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Erin E.'s avatar

"the kind of soggy liberals who teach at law schools have decided that they need to look busy when it comes to race or risk losing their cush gigs"

This made me chuckle. Twelve years ago, I found myself drunk for the first time on pineapple margaritas at a fairly tame bachelorette party held in an after-hours art store. As I stumbled out, a magnet caught my eye that's still on my fridge today. It's a very Catholic-looking portrait of Christ, and the caption reads: "Jesus is Coming. Look Busy." I didn't know it then, but that was the first real step I took toward a critical examination of my religious thought, which had dominated much of my life. It took drunken inhibition to get beneath the veneer of unshakable certainty.

Since then, any time I've internally felt the impulse "so-and-so is coming/watching. Look busy" I've stopped and really taken a good hard look at what I'm so invested in covering up with disingenuous supportiveness. You, among a few others, have provided handholds for me to navigate my way out of lazy thinking. Cheers.

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Always Adblock's avatar

"Banning CRT in schools is asinine, for no other reason than that K-12 students aren’t exactly in a rush to uncritically accept what’s they’re taught in the first place."

This is an absolute cop-out. It's saying, well, there's no reason to ban it because kids aren't going to buy the horseshit that we're feeding them. So why not just teach them creationism? Scientific racism? If the idea is that it's fine to teach whatever you want because kids are skeptical then let's get that applied across the board and not just for things that you have a lingering personal sympathy for. This is frankly dishonest.

Beyond that, opposition to CRT is not that it is being "taught" per se. That is, nobody's writing "Today's lesson: critical race theory" on a blackboard and teaching it as a theory of race and power. The opposition is that it is *underpinning* the teaching of other topics, ranging from civics to (as you mention) math. This would be the difference between teaching what creationism is in a comparative religion class or a history class, or creationism being the guiding principle in a biology class. In the former, you teach the theory as a theory and invite skepticism and inquiry from kids. (Or more likely, you invite boredom.) In the latter, your doctrine underpins a lesson that's ostensibly about the 'what' and not the 'why'. There's an absolute world of difference between the two.

Still, as always I find myself nodding along with your overall thesis. We as a society are speaking loudly and carrying no big stick. We twist ourselves into pretzels and scream the most shocking slogans, then go back to our 401ks and our Starbucks. It's all a colossal waste of time and energy.

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