Defending a policy on the basis of its inefficacy is a dishonest position 100% of the time. You'd balk at teaching Creationism as fact, even safe in the knowledge that 99.9% of your students would reject it? Why would you balk? For the 0.01%, and because truth and integrity matter.
I understand your comment fine, I just don't think the underlying premise is honest, otherwise the Left would cede control of curricula since it definitionally wouldn't move the needle. We both know that's completely untrue and hence the tooth and claw battle to retain control of the tools of indoctrination, however unreliable they may be. CRT was considered plenty effective, effective enough to be (for example) lionized as 'best practice' in Virginia for the past two and a half years, until it became convenient to throw it overboard. There's absolutely no way, none, that you'd be so sanguine about teaching evolution, for example.
"It would be bad for Republicans to decide on curricula with no checks against their power" is - and I trust you can speak for the Left here, granted that it's not a monolith - a view held by around 100% of the Left, with a small margin of error for people who misread the statement. Yes? If we allow that, we can allow the converse - the Right doesn't believe that the Democrats should have complete control over education with no checks at all. (I mean, the National Review probably does, but no true Scotsman and all that.)
All that is to say, as much as you'd prefer it to be in teachers' hands, you would - if forced to take one legislator over the other - pick the blue guy ahead of the red guy. Yes? If you acknowledge these, you acknowledge this control matters and understand why it's such a powerful issue, and why appeals to a lack of unanimity don't address the question.
Then we get to the crux of it - let's go back to your opening post:
"I always laugh when dipshit republicans claim we’re indoctrinating students. I can’t get my students to shut the fuck up and do their homework. Y’all really think I can turn them into communists or whatever."
This is about an inability to transmit doctrine to students entirely. Then this post:
"I am a teacher. I don’t think all curricula are ineffective, otherwise I would not teach. I think that the concepts that encompass CRT are specially beyond the grasp of my students. I do believe there are ways to teach anti-racism in ways that my students will understand but CRT is not among them."
Right, so you can transmit doctrine - and by the way, I am not using doctrine as a negative term, not necessarily - but it has to be effective. So any hypothetical Republican who did object to you inculcating the youth with anti-racism would be... 100% correct to do so!
It's as I said at the start - your original objection was categorical, which is dishonest, because your objection to CRT is that it's *not effective enough* compared to an alternative method, not that there's no point in advocating for or against a method.
This has been the pattern literally 100% of the times I've heard this objection, literally not a single exception.
The label is completely irrelevant. What people object to is curricula that automatically labels all whites as racist, or argues that whites (even the poor ones) are automatically the beneficiaries of structural racism, etc. It doesn't matter if it's called CRT, or racial education, or white fragility training, or pumpkin spice latte. The substance is what people find so objectionable and it's deeply dishonest to try to deflect away from that by declaring that "CRT isn't taught anywhere but grad school" or the equivalent.
That presumes that the only people objecting to this type of education are conservatives. If both conservatives and moderates are mounting objections then doesn't it make sense to survey both groups?
And is it just conservatives? It seems to me that the election last night in Virginia is a powerful counter argument.
I wouldn't be for bans either, but frankly making a soft spoken argument about why this stuff is wrong isn't working and won't work. You are dealing with extremely strident people who appear to lack the empathy they talk about so much. Gotta use a sledgehammer to break a cinder block. The ball peen won't do it.
I think most conservatives are proud of the nation, of their ancestors and of the nation's history. They believe it's an overwhelmingly positive story. They believe there's value in that story being the common national story.
Ghouls like Ezra Klein say Americans should look at their past similar to how the Germans do. Millions of Americans are happy to die on that hill, rejecting that view.
As for Gervais, he is no conservative. Who else has complained about the oversensitivity of modern audiences? Dave Chappelle. Chris Rock. Jerry Seinfeld. If they are engaged in acts of deliberate provocation then it does not follow that conservatism is intent on provoking simply because they are not conservatives.
He is maybe not so funny anymore. But I would add as a caveat that the scorched earth nature of, for example, his Golden Globe performance is impressive. I can't help but feel something akin to admiration for somebody willing to go up on stage and insult an audience full of the rich and powerful directly to their faces.
He has said that he's very left but there's a chunk of them who are incapable of nuance -- so when he defends free speech they see him as a right winger. He described it as a Venn Diagram that doesn't intersect, it's just two circles. (That's funny, Freddie!)
Reminds me of a friend who's a Vermont socialist, but also a gun rights enthusiast. I watched so many people's brains melt when engaging with the guy because he didn't fit their view of what a Second Amendment supporter is.
Guns are a culture war issue. I wish there was an objective measure of how much of the left's anti-gun sentiment is simply because they think all gun owners are Southern rednecks.
People care about this because it affects their children. I don't want my daughtered labelled as some sort of "oppressor" at her school. That doesn't feel like "racist bullshit." It isn't denying that slavery occurred. It also has nothing to do with the 1800s.
"She probably won't be labelled an oppressor and if she is it's not that bad and there are other things to worry about." Color me convinced this isn't worth my time! First, it's teachers communicating this message, not peers. Second, while children can be cruel, I find myself consistently surprised that kids have it in their nature to be kind and cooperate.
A public school telling my child to be ashamed (implicitly or explicitly) matters to me more than my taxes going up or down 3%.
Arguing that, regardless, people's kids are going to be treated like shit by government entities, such as teachers and schools, really isn't the rousing argument for handing money to the government that you seem to think it is.
And if I had written about you, specifically, that would be relevant. This is precisely what I knew would happen in these comments: because I criticized ANY of the people working themselves into hysteria about CRT, I must be criticizing EVERY one of the people criticizing it. Which is just... not helpful. And this goes for all of you.
If you call most opposition to CRT "racist bullshit", how can you be surprised if someone thinks they might fall into the bucket of "most"?
You wrote an article a week or two back about how there's a cottage industry of white guys talking about how white guys are categorically a problem while exempting themselves. This differs only by degree. Your objection - nuanced, pragmatic, based on outcome and not dialectic. Most others' disagreements - racist bullshit, or "I wasn't talking about you specifically." Well? Now what? This commenter doesn't want her daughter to be called an oppressor. Why call her out for that? Notice something key - she didn't even mention you or your stance at all, referring only to "this." Why make it personal?
I'll repeat my final point - she didn't mention your opinion of her at all. She said she disagrees with "this" - CRT - because of how it styles children in general and her daughter in particular. She didn't even imply, much less state, what you're accusing her of. If she had - would she be wrong? Since she didn't - why get personal?
What is "personal," to you? I talked to an adult like an adult, which is to frankly state my objection to her incorrect assumption that I included her in my critique. If she had a male username, would you say the same thing?
But where is that assumption of hers? I don't see it. What I see is an assumption _you_ made - which is that her opposition to "this" (CRT) was a defensive posture in response to your critique. There is negative evidence for that - she explained pretty concisely where her objection lies and it's only tangentially related to what you said.
You're adopting the pragmatic, all-business stance of conditional opposition to CRT (because it scares the paroles) while accusing anyone who says "no, CRT just outright sucks" of being defensive - dare I say it, triggered - by your position. It's very uncharitable.
Yes, if it was a father or someone with a male or neutral username, I'd say the same thing.
If you wanted to say "most punditry or political messaging on CRT is racist bullshit," won't argue with you there. Just because idiots like Ben Shapiro talk about it doesn't mean that the concerns of real people are imaginary. Parents are scared to raise their hands and object, so bomb throwers are speaking loudest. Sounds a lot like Trump's appeal TBH.
How do you substantiate "most" though? You neither attempt to quantify it nor do you give specific examples of criticism that *is* just racist bullshit in order to contrast it with that which is not. Your "oh, I don't mean *you*" defense is silly and comes across as a way to avoid the question. I expect Lamoille's comment is objecting as much to the "most" part of your accusation as anything else. If all of their experience involves objecting to CRT on Not Racist Bullshit terms, and their interactions with other parents also involves those parents objecting on Not Racist Bullshit terms, then of course they're going to feel attacked.
Eh, I would contend that anyone who says "most" about any topic without any attempt to quantify or be specific has no right to complain when others object.
Do you really expect us to read a five-part essay by Scott Alexander that begins "Imagine Heraclitus as a cattle rustler in the Old West"? Sorry, but no. I'm holding out for the Readers Digest version of SSC.
I don't personally view this as an isolated demand for rigor. The quantifier "most" is high enough that, absent the claimant making even a faint attempt to scaffold the claim, it would only pass muster for me as an assertion if I already had a rather strong prior in agreement (like "most people think the sky is blue"). In the majority of such cases, I'm more likely to just be quietly unconvinced than to actually demand the rigor, but the point remains.
But certainly for any "most" claim that's made sans scaffolding and which strongly *disagrees* with my prior experience of a given thing, I'd be inclined to ask for the rigor, because it would provide worthwhile clarification. So, it seems reasonable to me for people to be doing that in this case.
Freddie: "I also think the anti-CRT hysteria is absurd and, yes, largely a matter of white backlash against increasing awareness of racism and racial inequality, though there are exceptions."
IMO, there is nothing hyterical or absurd about not wanting your kids to be taught in school that they are irredeemably racist. And that this is actually happening is well documented.
I think I am as aware of racism and racial inequality as any white person. I have considered myself to be pretty far left all my life (I'm 66), and have never voted for a Republican for any office. But the illiberalism of today's left is driving me ever further rightward. I would have voted for Youngkin in Virginia.
Fun fact: Youngkin's just elected Republican Lieutenant Governor is a Black woman, Winsome Sears.
So it's a policy not worth advancing, but those opposed to it are "largely" hysterical and absurd and acting out of white backlash against racial inequality.
But hey, only "largely"!
By the way, how's that program of winning hearts and minds to socialism coming along?
Changing hearts and minds to socialism involves converting liberals first, and looking at the way the GOP cynically stoked racism - yes, racism - using CRT and saying "nope, no racism here" wouldn't help. I suspect that most individual people who came out hard against CRT are motivated in part or in whole by racial animus, yes. Is that really so hard to believe? Or impermissible? I don't think that's a rational reading of the situation, and I don't think I've said anything without appropriate limitation and qualification.
Claiming "anti-CRT hysteria is absurd," "mostly racist bullshit" that is "largely a matter of white backlash" seems closer to dismissing "EVERY" rather than "ANY" person holding such concerns.
PS: in general thanks for your interesting and thoughtful perspective on things!
Today I read (somewhere, just was startled) that there are far more people w/o children who are D than R. And w/o children people more likely to be fine w/ CRT. Will need to follow up on details, but now I'm alert to this and thinking of people I know and does somewhat track.
And there is a bit of evidence that this is actually a two-way relationship - that is, it's not just that people who are conservative are more likely to have kids, but that having kids makes people more conservative. (Not in all cases, and some of the evidence is fuzzy, but I have no problem believing it personally.)
And that also means conservative with a small c (0r maybe I should say careful?) Just think of how one lives one's life before becoming a parent and after. It's the small things at first--maybe you think more about what food is provided; then maybe you become a more careful driver; then (in my day) stop smoking, have to be clearheaded to manage things...it all leads to a way of living different than pre-parenthood.
We have a biological imperative to protect our children. Having kids creates a narrow circle of intense care, probably at the expense of larger issues. Call it selfish if you will, but most parents would save their child over a bus full of nuns, regardless of the objective morality of that choice.
And you don't even know that is how you would respond until you have a child. I think the number of state School Boards like Ohio and Pennsylvania resigning from the National School Boards Association is a big reflection of this at grass roots level.
Couldn't agree more. It's not logical. You can't explain it to someone. My partner and I were desperate to avoid being the crazy parents, but I have also been at urgent care at 1 AM over a bloody lip ("It won't stop bleeding!" "What about her teeth!?")
This isn't hysteria. The state of local schools and how they teach our children is probably the number one issue for any young family. The topic of race and gender messaging is a very common discussion among parents. 99% of these parents aren't election truthers or Daily Wire subscribers.
Test scores are dropping. And schools are focusing inordinate amounts of time on "DEI" which we had never even heard of before the drop in test scores.
I don't want my kids labeled as racist oppressors simply for being pale, either. At the same time, with me as their mom, frankly, they'll have bigger fish to fry. I didn't know until I had kids how relatively unconcerned I would be about them getting guff from time to time for what used to be called PC reasons. Maybe as my kids age, my mind will change on this, depending on what they're exposed to. But right now, the bigger threat to getting my kids to adulthood in one piece is the family disharmony caused by well-meaning relatives forwarding me warnings that "social-emotional learning" is yet another code for "CRT" when I can tell that so far, my kids have benefited from the social-emotional learning they've been getting.
I need my family with me to raise these kids. My family, for the most part, believes Chris Rufo, though. I'm also absoforkinlutely grateful for the good the public school district I'm in has done for my littles, and I'm not about ready to become an ingrate just because the curriculum indulges in some of the usual lefty edspeak pieties.
I think there are serious problems with the "equity industry". If a Kafkatrapping grifter like DiAngelo were discovered dead in a ditch tomorrow, I would not mourn much. But in the situation I happen to be in, Rufo is the grifter I end up having to worry more about. I've just had it with the "anti-equity industry" at this point. Quite possibly, this is because of exposure, and if I had been more exposed to the "equity industry" instead, I'd've had it with them first. So I sympathize with those whose patience with the "equity industry" ran out first. That's not the group I find myself in, though.
I disagree that it's unfair to ask for the proponents of CRT to define their terms precisely, especially when it comes to the implementation of a curriculum. We have no problem demarcating the limits of how history should be taught to fifth graders in any other context. (We can, and do, define the subject matter, framing, depth, preferred outcomes etc.) The reason why it's hard to do this at a national level is fair enough - these things are decided locally. But it's not hard to do so locally, and the reason it's not done locally and parents who do so are subject to demonization is an obvious one - everyone hates this stuff except the crazies who are pushing it. It's not because it's hard to define or hard to explain, certainly no more so than any other facet of post-Marxist critical theory. It's not that, contra McAuliffe, it's none of our business to ask. It's that it absolutely sucks and everyone knows it.
Hence the constant obfuscation of the topic, telling us the flaming oven is the aurora borealis that we're not allowed to see. I am not accusing Freddie of this but there is a reflexive tendency among the left to both treat the racial indoctrination of children as simultaneously of vital importance and of no consequence whatsoever. That we evil Rightists are, in the same breath, denying the children their birthright of critical race education, but also dumb racist hicks who are, like, ignoring the big issues, man. To which, two responses: if it's so important to you, you can define it and let the issue be decided by the voters on the merits. (Like just happened in Virginia.) If it's the latter, something only dumb hayseeds like me care about, and detracts from a focus on the economy, then this: I hereby relieve you of the duty to educate me further. You need never talk to me about CRT ever again. Go and be fruitful on the field of economy, the one that matters to you and the one that, apparently, you'd have a winning message on were you not on a mission to civilize country cousins like me. Now we're both happy.
The raw facts are these: even people whose understanding of CRT is rudimentary by now know enough to know it stinks, and that their opponents hide its inner workings away like the ark of Axum is *more* evidence of that, not less, because people with solid, persuasive theorems tell them to anyone who'll listen. Those selling horseshit disguised as perfume won't let you sniff it, much less look at the bottle. So the obscurantism fails on its own merits.
And finally, bear in mind that the middle-of-the-road Carlyle Group alum, a guy who makes Mitt Romney look like a wild-eyed radical, won Virginian without even acknowledging a key point, which is that CRT is explicitly anti-White. This is extraordinary, but it's also not going to happen again. When the CRT fight ramps up in other states, ones less gentrified and respectable than the Commonwealth, someone's eventually going to tell it like it is. And that's when CRT defenders really have their work cut out for them.
The whole CRT/Whiteness schtick made more sense to me when I realized that Whiteness is just a new word for Cultural Protestantism. I mean look at the famous Smithsonian Whiteness Infographic: it puts "protestant work ethic" right there on the label for the hard of thinking, before going on to list individualism, Christian holidays and just about every other known characteristic of Protestantism.
So what do you get when you reject "Whiteness"? You get the end of Cultural Protestantism. The end of deferred gratification, following time schedules and the idea that the future should be better than the past.
And *that's* why people can be 'white adjacent' or 'become white' - they have adapted just enough Cultural Protestantism to prosper. It's nothing to do with skin color. Why they chose to eschew 'Protestantism' for 'Whiteness' I'll leave as an exercise for the reader...
What I've heard by way of explanation is that b/c the Protestant settlers were white Europeans, Protestantism and whiteness are virtually interchangeable.
It's because they need to be able to damn YOU now. You may say "I'm not a Protestant, I'm a Buddhist" (or whatever), but you can't escape your Whiteness.
Because one would have to take it more seriously if we did. If it were called cultural protestantism it would be critiqued on the grounds that lots of other cultures shared the same values too. Basically it would turn it to a genuine claim that is up for debate.
And it's rather ironic that attitudes and attributes (usually) required to be successful, or even functional, are the ones being critiqued and demonized.
>What bothers me is the obvious contrast: Biden’s child tax credit is in effect a very pro-Black program that has profound and immediate material impact. (And it doesn’t lead to a lot of people living off the dole, right-wing fantasies to the contrary.)
The link cited does not support this claim. The article describes one study claiming that after "two or three" child support payments, in a temporary program, no labor market effects are visible. But the article goes on to cite another economist, who very reasonably says he would expect effects to show up only in the longer term.
"The researchers write that “our analyses of real-world data do not support claims” that the child tax credit “has negative employment effects that offset its documented reductions in poverty and hardship.”
“If the accounts and models are true that more than a million parents are going to drop out of the labor market, well surely we would see some evidence of that after two or three payments,” Parolin said in a phone interview. “The short answer is you don’t when you go to the data and actually assess what is happening.”
But York, the Tax Foundation economist, maintains that it is too early to truly see an effect.
"We've only had a few months and there's only a couple more payments scheduled before it expires," York said. "I'd expect to seeing changing work incentives in the medium to long term and not necessarily right away.""
You really think the progressives are to blame for holding up this legislation by holding out for some of the decently substantive policy voters were promised to be included? Not the two named and countless unnamed moderates constantly undermining Biden’s ostensible agenda? Wild perspective on the whole situation if you ask me.
Yes, because it's been obvious from Day One that Manchin and Sinema were going to set hard upper limits on what could be accomplished. They have the power to do that, and they are exercising that power. Don't like it? Get more Democrats elected to the Senate. Meanwhile, get done what can be gotten done.
Do you think there is another Democrat in West Virginia who could win a statewide election for Senator? Dream on. Manchin is the best you're going to get, period. He votes Democrat often enough (especially on executive appointments, which have often been party line votes) to be important and useful.
Do you know who ran against Sinema in the Democrat primary in Arizona in 2018? Only one opponent: a Muslim woman who wears the hijab. You think she (the Muslim I mean) could have beaten Republcian Martha McSally in the 2018 Arizona statewide election? Dream on! And Sinema, like Manchin, votes party line on appointments.
Not getting done what Manchin and Sinema will permit has just helped the Democrats lose Virginia, and will lead to the Restoration of the Trump Dynasty in 2024 if the progressives don't stop holding their breath and accomplish something.
Yep. I’m aware this is your take, been reading the newsletter for a little while now and you pop up in the comments to repeat these notions often. Not gonna argue with you, as you seem quite set in your ideas of what kind of messaging and governance wins over enough voters to not cede ground to the GOP, which are extremely different from mine as a young socialist. It is what it is.
My main point is that I find it interesting that people who self describe as left like yourself are so willing to blame the left flank of the party who actually try to deliver for voters, when in fact both the centrists and the progressives are holding up legislation. It’s just the centrists will actually use the leverage of withholding their vote to make it worse, obviously, like you said we’ve known that since day one. And since folks like you always blame progressives who try and do the same, I can’t say my hopes are up for Third Way politics getting us anywhere good in 2022 or 2024. My guess is voters will get half a bowl of shit and feel betrayed again, and Dems will lose one or both chambers.
I had a friend who was getting a big time MBA and a lot of the curriculum was about how to run a “sustainable” business. He joked, in a mostly serious way, they the they class was great, all you had to do to build a successful business was do the opposite of what they taught you.
So, with that in mind, here is the question - why does a resume with a Black sounding name get fewer callbacks than the exact same resume with a white sound sign name? Because people think, consciously or unconsciously, that Black people are inferior. Will pointing out all the ways that Black people have been mistreated reduce that bias or increase it?
CRT is being pushed by well meaning folks who a really into education. I don’t think they really grasp how things work for a substantial portion of the population.
> “Why does a resume with a Black sounding name get fewer callbacks”
It doesn’t. That claim didn’t survive the replication crisis.
The problem was that names don’t JUST signify race, they also signify OTHER attributes an employer might or might not want such as age, education level or social class. So either you need to use a LOT of names or *very carefully selected* names to avoid confounding the results. When names were selected to be more similar in ways *other* than race there was no difference found.
(Example using “white” names - would a *law firm* prefer to interview a “William Robert”, or a “Billy-Bob”? Billy-Bob might do better at an auto body shop, but William Robert is getting interviewed first at the law firm.)
(The “black” names Darius, Malik, and Andre were found to signal higher socioeconomic status than the names Rasheed, Leroy, and Jamal)
No, it turned out the names that first study picked as “stereotypically black” *happened* to signal low-SES. There existed other names they could have chosen that signaled “black” just as well *without* also signaling low-SES.
When I say it failed to replicate what I mean is there have been ACTUAL STUDIES that did the exact same thing and didn’t find the same result. I don’t just mean “I found an excuse to distrust this result”. The SES discovery was part of people trying to figure out WHY it didn’t replicate.
Wouldn't a study demonstrating that class has more of an impact on people's decisions than race be way more interesting than squinting at this to say "yeah, but race still matters"? (I'm not saying that's accurate, just stipulating Glen's read on this study is accurate)
I have two Chinese couple friends (Immigrants) who both have children who they named Joe, Mike, Suzy and Tony because they told me they knew this would work better for them in the U.S. I was initially surprised at this pragmatism over culture, but they told me they wanted to make their children's lives less complicated. Also, my mother's family (Hispanic) often use an English version of their first names.
Every person I work with professionally in the US who was born in China has an name they chose to use. They tend to be very proper British names. It comes up when you’re on a call with “Gwen” and you get a follow up email from Zhongfeng as their email name is usually their legal name.
This is, at least according to a Taiwanese friend, the standard among well-educated Chinese (and Taiwanese) people. They give their kid a Chinese first name and an English middle name so that their kid has an easy name to use when they inevitably go to an English-speaking country for school or their career.
"why does a resume with a Black sounding name get fewer callbacks than the exact same resume with a white sound sign name? Because people think, consciously or unconsciously, that Black people are inferior."
Not necessarily. That's only one possibility.
Another (but there are many more) could be familiarity bias. People get the warm-fuzzies about those that seem more like them on a whole host of dimensions. Perhaps that's not a more comforting reason, but it is a different one. Maybe in a black-run company white names or Asian names would get fewer callbacks. As far as I'm aware, that's not data we have.
The point is, though, correlation is not causation. Fewer call-backs is not enough, by itself, to tell us the cause. Could it be racism? Sure could. Is racism the only possibility? Nope.
Great post. Harping on white privilege is never going to bring about positive change. It’s just not. Maybe it’s emotionally satisfying to force white people to confront their whiteness and act guilty forever, but it’s a terrible strategy for making things better.
Americans like to be part of positive movements that make them feel good. They also feel motivated to help when someone faces unfair treatment (“You were denied a loan just for being Black? Well that’s not fair. Let’s do something.”)
I keep thinking about how well Obama handled race in 2008. White moms in the suburbs were proud to volunteer for his campaign, to be part of electing the first Black president. They felt uplifted rather than diminished.
Some of those same people voted against McAullife in part because they’re pissed about CRT and social justice politics. Right or wrong, this stuff is not popular. You have to coddle people a bit to bring them along or at least not make them feel insulted.
"Maybe it’s emotionally satisfying to force white people to confront their whiteness and act guilty forever, but it’s a terrible strategy for making things better."
I think people have forgotten to separate the personal and political.
This post is very reflective of my views, including being personally open to and supportive of reparations (although I cannot imagine a world in which that view wins a majority). I will never be persuaded that being "white" is something important about me culturally -- has it given me social and economic advantages? Yes. Should those be afforded to all people? Yes. I saw some Kendi tweet about how novels by white people with white characters are fundamentally about race and it just made my heart sink. I mean is there some way in which that is true? Yes. Is it super interesting to talk about? No. Since I read it as a teen I have felt that Invisible Man is the greatest American novel and one of the greatest works of art generally -- I recently read Moby Dick and while there were really fascinating things about it, I only finished it because right as I was about to give up because I could not read one more sentence about whales, there was a whole ode to the relative mystery and magic of the Pacific Ocean which as an immigrant to California was something that hooked me back in. Anyway my point is that Invisible Man is great in part because the racial history of America makes some amazing material for modernism but not simply because it is "about race" -- that feels just really reductionist. And I share great enthusiasm for the CTC. I work on child welfare and juvenile justice issues and the lesson that I learn over and over again in my career is that kids need consistent adult support and love in their lives -- it is just so powerful and the CTC could make a really meaningful difference in making that more likely for families with one parent or who are just struggling to make ends meet. That is going to do a lot more to improve outcomes for youth of color than struggle sessions at Dalton.
My son's high school has been teaching "lessons" about privilege and oppression in virtually every class for the last several years. Students have been instructed to define themselves by their identities; my kid reluctantly had the fact that he's Jewish become central to an in-class discussion about the State of Israel and the oppression of Palestinians, and how that dovetails with systems of oppression more broadly in the United States. This isn't CRT, but it's certainly something a little different than reading, writing and arithmetic. Syllabi went from being overweighted with dead white males to having dead white males totally verboten and wholly absent from his humanities instruction.
We've just rolled with it - our kid's a great critical thinker, and a large-hearted, liberally-minded, colorblind reader. Great works of formerly ignored literature are finally being placed in front of kids of all races, and we're all the better for it. But you can see the backlash surging, even in San Francisco, and parents are grumbling and organizing to recall the school board, the "progressive" DA and more, if they can. I can only imagine the conversations in Virginia. We ignore the overreach at our much greater peril.
"My son's high school has been teaching "lessons" about privilege and oppression in virtually every class for the last several years."
You are saying that math and science class, PE class, language class, electives, have lessons in which the students are instructed to view themselves by an identity? Talking about Israel and Palestine?
Or does "virtually every class" translate, like Freddie's "most", into well, not really most but a lot and probably really just history and English class sometimes.
I ask because while I think the constant focus on examining every issue through race (shortcircuited to CRT) is idiotic, I also know that the vast majority of schools aren't doing anything other than an occasional bullshit lesson that the kids ignore. And the schools that are absolutely viewing everything through race are generally charters with 100% black population.
Humanities classes and Learning Seminar classes; Civics. I don’t think it’s reached math just yet. Amen to the “occasional bullshit lesson that kids ignore”. I’m not saying any true harm is being done, far from it - the harm being done is to any meaningful cause that might actually make a material difference in millions of lives. That just took another small step backward last night.
Equitable Math is quite a hodgepodge. Not every suggestion in it would necessarily harm math instruction, and some could conceivably improve it.
I taught for a while in an extracurricular program in underserved public schools. My specialty was math and science, especially physics, and I was in for a rude awakening in some respects. Equitable Math emphasizes, for example, using real-life examples your kids actually have access to, which I admit *was* a stumbling-block for me. (What do you mean the kids don't know how a seesaw works? I see one right there on school grounds. Oh, that seesaw has never worked, and nobody has plans for it working, ever? And the seesaws in the local parks have all been disassembled? Oh...)
I think it's possible to argue what's good about Equitable Math isn't what's special, and what's special isn't good, but, having read through all the "Strides" not too long ago, it's not the offense against mathematics the "anti-equity" side of the culture wars makes it out to be.
"Every student is a mathematician!"-type language is of course cheesy. And false. Not every student will be. But if you have an interest in evoking math talent that might otherwise go overlooked, some of those "every student is a mathematician!" tips can help, despite their literal falsehood.
Pedagogy can always be improved (in math and everything else), but the title of the linked material is "Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction". So: before you started using more real-world examples, were you practicing racism that needed to be dismantled? Are you now, or have you ever been, a racist? I'm going with "no". The whole premise is absurd, which is the point.
I had some obliviousness, which I would call more class- (and sometimes perhaps culture-) than race-based, which did deserve dismantling.
Are copious clouds of lefty edspeak pieties *necessary* to drive that lesson home? No, of course not. Still, had the Strides been around when I was teaching, and had I been willing to read through them all and get the good I could out of them, my best bet is they would have corrected some deficits in my teaching.
Oh, Equitable Math doesn't deserve credit. Still, some useful tips on relatability are buried in the Strides. I often see Equitable Math described as a kind of anti-math, and for all its silly pretensions, it's not that.
Wouldn't one of the kids have just said "teacher, what's a seesaw?" Was your previous, seesaw-rich curriculum really ending up in insurmountable racist confusion?
People have been making lesson plans and materials with real-world examples for the best part of a century. (Someome put the word 'yacht' in a question about fifty years ago and we still haven't heard the end of that one. Y'know, coz black kids apparently don't know what yachts are, and all white kids go home at the end of the day to their yacht, possibly with built-in seesaw.) It's simply unbelievable that you're so unaware of this, and so unable to read the mood of a room, that this 'seesaw' thing was some kind of revelation to you.
No, they knew what a seesaw was. It was that piece of playground equipment that never worked, as they informed me. It was therefore useless for relating to the worksheet I had prepared.
I had known since high school that using real-world examples to make questions more relatable wouldn't work if the real-world stuff wasn't itself relatable. I had seen the seesaw on the grounds, and just assumed that it worked when I made the worksheet at home. All in all, it was a small hitch, but it does stand out in my memory as symbolic of a larger obliviousness on my part that pricked my conscience as I recognized it. (The worse examples are more involved and harder to summarize.)
Obliviously assuming that something couldn't possibly be a problem (like my just assuming the seesaw would work) isn't animus, but it can end up being unfair. Sometimes (for example, in medicine), pretty seriously unfair. I still long for the universal harmonies, but I don't see overcoming facticity's absurd impediments as quite so obvious anymore.
You're free to impugn my youthful obliviousness and failure to read a room all you like. I was a young, fresh math major! With troubles of my own and conservative ideals, no less! None of those is famous factors for being a "people person". Guilty as charged!
To me way too many terms and topics on the left have been transmogrified into religious shibboleths that us mere peasants and sinners dont understand and for various reasons (primarily power- racial, patriarcal etc) cannot possibly be in a place to push back on, small or large. To me, this guy's thread gets at an important aspect of it.
"the words "lifelong process" is your 1st clue that someone is selling you a cult under guise of policymaking. Everyone is free to recite holy psalms, privilege confessions, & exotic pronoun lists. But don't pretend that forcing others to do likewise is a legit political project
A second clue is that you have been instructed on the existence of some priestly class, marked by ancestry or skin color or magically revealed forms of self-identification, that shall pronounce unfalsifiable truths on your worth as a human being ("allyship" etc)
And the third clue is that the act of objecting to all this cultish mysticism shall itself be construed as a form of "violence"... inherently evil thightcrime that marks you as an enemy of The Enlightened Ones and their revealed truths for saving humanity from original sin"
One of the two reasons I subscribed to Freddie in the first place is that he diagnosed one of the main ills of our age - Knowingness. Your post ties into it as well, in my opinion (though Freddie might disagree.) The esoteric CRT is distinct from the CRT that the rubes have latched onto. It can only be divined by those accredited - operating the heavy machinery of the holy racial texts without a license is suspect, if not totally sinful. This all feels like a logical extension of Knowingness to me - that once the proles notice that what is known is really pretty lame, they're threatened for their illicit Noticing.
The problem is that 50-percent-plus-one are now Noticing.
Batya Ungar-Sargon has a killer post about this on Bari Weiss' Substack.
"This is how white liberals arrived at a situation where instead of agitating for a more equal society, they agitated for more diverse elites. Instead of asking why our elites have risen so far above the average American, they asked why the elites are so white."
Yes. Excellent piece as well. CRT in both theory and practice is a distraction from, and a rationalization of the elites privileged position only a modicum of which was earned.
People throw "1984" around alot, (and I wear a "Make Orwell fiction again" T-shirt) but "Animal Farm" is just as true.
The debate is so confused because on both sides you have partisans who don't fully understand the terminology but generally know what they're for and against and are sure the other side is wrong and dangerous, and activists who do understand the terms of the debate but deliberately obfuscate. On the left, that's people who believe schools should teach racial issues in a way that makes most white people uncomfortable but don't want to lose elections because of that, and on the right it's people like Rufo who know not everything he's against fits neatly under the term "critical race theory" but understands the importance of slogans.
In general, I find the right more dishonest about the terminology and just how far along the progressive project is (that is, how close Portland's racial justice curriculum is to being implemented in Roanoke), and the left more dishonest about what generally is at stake. If you get progressives talking among themselves, there's broad agreement that (1) it's an important mission of schools to push students beyond whatever narrowminded or outdated ideas they might be learning at home; (2) white supremacy will not be dismantled without white people being made to feel uncomfortable; and (3) it's important to teach the history of race in America in a way that pushes beyond the narrative of slavery/abolition/Jim Crow/Civil Rights/Barack Obama and reckons with the structural and psychic tolls of that history. Yet, when anyone blanches at those goals put into practice, they retreat to a feigned incredulity and pretend people are just objected to any suggestion of America having a racist past.
Here’s where I see the issue: when these things are taught as ongoing and the US is virtually the same as Alabama in 1950. We can’t teach kids that all of this is their *ongoing cultural inheritance*; it has to be placed in history. Even recent history! But if we teach these things as ineradicable systemic reality (even though there’s lots of data proving a tremendous amount of progress in the last 60 years, both in white people’s attitudes and black people’s material conditions) then we continue to perpetuate the worst parts of our history.
I’m half Northern Irish, Protestant. My cousin married a Catholic, recently enough that it was possible and long enough ago that it was still an issue. I know firsthand that continuing to promote tribal identity as a positive attribute rather than an interesting fact about one’s self is always going to backfire.
Defending a policy on the basis of its inefficacy is a dishonest position 100% of the time. You'd balk at teaching Creationism as fact, even safe in the knowledge that 99.9% of your students would reject it? Why would you balk? For the 0.01%, and because truth and integrity matter.
I understand your comment fine, I just don't think the underlying premise is honest, otherwise the Left would cede control of curricula since it definitionally wouldn't move the needle. We both know that's completely untrue and hence the tooth and claw battle to retain control of the tools of indoctrination, however unreliable they may be. CRT was considered plenty effective, effective enough to be (for example) lionized as 'best practice' in Virginia for the past two and a half years, until it became convenient to throw it overboard. There's absolutely no way, none, that you'd be so sanguine about teaching evolution, for example.
"It would be bad for Republicans to decide on curricula with no checks against their power" is - and I trust you can speak for the Left here, granted that it's not a monolith - a view held by around 100% of the Left, with a small margin of error for people who misread the statement. Yes? If we allow that, we can allow the converse - the Right doesn't believe that the Democrats should have complete control over education with no checks at all. (I mean, the National Review probably does, but no true Scotsman and all that.)
All that is to say, as much as you'd prefer it to be in teachers' hands, you would - if forced to take one legislator over the other - pick the blue guy ahead of the red guy. Yes? If you acknowledge these, you acknowledge this control matters and understand why it's such a powerful issue, and why appeals to a lack of unanimity don't address the question.
Then we get to the crux of it - let's go back to your opening post:
"I always laugh when dipshit republicans claim we’re indoctrinating students. I can’t get my students to shut the fuck up and do their homework. Y’all really think I can turn them into communists or whatever."
This is about an inability to transmit doctrine to students entirely. Then this post:
"I am a teacher. I don’t think all curricula are ineffective, otherwise I would not teach. I think that the concepts that encompass CRT are specially beyond the grasp of my students. I do believe there are ways to teach anti-racism in ways that my students will understand but CRT is not among them."
Right, so you can transmit doctrine - and by the way, I am not using doctrine as a negative term, not necessarily - but it has to be effective. So any hypothetical Republican who did object to you inculcating the youth with anti-racism would be... 100% correct to do so!
It's as I said at the start - your original objection was categorical, which is dishonest, because your objection to CRT is that it's *not effective enough* compared to an alternative method, not that there's no point in advocating for or against a method.
This has been the pattern literally 100% of the times I've heard this objection, literally not a single exception.
At least put on a Dan voice so I can dream.
"The trouble is that CRT is a remarkably fluid target and it’s never clear from one analysis to the next which “level” of CRT we’re talking about."
Way too many debates come down to this.
Person 1: X
Person 2: Here's evidence against X
Person 1: Well by X I actually meant X'
The label is completely irrelevant. What people object to is curricula that automatically labels all whites as racist, or argues that whites (even the poor ones) are automatically the beneficiaries of structural racism, etc. It doesn't matter if it's called CRT, or racial education, or white fragility training, or pumpkin spice latte. The substance is what people find so objectionable and it's deeply dishonest to try to deflect away from that by declaring that "CRT isn't taught anywhere but grad school" or the equivalent.
That presumes that the only people objecting to this type of education are conservatives. If both conservatives and moderates are mounting objections then doesn't it make sense to survey both groups?
And is it just conservatives? It seems to me that the election last night in Virginia is a powerful counter argument.
I’m a liberal and I’m against it. I also don’t think bans are a good idea.
I wouldn't be for bans either, but frankly making a soft spoken argument about why this stuff is wrong isn't working and won't work. You are dealing with extremely strident people who appear to lack the empathy they talk about so much. Gotta use a sledgehammer to break a cinder block. The ball peen won't do it.
I wrote a blog post explaining my views. But also I have no audience lol
Well link it to your profile on substack so if someone (like me) wanted to read it they could!
I think most conservatives are proud of the nation, of their ancestors and of the nation's history. They believe it's an overwhelmingly positive story. They believe there's value in that story being the common national story.
Ghouls like Ezra Klein say Americans should look at their past similar to how the Germans do. Millions of Americans are happy to die on that hill, rejecting that view.
To what end? CRT is anti-White. No need to imply it has some kind of pure, clean version that's not.
Fair. I see your logic. I'd rather take out the whole hydra, but going for one head with precision makes sense too.
Correct.
As for Gervais, he is no conservative. Who else has complained about the oversensitivity of modern audiences? Dave Chappelle. Chris Rock. Jerry Seinfeld. If they are engaged in acts of deliberate provocation then it does not follow that conservatism is intent on provoking simply because they are not conservatives.
He's a comedian I rarely find funny anymore, is my complaint.
He is maybe not so funny anymore. But I would add as a caveat that the scorched earth nature of, for example, his Golden Globe performance is impressive. I can't help but feel something akin to admiration for somebody willing to go up on stage and insult an audience full of the rich and powerful directly to their faces.
That I liked.
He has said that he's very left but there's a chunk of them who are incapable of nuance -- so when he defends free speech they see him as a right winger. He described it as a Venn Diagram that doesn't intersect, it's just two circles. (That's funny, Freddie!)
Reminds me of a friend who's a Vermont socialist, but also a gun rights enthusiast. I watched so many people's brains melt when engaging with the guy because he didn't fit their view of what a Second Amendment supporter is.
Guns are a culture war issue. I wish there was an objective measure of how much of the left's anti-gun sentiment is simply because they think all gun owners are Southern rednecks.
People care about this because it affects their children. I don't want my daughtered labelled as some sort of "oppressor" at her school. That doesn't feel like "racist bullshit." It isn't denying that slavery occurred. It also has nothing to do with the 1800s.
Cruelty at the hands of peers is one thing, cruelty by the State at the hands of Agents of the State is something else entirely.
"She probably won't be labelled an oppressor and if she is it's not that bad and there are other things to worry about." Color me convinced this isn't worth my time! First, it's teachers communicating this message, not peers. Second, while children can be cruel, I find myself consistently surprised that kids have it in their nature to be kind and cooperate.
A public school telling my child to be ashamed (implicitly or explicitly) matters to me more than my taxes going up or down 3%.
Arguing that, regardless, people's kids are going to be treated like shit by government entities, such as teachers and schools, really isn't the rousing argument for handing money to the government that you seem to think it is.
Shame is terrible! Let's do more of it!
And if I had written about you, specifically, that would be relevant. This is precisely what I knew would happen in these comments: because I criticized ANY of the people working themselves into hysteria about CRT, I must be criticizing EVERY one of the people criticizing it. Which is just... not helpful. And this goes for all of you.
If you call most opposition to CRT "racist bullshit", how can you be surprised if someone thinks they might fall into the bucket of "most"?
You wrote an article a week or two back about how there's a cottage industry of white guys talking about how white guys are categorically a problem while exempting themselves. This differs only by degree. Your objection - nuanced, pragmatic, based on outcome and not dialectic. Most others' disagreements - racist bullshit, or "I wasn't talking about you specifically." Well? Now what? This commenter doesn't want her daughter to be called an oppressor. Why call her out for that? Notice something key - she didn't even mention you or your stance at all, referring only to "this." Why make it personal?
"If you call most opposition to CRT "racist bullshit", how can you be surprised if someone thinks they might fall into the bucket of "most"? "
I expect adults to understand the definition of "most"
I'll repeat my final point - she didn't mention your opinion of her at all. She said she disagrees with "this" - CRT - because of how it styles children in general and her daughter in particular. She didn't even imply, much less state, what you're accusing her of. If she had - would she be wrong? Since she didn't - why get personal?
What is "personal," to you? I talked to an adult like an adult, which is to frankly state my objection to her incorrect assumption that I included her in my critique. If she had a male username, would you say the same thing?
But where is that assumption of hers? I don't see it. What I see is an assumption _you_ made - which is that her opposition to "this" (CRT) was a defensive posture in response to your critique. There is negative evidence for that - she explained pretty concisely where her objection lies and it's only tangentially related to what you said.
You're adopting the pragmatic, all-business stance of conditional opposition to CRT (because it scares the paroles) while accusing anyone who says "no, CRT just outright sucks" of being defensive - dare I say it, triggered - by your position. It's very uncharitable.
Yes, if it was a father or someone with a male or neutral username, I'd say the same thing.
If you wanted to say "most punditry or political messaging on CRT is racist bullshit," won't argue with you there. Just because idiots like Ben Shapiro talk about it doesn't mean that the concerns of real people are imaginary. Parents are scared to raise their hands and object, so bomb throwers are speaking loudest. Sounds a lot like Trump's appeal TBH.
How do you substantiate "most" though? You neither attempt to quantify it nor do you give specific examples of criticism that *is* just racist bullshit in order to contrast it with that which is not. Your "oh, I don't mean *you*" defense is silly and comes across as a way to avoid the question. I expect Lamoille's comment is objecting as much to the "most" part of your accusation as anything else. If all of their experience involves objecting to CRT on Not Racist Bullshit terms, and their interactions with other parents also involves those parents objecting on Not Racist Bullshit terms, then of course they're going to feel attacked.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/
Eh, I would contend that anyone who says "most" about any topic without any attempt to quantify or be specific has no right to complain when others object.
Do you really expect us to read a five-part essay by Scott Alexander that begins "Imagine Heraclitus as a cattle rustler in the Old West"? Sorry, but no. I'm holding out for the Readers Digest version of SSC.
I don't personally view this as an isolated demand for rigor. The quantifier "most" is high enough that, absent the claimant making even a faint attempt to scaffold the claim, it would only pass muster for me as an assertion if I already had a rather strong prior in agreement (like "most people think the sky is blue"). In the majority of such cases, I'm more likely to just be quietly unconvinced than to actually demand the rigor, but the point remains.
But certainly for any "most" claim that's made sans scaffolding and which strongly *disagrees* with my prior experience of a given thing, I'd be inclined to ask for the rigor, because it would provide worthwhile clarification. So, it seems reasonable to me for people to be doing that in this case.
Yes, exactly.
Freddie: "I also think the anti-CRT hysteria is absurd and, yes, largely a matter of white backlash against increasing awareness of racism and racial inequality, though there are exceptions."
IMO, there is nothing hyterical or absurd about not wanting your kids to be taught in school that they are irredeemably racist. And that this is actually happening is well documented.
I think I am as aware of racism and racial inequality as any white person. I have considered myself to be pretty far left all my life (I'm 66), and have never voted for a Republican for any office. But the illiberalism of today's left is driving me ever further rightward. I would have voted for Youngkin in Virginia.
Fun fact: Youngkin's just elected Republican Lieutenant Governor is a Black woman, Winsome Sears.
You have a remarkable faith in the idea that cultural transference doesn't affect developing humans, given how central it is to every human society.
Good thing I explicitly said that it's not a policy worth advancing, didn't I?
So it's a policy not worth advancing, but those opposed to it are "largely" hysterical and absurd and acting out of white backlash against racial inequality.
But hey, only "largely"!
By the way, how's that program of winning hearts and minds to socialism coming along?
Changing hearts and minds to socialism involves converting liberals first, and looking at the way the GOP cynically stoked racism - yes, racism - using CRT and saying "nope, no racism here" wouldn't help. I suspect that most individual people who came out hard against CRT are motivated in part or in whole by racial animus, yes. Is that really so hard to believe? Or impermissible? I don't think that's a rational reading of the situation, and I don't think I've said anything without appropriate limitation and qualification.
first Black woman ever elected state wide in VA.
Claiming "anti-CRT hysteria is absurd," "mostly racist bullshit" that is "largely a matter of white backlash" seems closer to dismissing "EVERY" rather than "ANY" person holding such concerns.
PS: in general thanks for your interesting and thoughtful perspective on things!
Today I read (somewhere, just was startled) that there are far more people w/o children who are D than R. And w/o children people more likely to be fine w/ CRT. Will need to follow up on details, but now I'm alert to this and thinking of people I know and does somewhat track.
And there is a bit of evidence that this is actually a two-way relationship - that is, it's not just that people who are conservative are more likely to have kids, but that having kids makes people more conservative. (Not in all cases, and some of the evidence is fuzzy, but I have no problem believing it personally.)
And that also means conservative with a small c (0r maybe I should say careful?) Just think of how one lives one's life before becoming a parent and after. It's the small things at first--maybe you think more about what food is provided; then maybe you become a more careful driver; then (in my day) stop smoking, have to be clearheaded to manage things...it all leads to a way of living different than pre-parenthood.
If I was the catty type - couldn't be me, perish the thought - I'd condense it to: "people want to conserve the things they love."
We have a biological imperative to protect our children. Having kids creates a narrow circle of intense care, probably at the expense of larger issues. Call it selfish if you will, but most parents would save their child over a bus full of nuns, regardless of the objective morality of that choice.
And you don't even know that is how you would respond until you have a child. I think the number of state School Boards like Ohio and Pennsylvania resigning from the National School Boards Association is a big reflection of this at grass roots level.
Couldn't agree more. It's not logical. You can't explain it to someone. My partner and I were desperate to avoid being the crazy parents, but I have also been at urgent care at 1 AM over a bloody lip ("It won't stop bleeding!" "What about her teeth!?")
This isn't hysteria. The state of local schools and how they teach our children is probably the number one issue for any young family. The topic of race and gender messaging is a very common discussion among parents. 99% of these parents aren't election truthers or Daily Wire subscribers.
Test scores are dropping. And schools are focusing inordinate amounts of time on "DEI" which we had never even heard of before the drop in test scores.
I don't want my kids labeled as racist oppressors simply for being pale, either. At the same time, with me as their mom, frankly, they'll have bigger fish to fry. I didn't know until I had kids how relatively unconcerned I would be about them getting guff from time to time for what used to be called PC reasons. Maybe as my kids age, my mind will change on this, depending on what they're exposed to. But right now, the bigger threat to getting my kids to adulthood in one piece is the family disharmony caused by well-meaning relatives forwarding me warnings that "social-emotional learning" is yet another code for "CRT" when I can tell that so far, my kids have benefited from the social-emotional learning they've been getting.
I need my family with me to raise these kids. My family, for the most part, believes Chris Rufo, though. I'm also absoforkinlutely grateful for the good the public school district I'm in has done for my littles, and I'm not about ready to become an ingrate just because the curriculum indulges in some of the usual lefty edspeak pieties.
I think there are serious problems with the "equity industry". If a Kafkatrapping grifter like DiAngelo were discovered dead in a ditch tomorrow, I would not mourn much. But in the situation I happen to be in, Rufo is the grifter I end up having to worry more about. I've just had it with the "anti-equity industry" at this point. Quite possibly, this is because of exposure, and if I had been more exposed to the "equity industry" instead, I'd've had it with them first. So I sympathize with those whose patience with the "equity industry" ran out first. That's not the group I find myself in, though.
I disagree that it's unfair to ask for the proponents of CRT to define their terms precisely, especially when it comes to the implementation of a curriculum. We have no problem demarcating the limits of how history should be taught to fifth graders in any other context. (We can, and do, define the subject matter, framing, depth, preferred outcomes etc.) The reason why it's hard to do this at a national level is fair enough - these things are decided locally. But it's not hard to do so locally, and the reason it's not done locally and parents who do so are subject to demonization is an obvious one - everyone hates this stuff except the crazies who are pushing it. It's not because it's hard to define or hard to explain, certainly no more so than any other facet of post-Marxist critical theory. It's not that, contra McAuliffe, it's none of our business to ask. It's that it absolutely sucks and everyone knows it.
Hence the constant obfuscation of the topic, telling us the flaming oven is the aurora borealis that we're not allowed to see. I am not accusing Freddie of this but there is a reflexive tendency among the left to both treat the racial indoctrination of children as simultaneously of vital importance and of no consequence whatsoever. That we evil Rightists are, in the same breath, denying the children their birthright of critical race education, but also dumb racist hicks who are, like, ignoring the big issues, man. To which, two responses: if it's so important to you, you can define it and let the issue be decided by the voters on the merits. (Like just happened in Virginia.) If it's the latter, something only dumb hayseeds like me care about, and detracts from a focus on the economy, then this: I hereby relieve you of the duty to educate me further. You need never talk to me about CRT ever again. Go and be fruitful on the field of economy, the one that matters to you and the one that, apparently, you'd have a winning message on were you not on a mission to civilize country cousins like me. Now we're both happy.
The raw facts are these: even people whose understanding of CRT is rudimentary by now know enough to know it stinks, and that their opponents hide its inner workings away like the ark of Axum is *more* evidence of that, not less, because people with solid, persuasive theorems tell them to anyone who'll listen. Those selling horseshit disguised as perfume won't let you sniff it, much less look at the bottle. So the obscurantism fails on its own merits.
And finally, bear in mind that the middle-of-the-road Carlyle Group alum, a guy who makes Mitt Romney look like a wild-eyed radical, won Virginian without even acknowledging a key point, which is that CRT is explicitly anti-White. This is extraordinary, but it's also not going to happen again. When the CRT fight ramps up in other states, ones less gentrified and respectable than the Commonwealth, someone's eventually going to tell it like it is. And that's when CRT defenders really have their work cut out for them.
The whole CRT/Whiteness schtick made more sense to me when I realized that Whiteness is just a new word for Cultural Protestantism. I mean look at the famous Smithsonian Whiteness Infographic: it puts "protestant work ethic" right there on the label for the hard of thinking, before going on to list individualism, Christian holidays and just about every other known characteristic of Protestantism.
So what do you get when you reject "Whiteness"? You get the end of Cultural Protestantism. The end of deferred gratification, following time schedules and the idea that the future should be better than the past.
And *that's* why people can be 'white adjacent' or 'become white' - they have adapted just enough Cultural Protestantism to prosper. It's nothing to do with skin color. Why they chose to eschew 'Protestantism' for 'Whiteness' I'll leave as an exercise for the reader...
What I've heard by way of explanation is that b/c the Protestant settlers were white Europeans, Protestantism and whiteness are virtually interchangeable.
So why not just used the less loaded term?
Good question!
Maybe CRT sociologists are dumb and not so good with words. That's one possibility I guess.
The other possibility being that they are not dumb and deliberately chose the loaded term...
It's because they need to be able to damn YOU now. You may say "I'm not a Protestant, I'm a Buddhist" (or whatever), but you can't escape your Whiteness.
Because one would have to take it more seriously if we did. If it were called cultural protestantism it would be critiqued on the grounds that lots of other cultures shared the same values too. Basically it would turn it to a genuine claim that is up for debate.
And it's rather ironic that attitudes and attributes (usually) required to be successful, or even functional, are the ones being critiqued and demonized.
>What bothers me is the obvious contrast: Biden’s child tax credit is in effect a very pro-Black program that has profound and immediate material impact. (And it doesn’t lead to a lot of people living off the dole, right-wing fantasies to the contrary.)
The link cited does not support this claim. The article describes one study claiming that after "two or three" child support payments, in a temporary program, no labor market effects are visible. But the article goes on to cite another economist, who very reasonably says he would expect effects to show up only in the longer term.
"The researchers write that “our analyses of real-world data do not support claims” that the child tax credit “has negative employment effects that offset its documented reductions in poverty and hardship.”
“If the accounts and models are true that more than a million parents are going to drop out of the labor market, well surely we would see some evidence of that after two or three payments,” Parolin said in a phone interview. “The short answer is you don’t when you go to the data and actually assess what is happening.”
But York, the Tax Foundation economist, maintains that it is too early to truly see an effect.
"We've only had a few months and there's only a couple more payments scheduled before it expires," York said. "I'd expect to seeing changing work incentives in the medium to long term and not necessarily right away.""
The left is completely incapable of cost-benefit analysis. Always has been.
Compromise, damnit!
Tell it to the progressives in the House blocking infrastructure.
You really think the progressives are to blame for holding up this legislation by holding out for some of the decently substantive policy voters were promised to be included? Not the two named and countless unnamed moderates constantly undermining Biden’s ostensible agenda? Wild perspective on the whole situation if you ask me.
Yes, because it's been obvious from Day One that Manchin and Sinema were going to set hard upper limits on what could be accomplished. They have the power to do that, and they are exercising that power. Don't like it? Get more Democrats elected to the Senate. Meanwhile, get done what can be gotten done.
Do you think there is another Democrat in West Virginia who could win a statewide election for Senator? Dream on. Manchin is the best you're going to get, period. He votes Democrat often enough (especially on executive appointments, which have often been party line votes) to be important and useful.
Do you know who ran against Sinema in the Democrat primary in Arizona in 2018? Only one opponent: a Muslim woman who wears the hijab. You think she (the Muslim I mean) could have beaten Republcian Martha McSally in the 2018 Arizona statewide election? Dream on! And Sinema, like Manchin, votes party line on appointments.
Not getting done what Manchin and Sinema will permit has just helped the Democrats lose Virginia, and will lead to the Restoration of the Trump Dynasty in 2024 if the progressives don't stop holding their breath and accomplish something.
Yep. I’m aware this is your take, been reading the newsletter for a little while now and you pop up in the comments to repeat these notions often. Not gonna argue with you, as you seem quite set in your ideas of what kind of messaging and governance wins over enough voters to not cede ground to the GOP, which are extremely different from mine as a young socialist. It is what it is.
My main point is that I find it interesting that people who self describe as left like yourself are so willing to blame the left flank of the party who actually try to deliver for voters, when in fact both the centrists and the progressives are holding up legislation. It’s just the centrists will actually use the leverage of withholding their vote to make it worse, obviously, like you said we’ve known that since day one. And since folks like you always blame progressives who try and do the same, I can’t say my hopes are up for Third Way politics getting us anywhere good in 2022 or 2024. My guess is voters will get half a bowl of shit and feel betrayed again, and Dems will lose one or both chambers.
I had a friend who was getting a big time MBA and a lot of the curriculum was about how to run a “sustainable” business. He joked, in a mostly serious way, they the they class was great, all you had to do to build a successful business was do the opposite of what they taught you.
So, with that in mind, here is the question - why does a resume with a Black sounding name get fewer callbacks than the exact same resume with a white sound sign name? Because people think, consciously or unconsciously, that Black people are inferior. Will pointing out all the ways that Black people have been mistreated reduce that bias or increase it?
CRT is being pushed by well meaning folks who a really into education. I don’t think they really grasp how things work for a substantial portion of the population.
> “Why does a resume with a Black sounding name get fewer callbacks”
It doesn’t. That claim didn’t survive the replication crisis.
The problem was that names don’t JUST signify race, they also signify OTHER attributes an employer might or might not want such as age, education level or social class. So either you need to use a LOT of names or *very carefully selected* names to avoid confounding the results. When names were selected to be more similar in ways *other* than race there was no difference found.
(Example using “white” names - would a *law firm* prefer to interview a “William Robert”, or a “Billy-Bob”? Billy-Bob might do better at an auto body shop, but William Robert is getting interviewed first at the law firm.)
(The “black” names Darius, Malik, and Andre were found to signal higher socioeconomic status than the names Rasheed, Leroy, and Jamal)
So the more stereotypically black the name the fewer callbacks received? I don’t see how that means the study failed to replicate.
Here's a good writeup of the failed replication with some more nuance on names and how they may indicate SES and race - http://datacolada.org/51
But in terms of stereotypes, race and class are closely related. In all honesty that study seems like too smart by half sophistry.
No, it turned out the names that first study picked as “stereotypically black” *happened* to signal low-SES. There existed other names they could have chosen that signaled “black” just as well *without* also signaling low-SES.
When I say it failed to replicate what I mean is there have been ACTUAL STUDIES that did the exact same thing and didn’t find the same result. I don’t just mean “I found an excuse to distrust this result”. The SES discovery was part of people trying to figure out WHY it didn’t replicate.
More here: datacolada.org/51
They didn’t do the same thing. They used names that didn’t signal stereotypical blackness.
"Malik" isn't stereotypically black?
Arabic?
Wouldn't a study demonstrating that class has more of an impact on people's decisions than race be way more interesting than squinting at this to say "yeah, but race still matters"? (I'm not saying that's accurate, just stipulating Glen's read on this study is accurate)
I have two Chinese couple friends (Immigrants) who both have children who they named Joe, Mike, Suzy and Tony because they told me they knew this would work better for them in the U.S. I was initially surprised at this pragmatism over culture, but they told me they wanted to make their children's lives less complicated. Also, my mother's family (Hispanic) often use an English version of their first names.
Every person I work with professionally in the US who was born in China has an name they chose to use. They tend to be very proper British names. It comes up when you’re on a call with “Gwen” and you get a follow up email from Zhongfeng as their email name is usually their legal name.
This is, at least according to a Taiwanese friend, the standard among well-educated Chinese (and Taiwanese) people. They give their kid a Chinese first name and an English middle name so that their kid has an easy name to use when they inevitably go to an English-speaking country for school or their career.
"why does a resume with a Black sounding name get fewer callbacks than the exact same resume with a white sound sign name? Because people think, consciously or unconsciously, that Black people are inferior."
Not necessarily. That's only one possibility.
Another (but there are many more) could be familiarity bias. People get the warm-fuzzies about those that seem more like them on a whole host of dimensions. Perhaps that's not a more comforting reason, but it is a different one. Maybe in a black-run company white names or Asian names would get fewer callbacks. As far as I'm aware, that's not data we have.
The point is, though, correlation is not causation. Fewer call-backs is not enough, by itself, to tell us the cause. Could it be racism? Sure could. Is racism the only possibility? Nope.
Great post. Harping on white privilege is never going to bring about positive change. It’s just not. Maybe it’s emotionally satisfying to force white people to confront their whiteness and act guilty forever, but it’s a terrible strategy for making things better.
Americans like to be part of positive movements that make them feel good. They also feel motivated to help when someone faces unfair treatment (“You were denied a loan just for being Black? Well that’s not fair. Let’s do something.”)
I keep thinking about how well Obama handled race in 2008. White moms in the suburbs were proud to volunteer for his campaign, to be part of electing the first Black president. They felt uplifted rather than diminished.
Some of those same people voted against McAullife in part because they’re pissed about CRT and social justice politics. Right or wrong, this stuff is not popular. You have to coddle people a bit to bring them along or at least not make them feel insulted.
"Maybe it’s emotionally satisfying to force white people to confront their whiteness and act guilty forever, but it’s a terrible strategy for making things better."
I think people have forgotten to separate the personal and political.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_personal_is_political
This post is very reflective of my views, including being personally open to and supportive of reparations (although I cannot imagine a world in which that view wins a majority). I will never be persuaded that being "white" is something important about me culturally -- has it given me social and economic advantages? Yes. Should those be afforded to all people? Yes. I saw some Kendi tweet about how novels by white people with white characters are fundamentally about race and it just made my heart sink. I mean is there some way in which that is true? Yes. Is it super interesting to talk about? No. Since I read it as a teen I have felt that Invisible Man is the greatest American novel and one of the greatest works of art generally -- I recently read Moby Dick and while there were really fascinating things about it, I only finished it because right as I was about to give up because I could not read one more sentence about whales, there was a whole ode to the relative mystery and magic of the Pacific Ocean which as an immigrant to California was something that hooked me back in. Anyway my point is that Invisible Man is great in part because the racial history of America makes some amazing material for modernism but not simply because it is "about race" -- that feels just really reductionist. And I share great enthusiasm for the CTC. I work on child welfare and juvenile justice issues and the lesson that I learn over and over again in my career is that kids need consistent adult support and love in their lives -- it is just so powerful and the CTC could make a really meaningful difference in making that more likely for families with one parent or who are just struggling to make ends meet. That is going to do a lot more to improve outcomes for youth of color than struggle sessions at Dalton.
My son's high school has been teaching "lessons" about privilege and oppression in virtually every class for the last several years. Students have been instructed to define themselves by their identities; my kid reluctantly had the fact that he's Jewish become central to an in-class discussion about the State of Israel and the oppression of Palestinians, and how that dovetails with systems of oppression more broadly in the United States. This isn't CRT, but it's certainly something a little different than reading, writing and arithmetic. Syllabi went from being overweighted with dead white males to having dead white males totally verboten and wholly absent from his humanities instruction.
We've just rolled with it - our kid's a great critical thinker, and a large-hearted, liberally-minded, colorblind reader. Great works of formerly ignored literature are finally being placed in front of kids of all races, and we're all the better for it. But you can see the backlash surging, even in San Francisco, and parents are grumbling and organizing to recall the school board, the "progressive" DA and more, if they can. I can only imagine the conversations in Virginia. We ignore the overreach at our much greater peril.
Public or private school?
That’s not “CRT”—but it is *applied* CRT. That’s what it looks like in high schools.
"My son's high school has been teaching "lessons" about privilege and oppression in virtually every class for the last several years."
You are saying that math and science class, PE class, language class, electives, have lessons in which the students are instructed to view themselves by an identity? Talking about Israel and Palestine?
Or does "virtually every class" translate, like Freddie's "most", into well, not really most but a lot and probably really just history and English class sometimes.
I ask because while I think the constant focus on examining every issue through race (shortcircuited to CRT) is idiotic, I also know that the vast majority of schools aren't doing anything other than an occasional bullshit lesson that the kids ignore. And the schools that are absolutely viewing everything through race are generally charters with 100% black population.
Humanities classes and Learning Seminar classes; Civics. I don’t think it’s reached math just yet. Amen to the “occasional bullshit lesson that kids ignore”. I’m not saying any true harm is being done, far from it - the harm being done is to any meaningful cause that might actually make a material difference in millions of lives. That just took another small step backward last night.
It's coming to math:
https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf
Equitable Math is quite a hodgepodge. Not every suggestion in it would necessarily harm math instruction, and some could conceivably improve it.
I taught for a while in an extracurricular program in underserved public schools. My specialty was math and science, especially physics, and I was in for a rude awakening in some respects. Equitable Math emphasizes, for example, using real-life examples your kids actually have access to, which I admit *was* a stumbling-block for me. (What do you mean the kids don't know how a seesaw works? I see one right there on school grounds. Oh, that seesaw has never worked, and nobody has plans for it working, ever? And the seesaws in the local parks have all been disassembled? Oh...)
I think it's possible to argue what's good about Equitable Math isn't what's special, and what's special isn't good, but, having read through all the "Strides" not too long ago, it's not the offense against mathematics the "anti-equity" side of the culture wars makes it out to be.
"Every student is a mathematician!"-type language is of course cheesy. And false. Not every student will be. But if you have an interest in evoking math talent that might otherwise go overlooked, some of those "every student is a mathematician!" tips can help, despite their literal falsehood.
Pedagogy can always be improved (in math and everything else), but the title of the linked material is "Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction". So: before you started using more real-world examples, were you practicing racism that needed to be dismantled? Are you now, or have you ever been, a racist? I'm going with "no". The whole premise is absurd, which is the point.
The seesaw should also be dismantled. By having a high side and a low side it perpetuates inequality.
I had some obliviousness, which I would call more class- (and sometimes perhaps culture-) than race-based, which did deserve dismantling.
Are copious clouds of lefty edspeak pieties *necessary* to drive that lesson home? No, of course not. Still, had the Strides been around when I was teaching, and had I been willing to read through them all and get the good I could out of them, my best bet is they would have corrected some deficits in my teaching.
Making Math relatable is a great idea, but I'm not sure Equitable Math can take the credit for it.
Oh, Equitable Math doesn't deserve credit. Still, some useful tips on relatability are buried in the Strides. I often see Equitable Math described as a kind of anti-math, and for all its silly pretensions, it's not that.
Wouldn't one of the kids have just said "teacher, what's a seesaw?" Was your previous, seesaw-rich curriculum really ending up in insurmountable racist confusion?
People have been making lesson plans and materials with real-world examples for the best part of a century. (Someome put the word 'yacht' in a question about fifty years ago and we still haven't heard the end of that one. Y'know, coz black kids apparently don't know what yachts are, and all white kids go home at the end of the day to their yacht, possibly with built-in seesaw.) It's simply unbelievable that you're so unaware of this, and so unable to read the mood of a room, that this 'seesaw' thing was some kind of revelation to you.
No, they knew what a seesaw was. It was that piece of playground equipment that never worked, as they informed me. It was therefore useless for relating to the worksheet I had prepared.
I had known since high school that using real-world examples to make questions more relatable wouldn't work if the real-world stuff wasn't itself relatable. I had seen the seesaw on the grounds, and just assumed that it worked when I made the worksheet at home. All in all, it was a small hitch, but it does stand out in my memory as symbolic of a larger obliviousness on my part that pricked my conscience as I recognized it. (The worse examples are more involved and harder to summarize.)
Obliviously assuming that something couldn't possibly be a problem (like my just assuming the seesaw would work) isn't animus, but it can end up being unfair. Sometimes (for example, in medicine), pretty seriously unfair. I still long for the universal harmonies, but I don't see overcoming facticity's absurd impediments as quite so obvious anymore.
You're free to impugn my youthful obliviousness and failure to read a room all you like. I was a young, fresh math major! With troubles of my own and conservative ideals, no less! None of those is famous factors for being a "people person". Guilty as charged!
To me way too many terms and topics on the left have been transmogrified into religious shibboleths that us mere peasants and sinners dont understand and for various reasons (primarily power- racial, patriarcal etc) cannot possibly be in a place to push back on, small or large. To me, this guy's thread gets at an important aspect of it.
https://twitter.com/jonkay/status/1455888717697138691
"the words "lifelong process" is your 1st clue that someone is selling you a cult under guise of policymaking. Everyone is free to recite holy psalms, privilege confessions, & exotic pronoun lists. But don't pretend that forcing others to do likewise is a legit political project
A second clue is that you have been instructed on the existence of some priestly class, marked by ancestry or skin color or magically revealed forms of self-identification, that shall pronounce unfalsifiable truths on your worth as a human being ("allyship" etc)
And the third clue is that the act of objecting to all this cultish mysticism shall itself be construed as a form of "violence"... inherently evil thightcrime that marks you as an enemy of The Enlightened Ones and their revealed truths for saving humanity from original sin"
One of the two reasons I subscribed to Freddie in the first place is that he diagnosed one of the main ills of our age - Knowingness. Your post ties into it as well, in my opinion (though Freddie might disagree.) The esoteric CRT is distinct from the CRT that the rubes have latched onto. It can only be divined by those accredited - operating the heavy machinery of the holy racial texts without a license is suspect, if not totally sinful. This all feels like a logical extension of Knowingness to me - that once the proles notice that what is known is really pretty lame, they're threatened for their illicit Noticing.
The problem is that 50-percent-plus-one are now Noticing.
CRT can be summed up as follows: If the class struggle isn't cutting it, well then, it must be race!
Batya Ungar-Sargon has a killer post about this on Bari Weiss' Substack.
"This is how white liberals arrived at a situation where instead of agitating for a more equal society, they agitated for more diverse elites. Instead of asking why our elites have risen so far above the average American, they asked why the elites are so white."
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/how-journalism-abandoned-the-working
Yes. Excellent piece as well. CRT in both theory and practice is a distraction from, and a rationalization of the elites privileged position only a modicum of which was earned.
People throw "1984" around alot, (and I wear a "Make Orwell fiction again" T-shirt) but "Animal Farm" is just as true.
The debate is so confused because on both sides you have partisans who don't fully understand the terminology but generally know what they're for and against and are sure the other side is wrong and dangerous, and activists who do understand the terms of the debate but deliberately obfuscate. On the left, that's people who believe schools should teach racial issues in a way that makes most white people uncomfortable but don't want to lose elections because of that, and on the right it's people like Rufo who know not everything he's against fits neatly under the term "critical race theory" but understands the importance of slogans.
In general, I find the right more dishonest about the terminology and just how far along the progressive project is (that is, how close Portland's racial justice curriculum is to being implemented in Roanoke), and the left more dishonest about what generally is at stake. If you get progressives talking among themselves, there's broad agreement that (1) it's an important mission of schools to push students beyond whatever narrowminded or outdated ideas they might be learning at home; (2) white supremacy will not be dismantled without white people being made to feel uncomfortable; and (3) it's important to teach the history of race in America in a way that pushes beyond the narrative of slavery/abolition/Jim Crow/Civil Rights/Barack Obama and reckons with the structural and psychic tolls of that history. Yet, when anyone blanches at those goals put into practice, they retreat to a feigned incredulity and pretend people are just objected to any suggestion of America having a racist past.
Here’s where I see the issue: when these things are taught as ongoing and the US is virtually the same as Alabama in 1950. We can’t teach kids that all of this is their *ongoing cultural inheritance*; it has to be placed in history. Even recent history! But if we teach these things as ineradicable systemic reality (even though there’s lots of data proving a tremendous amount of progress in the last 60 years, both in white people’s attitudes and black people’s material conditions) then we continue to perpetuate the worst parts of our history.
I’m half Northern Irish, Protestant. My cousin married a Catholic, recently enough that it was possible and long enough ago that it was still an issue. I know firsthand that continuing to promote tribal identity as a positive attribute rather than an interesting fact about one’s self is always going to backfire.