A Follow Up on My Last Post

 Other people, who know more than I do, have expressed my views on critical race theory in schools much better than I have.

Jonathan Chait:  

Yes, CRT is a term to describe a family of academic theories that are not being taught to schoolchildren. But many school administrators are embracing its theories as the basis for their anti-racist practices. Some of these lessons are reductive, employ shaming, and are ineffective. Repeating over and over that these lessons are not, strictly speaking, CRT is a way of shutting down any channel for identifying and correcting errors.

 Julian Sanchez: (read the whole thing.  It's really good).

First, it’s of course true that K-12 schools are not "teaching Critical Race Theory” any more than they’re teaching vector calculus. And this is the instinctive response of people who had some sense of what “critical race theory” was before it became a buzzword.

But most people had never heard of CRT before it became a buzzword. To them it means “a fuzzy constellation of stuff happening in schools I’m uncomfortable with.” And that is very explicitly the point of the folks mounting the crusade.

. . . . .

The plan, explicitly, is to hijack the label—evoking an abstruse academic theory that might motivate a secret elite plot—to slap on a whole cluster of loosely related phenomena. And the fact that it’s inaccurate is, somewhat ingeniously, a component of its effectiveness.

Because, predictably, people with at least a passing prior acquaintance with CRT say “that’s absurd, nobody’s teaching that to 9th graders.” Which is literally true. But *the stuff in schools people are vaguely uncomfortable with* is, indeed, happening.

So when people say “this is nuts, schools aren’t teaching CRT,” it feels like gaslighting.

Comparing the critical race theory to the 1619 project, Sanchez says:

Maybe I’m naive, but I tend to think in both cases, you’d get a surprising level of consensus if you sat normal people down for an hour of quiet discussion. “Yes, OK, these five things were wrong, the other stuff is right."

The function of the package deal is to try & push the folks with legitimate or at least debatable objections into a coalition with the folks who have illegitimate objections, as though there’s some unified thing they’re all taking issue with.

 And our side somehow has to turn the temperature down enough to find that consensus among normal people and exclude the ones with illegitmate objections.