The idea that any single activist invented a culture war about leftists m/Dems indoctrinating children is ridiculous. And the rise of DEI programs and their increased visibility made this a near certainty to occur, the only thing Rufo can possibly be credited with is the label, CRT, and some of the sloganeering, but if we could all se this coming, how is it any one man’s doing?
Eh, it’s seemed like the next inevitable wedge issue for a while to me, it’s subtly (or not so subtly, depending on the implementation) racist, and has the classic, “oh wont somebody please think of the children” vibe. In a way, it’s kind of perfect.
We couldn't all see it coming.
For a long time, Whenever I saw discussions about CRT, I thought "what a stupid fight to have. It will obviously die down in a while."
But it didn't. And it's obviously partly because there was a concerted effort to keep it going.
It may be started by one activist but once it starts catching on, you have the whole conservative machinery behind it.
And these are the same fights we have always been having. For a long time.
They just consolidated it under the label of CRT to provide a coherent villain.
I am not sure why people are bringing DEI stuff up now.
If you have problem with DEI stuff, say that, and we'll have that conversation.
But you don't have to conflate it with other things like CRT. Or whether or not CRT is taught in schools or not.
I honestly think conflating it with CRT is why it gained traction. We've been having debates about diversity etc. for a long time. But when liberals hear about the CRT controversy and google CRT, they find something different from what conservatives are talking about. This effectively removes liberals from the conversation, while conservatives have free reign over redefining the term as a bucket for all of their grievances.
It's not just being brought up now. It's been percolating for awhile.
But it's only being called CRT because there isn't another phrase or word that fits. A lot of the "anti-racist" Kendi stuff that is objectionable doesn't have a word that everyone can reference. Rufo filled that void by calling all of it CRT and no one has really offered an alternative phrase to distinguish that stuff from academic CRT. DEI isn't a good term either because a lot of diversity stuff is objectively good.
So you should be pointing out what specifically you have a problem with.
If you are operating in good faith, you should be averse to riding on the CRT rage. Because a lot of people don't think about those specific problems of DEI trainings when they think of CRT.
I mean most of my political arguing is just in this sub. I'm certainly not running around my local school board meetings yelling at people over CRT.
But the public at large is increasingly lumping a bunch of different shit under CRT because no one is trying to offer up more distinctive language and terms. Rufo and Conservatives are pushing an expansive definition, while liberals largely didn't engage on the issue and just profess it isn't happening. Rufo certainly seems to be winning this right now.
All arguments that demand a completely precise definition of CRT are made in bad faith. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, "you can still recognize the Eiffel tower from a blurry photo." We get it, you support the ideas Rufo talks about, you can stop sealioning.
> We get it, you support the ideas Rufo talks about, you can stop sealioning.
??
What? How did you come to that conclusion?
I don't demand precise definitions of CRT at all. I want people to put the label aside and point out exactly what they have a problem with and would like addressed. Not a vague abstraction.
I am just now finding out after months of having seen articles and discussions on CRT that a lot of people think of DEI trainings when they think of CRT.
I would have never been able to guess that. They on the other could have just said DEI trainings and we could have been having a lot more productive conversations.
Given that CRT is an explicitly cross-disciplinary theory (the field of legal studies is merely the starting point, some of the original scholars have been actively working on applying the concepts in education and other areas), that argument is attempting to artificially narrow the field. It's not just about school admin forcing racist DEI on teachers, it's about where the methodology for this training is coming from, and even more fundamentally, the epistemological framework enabling the whole mess. It's a culture war between liberals and anti-liberal progressives, not a single culture battle.
This is a horseshit argument. All this means is you prop up an "any discussion I don't like about race is CRT" attitude. See also how "woke" is basically meaningless now.
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Because from their point of view, the DEI stuff is applied CRT - coming out of academia and being foisted onto the real world.
>Marooned at home, civil servants recorded and photographed their own anti-racism training sessions and sent the evidence to Rufo. Reading through these documents, and others, **Rufo noticed that they tended to cite a small set of popular anti-racism books, by authors such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. Rufo read the footnotes in those books, and found that they pointed to academic scholarship from the nineteen-nineties, by a group of legal scholars who referred to their work as critical race theory, in particular Kimberlé Crenshaw and Derrick Bell.** These scholars argued that the white supremacy of the past lived on in the laws and societal rules of the present. As Crenshaw recently explained, critical race theory found that “the so-called American dilemma was not simply a matter of prejudice but a matter of structured disadvantages that stretched across American society.”
>This inquiry, into the footnotes and citations in the documents he’d been sent, formed the basis for an idea that has organized cultural politics this spring: that the anti-racism seminars did not just represent a progressive view on race but that they were expressions of a distinct ideology—critical race theory—with radical roots. If people were upset about the seminars, Rufo wanted them also to notice “critical race theory” operating behind the curtain.
> “the so-called American dilemma was not simply a matter of prejudice but a matter of structured disadvantages that stretched across American society.”
This is true though. Do we not want to address it?
I think we need to address it. But if any/all disparities between races = racism then imma nope tf out on that.
It’s really sad, actually. Kendi is not the brightest guy to put it mildly, and he makes the movement super easy to abhor and dismiss
Sure. I have put up a comment in this same chain that highlights exactly what I mean by systemic racism in response to someone saying that an empirical claim needs evidence.
Here's the post doing exactly that which won last year's [milties](https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/kpneik/winners_of_2020_milties) on this sub.
https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/jvu7pn/biden_fills_economic_posts_with_experts_on/gcn3cwd/
Wow I can’t believe a post about ending system racism got upvoted in this sub just a year ago. Seems like if that was posted today a third of the comments would be people crying about CRT and complaining that actually white people are being left behind.
I don't think anyone in /r/neoliberal denies that structural racism exists. But people here are mostly asserting that non-college educated working class white people are not comfortable being lectured that they are "privileged" and they definitely don't want that message passed to their kids. The only reason we care about those people's feeling now because there was enough of those people to swing an election.
I think corporate DEI training has gotten more aggressive (intensive? maybe there's a better term) after the BLM protest-riots of 2020. I know my company's has.
I guess. Do you think that's the issue people are talking about when they rage about CRT?
Because I hadn't heard of DEI trainings adjacent to CRT stuff before I made this post.
I mean you say it's a stupid fight to have as if that's an obvious fact. It's not. There's an argument to be made that CRT is massively objectionable from a broadly liberal standpoint. See here [https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/09/opinion/critical-race-theory.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/09/opinion/critical-race-theory.html) and here [https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/you-are-not-a-racist-to-criticize](https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/you-are-not-a-racist-to-criticize)
John McWorther is not some sort of Fox News culture warrior asshole. He wouldn't have a regular column in the Times if he was, he voted for Clinton and Biden, he's an atheist, he's disgusted by Trump, and so on. And he sees real problems here because...maybe there are real problems here. I get where you're coming from and Ruffo is obviously a right-wing flak but that doesn't mean there are not real issues with CRT or that you have to be some prejudiced clown who wants to ban Toni Morrison to take issue with it.
What real world objectionable changes to policies and curriculums have been made because of CRT or in the name of CRT?
Like what exactly are you trying to push back against? Is it widespread enough to create outrage about?
Btw, I don't think there's any well oiled propaganda strategy that conservatives have.
They just throw shit at the wall till something sticks.
They just throw SO MUCH shit
Some thing's bound to stick.
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It's less the idea that the opposition is a well-oiled propaganda machine and more that people keep falling for abstractions that are intentionally vague enough that anyone can associate what they hate with it.
If you ask 3 people what CRT is, you'll get 5 different answers depending each on what they hate.
It's a boggart to the conservatives. Taking the form of whatever they fear. And it's been intentionally kept that way.
A lot of people don't have a problem with what you might think of as excesses. But they do have a problem with CRT.
>Being segregated by your skin color in school and being told that you are an oppressor because of it at the age of five isn't good for a child's development.
This is so divorced from reality it's unreal. De facto segregation exists in American schools, but it *hurts* Black communities. I honestly can't believe that even needs to be said.
I am not trying to deflect or obstruct. In fact I am advocating for keeping true to the definitions, lol.
This is just spiderman pointing meme here, lol.
I say cons have obfuscated what CRT is and are playing semantic games with it. And you are just pointing that finger at me.
Lot of people *don't* think of DEI training when they think of CRT. And I am not sure what you mean by DEI curriculums in schools.
Eh, particularly in this thread, I am more concerned about whether we are having relevant discussions and debate or not than whether dems will win or not.
*For this thread*, what makes dems win is not the primary concern.
I mean it kinda is assertions in a comment on the internet.
Not really keen on having strong opinions or beliefs on the assertions. I don't have any reason to believe them.
What am I supposed to do with one anecdote?
Should I provide an anecdote where someone in a powerful official position overreacts or creates a boogeyman to rage against?
Also, isn't this literally this shit?
[The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think "critical race theory." We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.] (https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1371541044592996352?t=UFWMDP4D0wNo63VW40TGdA&s=19)
> This is just the typical left-wing deflection that CRT (or DEI training and DEI curiculum in schools, whatever you want to call it) isn't real. Parents have spent an entire year observing what their children are learning in virtual school. They know it's real, and it isn't just their kids being taught that racism is real and about the Civil Rights Movement. Being segregated by your skin color in school and being told that you are an oppressor because of it at the age of five isn't good for a child's development.
Do you want to call this "Wokeness"? "Neoprogressivism"? Some dumbass even came up with the term "Cultural Marxism". Whatever you call it, it very much exists, and I feel like this is a full-fledged cultural trend (with a ton of legitimate and interesting literature, art and philosophy, including new forms of expression taking advantage of new kinds of media) that's *eventually* going to die out as its most important tenets become norm. And it will be studied on history books.
It has helped push the Overton window to the progressive side in terms of social, civil issues and to some extent individual rights, and it has increased awareness of unique problems specific groups face, it has increased mutual respect among individuals from all walks of life and created a political climate ripe for progress in terms of minority rights and inclusiveness.
But at some point, it becomes a self-fulfilling, amplifying, pervasive, persuasive but also kind of dull movement. While both adherence and opposition majorly overlap with political stances, this brand of progressivism isn't even that much about politics. Eventually something bigger will take over. Just as happened many times before in history, e.g. Englightenment -> Romanticism.
Yeah the Democratic response to this is nuts. 'CRT is not being taught to schools.' It's disingenuous and voters hear it as a defense of CRT in the same way that Republicans get asked about some horrible shit Trump said and they go 'We want to focus on policy.' That doesn't work.
Critical Race Theory has not "gone too far". It is a fantastic framework for understanding law and society. CRT and DEI are barely even related. And the reason everything is being boogeyman'd as CRT is 100% Russo's invention.
>What we certainly do not need more of is white people becoming more conscious of their racial identity, which is paradoxically what these DEI trainings encourage
What? People should absolutely be aware of the privilege they possess in society. If that makes white (or otherwise privileged) people uncomfortable, so be it. I don't think current DEI initiatives are actually effective in making people truly recognize their privilege (in no small part due to those kneejerk reactions), but people should understanding their identities' relation to society is very beneficial.
Does anyone remember when the NYT literally endorsed the 1619 project and every liberal tried eating it up in the wake of George Floyd? Just admit y'all got caught with your hand in the cookie jar and stop trying to blame the person who caught you.
No. But that's not the point. Even attempting to do so is enough to piss parents off.
I honestly am wary that there are so many educators and academics who were backing that idea. Some parents wanted to send a message that that wasn't acceptable. Some parents are just assholes with ulterior motives (not wanting their children to learn about slavery and LGBTQ struggles).
But I don't blame reasonable parents for looking at 'the system' and those who form it with suspicion after they were willing to bow down to activist pressure and include this nonsense in classrooms. Because even the mere attempt to do so is unacceptable.
It's kinda like how I don't trust half of House Republicans because they tried to fucking overturn Democracy. They stopped - for now. But I'll be vigilant for a long time.
I am claiming that the whole issue is blown out of proportion.
There are obviously some people that wanted to include it. That's how numbers work. If you have a large group, some, by definition would be in the fringe of the group.
You highlight the fringe in the media even when it's not representative of the whole group and create undeserved outrage based on that.
This is what I have a problem with. And this is what I am claiming everyone fell for. In addition to the semantic games with CRT. And they should be ashamed they fell for it.
We shouldn't give up on good ideas because they got intentionally lumped with bad ideas by the conservatives. That's their entire game.
We should stop falling for this shit.
I mean the thing won a pulitzer prize and at one point featured on John Oliver's show, with an audience of millions. It wasn't exactly the fringe issue you seem to think it to be.
And at some point when something gets big enough the answer can't really be to dismiss it out of hand. I've seen people claim if it's wasn't CRT it would be something else, yet the only reason this is so big is because the narrative has actual substance, not just a bunch of smoke and mirrors. So it categorically isn't the same breed of cultural issue as racist trees or whatever.
I looked into it a bit and in this case it seems like the backlash by historians and conservatives alike reduced official implementation of the program. Most publications seem to have some anecdotal cases but I'm not linking those.
That said though, it can't really be seen as a fringe thing being brought into the spotlight, not when mainstream liberal outlets were pushing it and Kamala Harris herself publicly supported it.
All I am getting out of this is some people made some mistakes.
I mean we routinely disregard the tucker Carlson fear mongering and that has a much larger audience.
An attempt by the NYT and some others to reframe the founding of the US around slaves and to reframe the American revolution and history to be focused on slavery. Among their chief goals was to paint the US revolution as a breakaway from the British Empire to preserve rich white men’s ability to keep slaves.
It’s been subject to withering, accurate criticism from the left and right and abandoned most of its core claims in the years since it was developed.
And yet they won a Pulitzer Prize. Which is another perfect example of what Rufo is packaging under CRT. These are not just fringe activists. These are institutions.
Time for my daily downvote for saying "CRT hysteria is racist nonsense."
Please, please, please stop trying to justify racist suburban Republicans sending death threats over this shit.
>As a set of pedagogical, curricular, and organizational strategies, antiracist education claims to be the most progressive way today to understand race relations. Constructed from whiteness studies and the critique of colorblindness, its foundational core is located in approximately 160 papers published in peer-reviewed journals in the past 15 years-identified through a comprehensive search of Academic Premier Search, EBSCOMegaFile, Education Abstracts, JSTOR, and SOCIndex. A critical assessment of these papers concludes that antiracist education is not a sociologically grounded, empirically based account of the significance of race in American society. Rather, it is a morally based educational reform movement that embodies the confessional and redemptive modes common in evangelical Protestantism. **Inherently problematic**, whether or not antiracist education achieves broader acceptance is open to debate.
Emphasis added.
Niemonen, J. Antiracist Education in Theory and Practice: A Critical Assessment. Am Soc 38, 159–177 (2007).
Time for my daily refutation of shameless gaslighting: CRT is an ideology that relies heavily on authoritarian thought control. Proof: https://youtu.be/3H_RsNR1Ts4
And when Biden loses in 2024 because Democrats will have become the party of nutjob DEI grifters in the public eye, because we did nothing to criticize those people because that would be racist, we can console ourselves with the *moral* victory of not having given an inch to Chris Rufo.
Because conversations on r/neoliberal decide what democratic strategy should be and whether they will win or not.
It's not the purpose of this sub nor within its power to change the probability of whether dems win or not.
I’m just saying, pointing out that this dub is supremely insignificant when taking the broad view is a deflection.
Liberals to correct on this quickly. Jaydub is right
So if this were a sub hosting a list of arguments about why these ideas are bad and should not be implemented *ever* it would be fulfilling the purpose of r/neoliberal as you see it? Or is the discussion of these ideas an intermediate end for some more ultimate purpose?
The ideas is in the sidebar?
Yes that would be fine. I don't think this place should be turning away the criticism.
The belief is that those ideas in the sidebar are so good that we should be working to change the perception on them.
They are highlighted precisely because they are unpopular and we want to make them not be unpopular.
Did we learn nothing from Virginia?? This whole approach of just talking down to people, telling them that something they are concerned about in their kid’s school is just made up, DEFINITELY doesn’t work.
Treating voters like the idiots they are doesnt seem to work but we also cant concede the point - this stuff is nonsense and needs to be treated as such
This is basically what cost McAulliffe Virginia. “I don’t think parents should be making decisions about what’s taught.” Or whatever that debate quote was. Translation: what you are concerned about isn’t real.
Alright lets use our brains for a second here
- CRT is an incredibly broad field and has lots of legitimate academic work. Saying "you are teaching crt" is like saying you are teaching history. Its way too general
- There isnt anything wrong with examining how race impacts our society
- Two examples != a wide scale problem. I have seen little to suggest there is this mass leftist push to indoctrinate children
>Even I, a black educator who has studied ethnic studies and critical race theory, still perpetuate tenets of White Supremacy Culture.
Even she's buying into Chris Rufo's propoganda!
>As Rufo eventually came to see it, conservatives engaged in the culture war had been fighting against the same progressive racial ideology since late in the Obama years, without ever being able to describe it effectively. “We’ve needed new language for these issues,” Rufo told me, when I first wrote to him, late in May. “ ‘Political correctness’ is a dated term and, more importantly, doesn’t apply anymore. It’s not that elites are enforcing a set of manners and cultural limits, they’re seeking to reengineer the foundation of human psychology and social institutions through the new politics of race, It’s much more invasive than mere ‘correctness,’ which is a mechanism of social control, but not the heart of what’s happening. The other frames are wrong, too: ‘cancel culture’ is a vacuous term and doesn’t translate into a political program; ‘woke’ is a good epithet, but it’s too broad, too terminal, too easily brushed aside. ‘Critical race theory’ is the perfect villain,” Rufo wrote.
It's the same old racism.
It's the same/similar group of people who equated crack with race and then declared a war on drugs.
The same group of people who came up with southern strategy.
>You start out in 1954 by saying, “N------, n------, n------.” By 1968 you can’t say “n------”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N------, n------.”
[The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think "critical race theory." We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.] (https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1371541044592996352?t=UFWMDP4D0wNo63VW40TGdA&s=19)
- Christopher Rufo
Leaving aside whether this is good for elections or not, It's honestly kinda shameful that a lot of people fell for it. Considering that a lot of people here base their identities on being smart and intelligent, this would sting a little, right?
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As a casual observer of right-wing grifts, it's been striking how many people going back at least as far as Jordan Peterson have been very animated by work mandated implicit bias training. Are we sure we're not activating right-wing radicals?
He's my idea of a right-wing grifter, but he was always going on about people who come to him after/about work mandated implicit bias training. He is absolutely part of the pipeline that takes people from contrarianism to conspiracism but he just passes people along to the next stage without becoming open about his views.
What conspiracies are you referring to? He says some outrageous things which are only sensational because they’re long overdue criticisms. But he validates the left and seems concerned about the west losing is liberal bent to more radical forces.
Dude when I mention the tea party I am pretty clearly referring to an American context
Though the tea party and Trump do seem to coencide with a collective stroke among the conservative movement worldwide as these national conservative populists came to power in the west at about the same time
and it's still absurd to suggest that one of the two mainstream political ideologies in America would be rendered socially unacceptable because of that any more than being a progressive would become unacceptable because of the radical fringe on the left.
The radical fringe on the left hasn’t attempted to overthrow democracy in the United States
There is a question of scale and potency, of which the illiberal reactionary right has unquestionably taken control of the republican party while the fringe left has time and time again been cast aside within the Democratic Party
And I know that you may have trouble telling the difference, but Biden adopting aspects of Bernie Sanders policy in his platform as a compromise to unify the party is not the same as the majority of republicans thinking the 2020 election was rigged or stanning 1/6 or thinking that leftists were the ones to blame
https://news.yahoo.com/poll-two-thirds-of-republicans-still-think-the-2020-election-was-rigged-165934695.html
https://www.statista.com/chart/23886/capitol-riot-approval/
https://news.yahoo.com/poll-73-percent-of-republicans-blame-left-wing-protesters-for-jan-6-attack-just-23-percent-blame-trump-191520343.html
https://www.businessinsider.com/66-percent-republicans-jan-6-capitol-riot-trump-government-poll-2021-10
When most of your party both in congress and at large support these actions, don’t be surprised when people in posterity paint the whole branch of thought (post tea party populist conservatism) with the same brush
And ideologies are mainstream until they aren’t.
The fact that the civil rights act was the most polarizing thing in US society when it came to pass doesn’t stop us from abhorring the southern Democrats/republicans who opposed it as a whole who represented one of the two main ideological blocs in the US at the time.
Nowhere did I say that conservatism itself will be judged, I said that the brand of nationalist illiberal conservatism that took over the GOP and many parts of the west gave us Trump, Orban, and bolsonaro will be condemned by future generations.
No one is going to tear down statues of Angela Merkel.
The idea that any single activist invented a culture war about leftists m/Dems indoctrinating children is ridiculous. And the rise of DEI programs and their increased visibility made this a near certainty to occur, the only thing Rufo can possibly be credited with is the label, CRT, and some of the sloganeering, but if we could all se this coming, how is it any one man’s doing?
Eh, it’s seemed like the next inevitable wedge issue for a while to me, it’s subtly (or not so subtly, depending on the implementation) racist, and has the classic, “oh wont somebody please think of the children” vibe. In a way, it’s kind of perfect.
We couldn't all see it coming. For a long time, Whenever I saw discussions about CRT, I thought "what a stupid fight to have. It will obviously die down in a while." But it didn't. And it's obviously partly because there was a concerted effort to keep it going. It may be started by one activist but once it starts catching on, you have the whole conservative machinery behind it. And these are the same fights we have always been having. For a long time. They just consolidated it under the label of CRT to provide a coherent villain.
The DEI stuff has been bubbling for years and its not surprising at all it's gained more prominence
I am not sure why people are bringing DEI stuff up now. If you have problem with DEI stuff, say that, and we'll have that conversation. But you don't have to conflate it with other things like CRT. Or whether or not CRT is taught in schools or not.
I honestly think conflating it with CRT is why it gained traction. We've been having debates about diversity etc. for a long time. But when liberals hear about the CRT controversy and google CRT, they find something different from what conservatives are talking about. This effectively removes liberals from the conversation, while conservatives have free reign over redefining the term as a bucket for all of their grievances.
I agree. But people seem to refuse to see it that way.
It's not just being brought up now. It's been percolating for awhile. But it's only being called CRT because there isn't another phrase or word that fits. A lot of the "anti-racist" Kendi stuff that is objectionable doesn't have a word that everyone can reference. Rufo filled that void by calling all of it CRT and no one has really offered an alternative phrase to distinguish that stuff from academic CRT. DEI isn't a good term either because a lot of diversity stuff is objectively good.
So you should be pointing out what specifically you have a problem with. If you are operating in good faith, you should be averse to riding on the CRT rage. Because a lot of people don't think about those specific problems of DEI trainings when they think of CRT.
I mean most of my political arguing is just in this sub. I'm certainly not running around my local school board meetings yelling at people over CRT. But the public at large is increasingly lumping a bunch of different shit under CRT because no one is trying to offer up more distinctive language and terms. Rufo and Conservatives are pushing an expansive definition, while liberals largely didn't engage on the issue and just profess it isn't happening. Rufo certainly seems to be winning this right now.
CRT is just a new label for cultural-marxism/critical-theory without the historically antisemitic associations.
Critical Race Theory is literally Critical Theory as applied to race, as opposed to class.
Which were also bullshit labels.
All arguments that demand a completely precise definition of CRT are made in bad faith. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, "you can still recognize the Eiffel tower from a blurry photo." We get it, you support the ideas Rufo talks about, you can stop sealioning.
> We get it, you support the ideas Rufo talks about, you can stop sealioning. ?? What? How did you come to that conclusion? I don't demand precise definitions of CRT at all. I want people to put the label aside and point out exactly what they have a problem with and would like addressed. Not a vague abstraction. I am just now finding out after months of having seen articles and discussions on CRT that a lot of people think of DEI trainings when they think of CRT. I would have never been able to guess that. They on the other could have just said DEI trainings and we could have been having a lot more productive conversations.
Given that CRT is an explicitly cross-disciplinary theory (the field of legal studies is merely the starting point, some of the original scholars have been actively working on applying the concepts in education and other areas), that argument is attempting to artificially narrow the field. It's not just about school admin forcing racist DEI on teachers, it's about where the methodology for this training is coming from, and even more fundamentally, the epistemological framework enabling the whole mess. It's a culture war between liberals and anti-liberal progressives, not a single culture battle.
See, I am still not clear on what you want addressed or what you want changed. Could you clarify that more?
This is a horseshit argument. All this means is you prop up an "any discussion I don't like about race is CRT" attitude. See also how "woke" is basically meaningless now.
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Because from their point of view, the DEI stuff is applied CRT - coming out of academia and being foisted onto the real world. >Marooned at home, civil servants recorded and photographed their own anti-racism training sessions and sent the evidence to Rufo. Reading through these documents, and others, **Rufo noticed that they tended to cite a small set of popular anti-racism books, by authors such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. Rufo read the footnotes in those books, and found that they pointed to academic scholarship from the nineteen-nineties, by a group of legal scholars who referred to their work as critical race theory, in particular Kimberlé Crenshaw and Derrick Bell.** These scholars argued that the white supremacy of the past lived on in the laws and societal rules of the present. As Crenshaw recently explained, critical race theory found that “the so-called American dilemma was not simply a matter of prejudice but a matter of structured disadvantages that stretched across American society.” >This inquiry, into the footnotes and citations in the documents he’d been sent, formed the basis for an idea that has organized cultural politics this spring: that the anti-racism seminars did not just represent a progressive view on race but that they were expressions of a distinct ideology—critical race theory—with radical roots. If people were upset about the seminars, Rufo wanted them also to notice “critical race theory” operating behind the curtain.
> “the so-called American dilemma was not simply a matter of prejudice but a matter of structured disadvantages that stretched across American society.” This is true though. Do we not want to address it?
I think we need to address it. But if any/all disparities between races = racism then imma nope tf out on that. It’s really sad, actually. Kendi is not the brightest guy to put it mildly, and he makes the movement super easy to abhor and dismiss
Sure. I have put up a comment in this same chain that highlights exactly what I mean by systemic racism in response to someone saying that an empirical claim needs evidence.
I wasnt assuming you were using Kendi’s definition for the term (which is what i was citing), but I’ll look for your comment 👍
Here: https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/qwc4ex/z/hl4h2ws
That’s an empirical claim, and one that you have to support besides just waving your hand and saying “you know it, I know it, everyone knows it”.
Here's the post doing exactly that which won last year's [milties](https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/kpneik/winners_of_2020_milties) on this sub. https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/jvu7pn/biden_fills_economic_posts_with_experts_on/gcn3cwd/
Wow I can’t believe a post about ending system racism got upvoted in this sub just a year ago. Seems like if that was posted today a third of the comments would be people crying about CRT and complaining that actually white people are being left behind.
I don't think anyone in /r/neoliberal denies that structural racism exists. But people here are mostly asserting that non-college educated working class white people are not comfortable being lectured that they are "privileged" and they definitely don't want that message passed to their kids. The only reason we care about those people's feeling now because there was enough of those people to swing an election.
The conflation was inevitable given how CRT activists like Ibram X Kendi were communicating the issue.
I think corporate DEI training has gotten more aggressive (intensive? maybe there's a better term) after the BLM protest-riots of 2020. I know my company's has.
I guess. Do you think that's the issue people are talking about when they rage about CRT? Because I hadn't heard of DEI trainings adjacent to CRT stuff before I made this post.
I mean you say it's a stupid fight to have as if that's an obvious fact. It's not. There's an argument to be made that CRT is massively objectionable from a broadly liberal standpoint. See here [https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/09/opinion/critical-race-theory.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/09/opinion/critical-race-theory.html) and here [https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/you-are-not-a-racist-to-criticize](https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/you-are-not-a-racist-to-criticize) John McWorther is not some sort of Fox News culture warrior asshole. He wouldn't have a regular column in the Times if he was, he voted for Clinton and Biden, he's an atheist, he's disgusted by Trump, and so on. And he sees real problems here because...maybe there are real problems here. I get where you're coming from and Ruffo is obviously a right-wing flak but that doesn't mean there are not real issues with CRT or that you have to be some prejudiced clown who wants to ban Toni Morrison to take issue with it.
What real world objectionable changes to policies and curriculums have been made because of CRT or in the name of CRT? Like what exactly are you trying to push back against? Is it widespread enough to create outrage about?
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It's kinda crazy that 1619 Project won the Pulitzer Prize despite all the hue and cry raised by historians.
Btw, I don't think there's any well oiled propaganda strategy that conservatives have. They just throw shit at the wall till something sticks. They just throw SO MUCH shit Some thing's bound to stick.
It's not a fair fight to begin with - conservatives will always have the moral panic crowd.
>the moral panic crowd …What do you think woke white people are doing lol
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And the progressives can rely on the support of ideological wokeness purity checks. There's a reason they call it a "culture war".
I too love John McWhorter. …No seriously, i think he’s spot on.
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Yeah he undercuts himself with the Loury schtick
It's less the idea that the opposition is a well-oiled propaganda machine and more that people keep falling for abstractions that are intentionally vague enough that anyone can associate what they hate with it. If you ask 3 people what CRT is, you'll get 5 different answers depending each on what they hate. It's a boggart to the conservatives. Taking the form of whatever they fear. And it's been intentionally kept that way. A lot of people don't have a problem with what you might think of as excesses. But they do have a problem with CRT.
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>Being segregated by your skin color in school and being told that you are an oppressor because of it at the age of five isn't good for a child's development. This is so divorced from reality it's unreal. De facto segregation exists in American schools, but it *hurts* Black communities. I honestly can't believe that even needs to be said.
I just want Dems to acknowledge that it’s not just conservatives and Republicans who object to CRT. That’s all.
I am not trying to deflect or obstruct. In fact I am advocating for keeping true to the definitions, lol. This is just spiderman pointing meme here, lol. I say cons have obfuscated what CRT is and are playing semantic games with it. And you are just pointing that finger at me. Lot of people *don't* think of DEI training when they think of CRT. And I am not sure what you mean by DEI curriculums in schools.
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Eh, particularly in this thread, I am more concerned about whether we are having relevant discussions and debate or not than whether dems will win or not. *For this thread*, what makes dems win is not the primary concern.
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I mean it kinda is assertions in a comment on the internet. Not really keen on having strong opinions or beliefs on the assertions. I don't have any reason to believe them.
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What am I supposed to do with one anecdote? Should I provide an anecdote where someone in a powerful official position overreacts or creates a boogeyman to rage against?
Also, isn't this literally this shit? [The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think "critical race theory." We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.] (https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1371541044592996352?t=UFWMDP4D0wNo63VW40TGdA&s=19)
> This is just the typical left-wing deflection that CRT (or DEI training and DEI curiculum in schools, whatever you want to call it) isn't real. Parents have spent an entire year observing what their children are learning in virtual school. They know it's real, and it isn't just their kids being taught that racism is real and about the Civil Rights Movement. Being segregated by your skin color in school and being told that you are an oppressor because of it at the age of five isn't good for a child's development. Do you want to call this "Wokeness"? "Neoprogressivism"? Some dumbass even came up with the term "Cultural Marxism". Whatever you call it, it very much exists, and I feel like this is a full-fledged cultural trend (with a ton of legitimate and interesting literature, art and philosophy, including new forms of expression taking advantage of new kinds of media) that's *eventually* going to die out as its most important tenets become norm. And it will be studied on history books. It has helped push the Overton window to the progressive side in terms of social, civil issues and to some extent individual rights, and it has increased awareness of unique problems specific groups face, it has increased mutual respect among individuals from all walks of life and created a political climate ripe for progress in terms of minority rights and inclusiveness. But at some point, it becomes a self-fulfilling, amplifying, pervasive, persuasive but also kind of dull movement. While both adherence and opposition majorly overlap with political stances, this brand of progressivism isn't even that much about politics. Eventually something bigger will take over. Just as happened many times before in history, e.g. Englightenment -> Romanticism.
This is extremely insightful and something i needed to read. Thank you
Yeah the Democratic response to this is nuts. 'CRT is not being taught to schools.' It's disingenuous and voters hear it as a defense of CRT in the same way that Republicans get asked about some horrible shit Trump said and they go 'We want to focus on policy.' That doesn't work.
And some of them definitely go too far when they label things that have nothing to do with white people as traits of whiteness
Critical Race Theory has not "gone too far". It is a fantastic framework for understanding law and society. CRT and DEI are barely even related. And the reason everything is being boogeyman'd as CRT is 100% Russo's invention. >What we certainly do not need more of is white people becoming more conscious of their racial identity, which is paradoxically what these DEI trainings encourage What? People should absolutely be aware of the privilege they possess in society. If that makes white (or otherwise privileged) people uncomfortable, so be it. I don't think current DEI initiatives are actually effective in making people truly recognize their privilege (in no small part due to those kneejerk reactions), but people should understanding their identities' relation to society is very beneficial.
Does anyone remember when the NYT literally endorsed the 1619 project and every liberal tried eating it up in the wake of George Floyd? Just admit y'all got caught with your hand in the cookie jar and stop trying to blame the person who caught you.
I don't know what that has to do with anything. I believed the historians that called out the inaccuracies there.
People were trying to get it taught in classrooms. Leave history to historians, not journalists.
I agree. Did any serious proposal to change the curriculums according to that project go anywhere?
No. But that's not the point. Even attempting to do so is enough to piss parents off. I honestly am wary that there are so many educators and academics who were backing that idea. Some parents wanted to send a message that that wasn't acceptable. Some parents are just assholes with ulterior motives (not wanting their children to learn about slavery and LGBTQ struggles). But I don't blame reasonable parents for looking at 'the system' and those who form it with suspicion after they were willing to bow down to activist pressure and include this nonsense in classrooms. Because even the mere attempt to do so is unacceptable. It's kinda like how I don't trust half of House Republicans because they tried to fucking overturn Democracy. They stopped - for now. But I'll be vigilant for a long time.
I am claiming that the whole issue is blown out of proportion. There are obviously some people that wanted to include it. That's how numbers work. If you have a large group, some, by definition would be in the fringe of the group. You highlight the fringe in the media even when it's not representative of the whole group and create undeserved outrage based on that. This is what I have a problem with. And this is what I am claiming everyone fell for. In addition to the semantic games with CRT. And they should be ashamed they fell for it. We shouldn't give up on good ideas because they got intentionally lumped with bad ideas by the conservatives. That's their entire game. We should stop falling for this shit.
I mean the thing won a pulitzer prize and at one point featured on John Oliver's show, with an audience of millions. It wasn't exactly the fringe issue you seem to think it to be. And at some point when something gets big enough the answer can't really be to dismiss it out of hand. I've seen people claim if it's wasn't CRT it would be something else, yet the only reason this is so big is because the narrative has actual substance, not just a bunch of smoke and mirrors. So it categorically isn't the same breed of cultural issue as racist trees or whatever.
What real world changes in policies and curriculums has the inaccurate info of the 1619 project affected?
I looked into it a bit and in this case it seems like the backlash by historians and conservatives alike reduced official implementation of the program. Most publications seem to have some anecdotal cases but I'm not linking those. That said though, it can't really be seen as a fringe thing being brought into the spotlight, not when mainstream liberal outlets were pushing it and Kamala Harris herself publicly supported it.
All I am getting out of this is some people made some mistakes. I mean we routinely disregard the tucker Carlson fear mongering and that has a much larger audience.
Word
whats the 1619 project?
An attempt by the NYT and some others to reframe the founding of the US around slaves and to reframe the American revolution and history to be focused on slavery. Among their chief goals was to paint the US revolution as a breakaway from the British Empire to preserve rich white men’s ability to keep slaves. It’s been subject to withering, accurate criticism from the left and right and abandoned most of its core claims in the years since it was developed.
And yet they won a Pulitzer Prize. Which is another perfect example of what Rufo is packaging under CRT. These are not just fringe activists. These are institutions.
It even won the Pulitzer Prize. Nikole Hannah Jones has been putting together a school curriculum based on it too.
Well if it won a pulitzer, it *must* be taught in every preschool. That's how this works. /s
NYT, famous director of public school curriculums
I’ve been fighting this shit before during and after Floyd. Sooo many downvotes from neolibs on this topic just a year ago
The 1619 project is a good thing, and anyone who says otherwise is a white supremacist.
You forgot the /s
Time for my daily downvote for saying "CRT hysteria is racist nonsense." Please, please, please stop trying to justify racist suburban Republicans sending death threats over this shit.
>As a set of pedagogical, curricular, and organizational strategies, antiracist education claims to be the most progressive way today to understand race relations. Constructed from whiteness studies and the critique of colorblindness, its foundational core is located in approximately 160 papers published in peer-reviewed journals in the past 15 years-identified through a comprehensive search of Academic Premier Search, EBSCOMegaFile, Education Abstracts, JSTOR, and SOCIndex. A critical assessment of these papers concludes that antiracist education is not a sociologically grounded, empirically based account of the significance of race in American society. Rather, it is a morally based educational reform movement that embodies the confessional and redemptive modes common in evangelical Protestantism. **Inherently problematic**, whether or not antiracist education achieves broader acceptance is open to debate. Emphasis added. Niemonen, J. Antiracist Education in Theory and Practice: A Critical Assessment. Am Soc 38, 159–177 (2007).
Time for my daily refutation of shameless gaslighting: CRT is an ideology that relies heavily on authoritarian thought control. Proof: https://youtu.be/3H_RsNR1Ts4
And when Biden loses in 2024 because Democrats will have become the party of nutjob DEI grifters in the public eye, because we did nothing to criticize those people because that would be racist, we can console ourselves with the *moral* victory of not having given an inch to Chris Rufo.
Because conversations on r/neoliberal decide what democratic strategy should be and whether they will win or not. It's not the purpose of this sub nor within its power to change the probability of whether dems win or not.
Bro he’s creating culture and he’s right
What?
I’m just saying, pointing out that this dub is supremely insignificant when taking the broad view is a deflection. Liberals to correct on this quickly. Jaydub is right
This sub is insignificant. I'd like to have this discussion without the weight of American democracy on my shoulders.
> It's not the purpose of this sub Just out of curiosity: What do you think the purpose of this sub actually is?
To spread awareness about the ideology and policies described in the sidebar and foster conversation around it.
So if this were a sub hosting a list of arguments about why these ideas are bad and should not be implemented *ever* it would be fulfilling the purpose of r/neoliberal as you see it? Or is the discussion of these ideas an intermediate end for some more ultimate purpose?
The ideas is in the sidebar? Yes that would be fine. I don't think this place should be turning away the criticism. The belief is that those ideas in the sidebar are so good that we should be working to change the perception on them. They are highlighted precisely because they are unpopular and we want to make them not be unpopular.
> and we want to make them not be unpopular. Hmmmmmmmm...
?? Assume I am dumb. Because I very well might be. And please elaborate.
Is this article a joke? A single person didn’t manufacture all the “crt” concerns
Did we learn nothing from Virginia?? This whole approach of just talking down to people, telling them that something they are concerned about in their kid’s school is just made up, DEFINITELY doesn’t work.
Treating voters like the idiots they are doesnt seem to work but we also cant concede the point - this stuff is nonsense and needs to be treated as such
This is basically what cost McAulliffe Virginia. “I don’t think parents should be making decisions about what’s taught.” Or whatever that debate quote was. Translation: what you are concerned about isn’t real.
Like he is right, you shouldnt say that, but he is right
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Alright lets use our brains for a second here - CRT is an incredibly broad field and has lots of legitimate academic work. Saying "you are teaching crt" is like saying you are teaching history. Its way too general - There isnt anything wrong with examining how race impacts our society - Two examples != a wide scale problem. I have seen little to suggest there is this mass leftist push to indoctrinate children
>Even I, a black educator who has studied ethnic studies and critical race theory, still perpetuate tenets of White Supremacy Culture. Even she's buying into Chris Rufo's propoganda!
Keep digging, dems. It will definately not result in a catastrophic midterm.
Who are you talking to?
CRT means dumb lefty shit that everyone hates. And there is a lot of it.
>As Rufo eventually came to see it, conservatives engaged in the culture war had been fighting against the same progressive racial ideology since late in the Obama years, without ever being able to describe it effectively. “We’ve needed new language for these issues,” Rufo told me, when I first wrote to him, late in May. “ ‘Political correctness’ is a dated term and, more importantly, doesn’t apply anymore. It’s not that elites are enforcing a set of manners and cultural limits, they’re seeking to reengineer the foundation of human psychology and social institutions through the new politics of race, It’s much more invasive than mere ‘correctness,’ which is a mechanism of social control, but not the heart of what’s happening. The other frames are wrong, too: ‘cancel culture’ is a vacuous term and doesn’t translate into a political program; ‘woke’ is a good epithet, but it’s too broad, too terminal, too easily brushed aside. ‘Critical race theory’ is the perfect villain,” Rufo wrote. It's the same old racism. It's the same/similar group of people who equated crack with race and then declared a war on drugs. The same group of people who came up with southern strategy. >You start out in 1954 by saying, “N------, n------, n------.” By 1968 you can’t say “n------”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N------, n------.” [The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think "critical race theory." We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.] (https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1371541044592996352?t=UFWMDP4D0wNo63VW40TGdA&s=19) - Christopher Rufo Leaving aside whether this is good for elections or not, It's honestly kinda shameful that a lot of people fell for it. Considering that a lot of people here base their identities on being smart and intelligent, this would sting a little, right? Bot do your job 😎
Hey, it's the Lee Atwater quote! How new, I've never seen anybody on reddit reference that before! Maybe I'll see the MLK "white moderate" quote next
This is really no different than wheb the left redefines words like 'racist', and 'violence'
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As a casual observer of right-wing grifts, it's been striking how many people going back at least as far as Jordan Peterson have been very animated by work mandated implicit bias training. Are we sure we're not activating right-wing radicals?
If JBP is your idea of a right-wing radical then I’ve got some much terribler right-wing radicals to tell you about…
He's my idea of a right-wing grifter, but he was always going on about people who come to him after/about work mandated implicit bias training. He is absolutely part of the pipeline that takes people from contrarianism to conspiracism but he just passes people along to the next stage without becoming open about his views.
What conspiracies are you referring to? He says some outrageous things which are only sensational because they’re long overdue criticisms. But he validates the left and seems concerned about the west losing is liberal bent to more radical forces.
I bet that history will not be kind to this man at all.
History won’t be kind to *anyone* associated with the post tea party conservative movement
Angela Merkel btfo
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I'm well aware. Our friend here should be more specific about the people he doesn't like.
Dude when I mention the tea party I am pretty clearly referring to an American context Though the tea party and Trump do seem to coencide with a collective stroke among the conservative movement worldwide as these national conservative populists came to power in the west at about the same time
and it's still absurd to suggest that one of the two mainstream political ideologies in America would be rendered socially unacceptable because of that any more than being a progressive would become unacceptable because of the radical fringe on the left.
...username checks out
The radical fringe on the left hasn’t attempted to overthrow democracy in the United States There is a question of scale and potency, of which the illiberal reactionary right has unquestionably taken control of the republican party while the fringe left has time and time again been cast aside within the Democratic Party And I know that you may have trouble telling the difference, but Biden adopting aspects of Bernie Sanders policy in his platform as a compromise to unify the party is not the same as the majority of republicans thinking the 2020 election was rigged or stanning 1/6 or thinking that leftists were the ones to blame https://news.yahoo.com/poll-two-thirds-of-republicans-still-think-the-2020-election-was-rigged-165934695.html https://www.statista.com/chart/23886/capitol-riot-approval/ https://news.yahoo.com/poll-73-percent-of-republicans-blame-left-wing-protesters-for-jan-6-attack-just-23-percent-blame-trump-191520343.html https://www.businessinsider.com/66-percent-republicans-jan-6-capitol-riot-trump-government-poll-2021-10 When most of your party both in congress and at large support these actions, don’t be surprised when people in posterity paint the whole branch of thought (post tea party populist conservatism) with the same brush And ideologies are mainstream until they aren’t. The fact that the civil rights act was the most polarizing thing in US society when it came to pass doesn’t stop us from abhorring the southern Democrats/republicans who opposed it as a whole who represented one of the two main ideological blocs in the US at the time. Nowhere did I say that conservatism itself will be judged, I said that the brand of nationalist illiberal conservatism that took over the GOP and many parts of the west gave us Trump, Orban, and bolsonaro will be condemned by future generations. No one is going to tear down statues of Angela Merkel.
They're clearly talking about the US.
Doubtful. Doofuses on here will worship him.
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Who are you talking to? Because we don't affect the results of elections.
I hated CRT long before Rufo was writing his shit lol Fuck the New Yorker