military to Study Society: "I Have....

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