Critical race theory (4 Viewers)

[DaveXA]

Frankly, I'm completely ignorant when it comes to the Critical Race Theory curriculum. What is it, where does it come from, and is it legitimate? Has anyone here read it and maybe give a quick summary?

If this has been covered in another thread, then I missed it.

 

[V Chip]

I believe this is your opinion which is based on your perception of reality.

It’s fact.

I said things are better compared to the 60s, 70s. But compared to 2000? Nope.

The number of hate crimes has risen since the early 2000s. The number of hate groups and members of hate groups has risen since the early 2000s. These are facts. In 2000 finding politicians and voters who support them who used racial incendiary language and promoting policies was difficult; in 2016 we elected one President and Congress and state legislatures are swelling with their numbers.

 

[SystemShock]

Any Latin American that is offended by that has a problem that was learned in the American culture. A fully assimilated Latin American may have an apoplexy.

You try so hard

 

[RebSaint]

One of the most significant misconceptions racism, institutional and otherwise is that the United States has followed a clear, teleological track of things improving for POC and other historically-oppressed groups.

Even a basic understanding of American history belies this silly naive perspective. Although I think Dr. King was correct in that events tend to "bend towards justice" the path is far from a clear and steady path reflecting progress and improvement.

One only has to look at the history of Reconstruction which saw African American (men) voting and serving in office followed by nearly a 100-year period of Jim Crow, lynching, disfranchisement and systemic oppression.

 

[brandon]

One of the most significant misconceptions racism, institutional and otherwise is that the United States has followed a clear, teleological track of things improving for POC and other historically-oppressed groups.

Even a basic understanding of American history belies this silly naive perspective. Although I think Dr. King was correct in that events tend to "bend towards justice" the path is far from a clear and steady path reflecting progress and improvement.

One only has to look at the history of Reconstruction which saw African American (men) voting and serving in office followed by nearly a 100-year period of Jim Crow, lynching, disfranchisement and systemic oppression.

I think we can look at 2000-present to see that we're worse off now than we were in, say, 2008-2012.

 

[Paul]

One of the most significant misconceptions racism, institutional and otherwise is that the United States has followed a clear, teleological track of things improving for POC and other historically-oppressed groups.

Even a basic understanding of American history belies this silly naive perspective. Although I think Dr. King was correct in that events tend to "bend towards justice" the path is far from a clear and steady path reflecting progress and improvement.

One only has to look at the history of Reconstruction which saw African American (men) voting and serving in office followed by nearly a 100-year period of Jim Crow, lynching, disfranchisement and systemic oppression.

The past cannot be changed. The future can be manipulated to a certain extent. Therefore a teleological approach is logical.

I would also expect progress to be like the stock market. Ups and downs with an overall upward slope.

 

[RebSaint]

I think we can look at 2000-present to see that we're worse off now than we were in, say, 2008-2012.

I agree wholeheartedly, and there's a lot of evidence to make this case.

 

[DaveXA]

One of the most significant misconceptions racism, institutional and otherwise is that the United States has followed a clear, teleological track of things improving for POC and other historically-oppressed groups.

Even a basic understanding of American history belies this silly naive perspective. Although I think Dr. King was correct in that events tend to "bend towards justice" the path is far from a clear and steady path reflecting progress and improvement.

One only has to look at the history of Reconstruction which saw African American (men) voting and serving in office followed by nearly a 100-year period of Jim Crow, lynching, disfranchisement and systemic oppression.

Yeah, and not just with racism, but progress of all kinds is hardly linear. And sometimes a bit subjective. And not just in terms of time, but also in terms of rate of change. Progress can be painstakingly slow, or happens at breakneck speed. It seems to me the last 5 years have been a murky, mixed bag. Race relations seem more strained now than they were 5 years ago. Certainly more hate and nationalism out there now than 5 years ago. At least it seems that way.

 

[Paul]

I agree wholeheartedly, and there's a lot of evidence to make this case.

Yes, it is basically two steps forward, one backwards. The mini-roller coaster of the stock market on the way up.

 

[Saintamaniac]

I think we can look at 2000-present to see that we're worse off now than we were in, say, 2008-2012.

Who would have thought that the election of a black man to the highest office would turn some of the most fervently "America, love it or leave it" people into traitors. It made people who preach about the economy like the gospel, ignore economic armageddon, refuse to work with him to fix the armageddon in an attempt to make the president a one-term president.

The country elected a black man and the Republicans decided to burn it down. When that didn't work, they helped elect the most incompetent, mentally ill sociopath to the highest office, looked the other way as he did the bidding of Russia and lied at least 15 times every day he held office.

Right now, people who preach about support for the military are saying "F" the military because the defense secretary is a black man.

 

[Optimus Prime]

From the Washington Post

ironic that they are now a “large crowd of angry white people who don’t want the history of Black children in a white school taught in schools”

it’s going to be interesting to see how all these anti history protest/bans end up ten years from now
==================

When a former federal marshal named Al Butler died almost a decade ago, he asked his wife to spread his ashes in front of an elementary school in New Orleans where he protected Black children as they tried to integrate all-White schools.

He made this request because, he said, it was the most important work of his life. And he wanted people to always remember.


I thought of Butler recently when a group called Moms for Liberty tried to shut down the use of a curriculum in Williamson County, Tenn., that includes an autobiography by Ruby Bridges.

As a 6-year-old in 1960, Bridges became an international symbol of the civil rights movement, and one of the first Black children to integrate New Orleans schools.


The Tennessee Moms argue that her book, “Ruby Bridges Goes to School: My True Story,” contains too many truths that cut too close to the bone.

The mothers find the story objectionable, citing a description of a “large crowd of angry white people who didn’t want Black children in a white school.”

They say that’s too negative a rendering of a moment that is well documented in books, film and photography.
Have these mothers not seen the pictures from that year-long struggle over integration?

Have they avoided the photographs of White women with their necks jutted out and the mouths screaming as though their world was coming to an end?

One of the protesters from 1960 carried a sign that read: “All I want for Christmas is a clean white school.”
The Moms for Liberty also complained that Bridges’s memoir offers no “redemption at its end.

This is where their display of strategic umbrage goes fully off the rails and into a muddy ditch for me.
We do our children no favors if we only feed them a steady diet of fairy tales that sidestep life’s complexities.

We commit long-term harm as guardians when we sanitize our history in the name of protecting our kids from feeling bad about themselves. What’s really at work is adults trying to outrun a sense of shame.


Across the country, states are willing to engage in lies of omission, with limits and outright bans against discussions of slavery, the civil rights movement and the white supremacy doctrine that fueled groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.


If those moms in Tennessee really want to see redemption, it can easily be inserted into the curriculum………

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/23/students-need-learn-about-haters-helpers-our-history/

 

[Optimus Prime]

Good article and good point
======================
Like many culture war battles, the debate over critical race theory has an almost impenetrable noise-to-signal ratio. It’s a struggle to find the serious critiques amid the posturing and performative outrage.

But one compelling objection raised by opponents of critical race theory is the problem of “collective guilt,” or the idea that White people today are complicit in the sins of White people in the past.


Critics have shared anecdotes about Maoist “struggle sessions” in which White people are encouraged or even browbeaten into accepting complicity for the United States’s historical racism.

These are just anecdotes, of course, but for the moment, let’s assume the worst: that they are both true and representative. There’s nothing wrong or unpatriotic about teaching the country’s flaws, sins and atrocities along with its virtues.

It seems unlikely that we’ve completely purged the legacy of explicitly discriminatory practices from our culture and institutions in the decades since. It’s a far safer bet that those policies still inflict harm on marginalized groups, and still help the people they’ve always helped.

But while it’s one thing to point out that White people still benefit from these policies, it’s quite another to say all White people today are complicit in those atrocities simply because they have the same complexion as the people who perpetrated them.


And yet the people who rail against collective White guilt often make very similar arguments about race, crime and the criminal justice system.

That argument goes something like this: Racial discrepancies in stops, searches, arrests, police shootings and other areas of the criminal justice system aren’t evidence of a racist system because Black people commit crimes — especially violent crimes — at higher rates than other groups.


Superficially, there’s some logic to the argument.

The problem is twofold: Black people don’t necessarily commit more crimes, and the people who commit the crimes often aren’t the same people who get stopped, searched, arrested and shot……

Take “stop-and-frisk” policies. Black people are much more likely to be stopped and frisked than White people. In New York, Black people made up 50 to 60 percent of such stops but just 25 percent of the city’s population.

At the height of stop-and-frisk in New York, 85 to 90 percent of the people stopped were innocent of any crime……

To defend a policy with that sort of record based on Black crime rates is to say that hundreds of thousands of innocent Black people should be okay with these humiliating searches simply because they belong to a demographic more likely to commit certain crimes.

(Supporters of stop-and-frisk argue these policies make Black neighborhoods safer, though the evidence for that isn’t persuasive.)


Similarly, many of the same people who bewail collective White guilt also cite homicide statistics to defend the disproportionate killings of Black people by police.

But we know from databases of police killings that police rarely kill to prevent a homicide in progress.

Police tend to kill people during traffic stops and “welfare checks,” after escalation during stops or arrests, or in response to domestic disputes or mental health crises.

To justify racial disparities in police shootings based on homicide statistics is to say that we should be okay with cops disproportionately killing one set of Black people because a mostly separate set of Black people disproportionately commits homicides………

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/21/hypocrisy-critical-race-theorys-opponents/

 

[MT15]

This is a wise teacher.

 

[Bigdaddysaints]

this is 99% of people who go crazy over it. All they know about it is what they see on Facebook and Fox News.

I'll be the first to admit that I do not really know what it is. But i won't pretend to know either.

 

[SaulGoodmanEsq]

Yes, it is basically two steps forward, one backwards. The mini-roller coaster of the stock market on the way up.

I don't really think you can compare race relations/social progress to economic indicators when attempting to predict trends.

 

[Paul]

I don't really think you can compare race relations/social progress to economic indicators when attempting to predict trends.

Explain why.

 

[Saintamaniac]

Explain why.

It's very intriguing that you don't know or don't understand this notion or you are simply pretending. The economy in it's most basic form is fueled by supply and demand. For example, take the price of oil and Amazon. During the pandemic, oil prices plummeted because no one was traveling. Amazon made money hand over fist during that same period because everyone and their brother was ordering things due to the convenience and safety. There was a high demand for their services. The price of oil and Amazon stock will fluctuate based on the demand for those services.

There is no supply and demand for basic human rights. There is only the problem of the majority in power refusing to live up to the notion of basic human rights. Race relations fluctuate because the majority in power fear becoming the minority. And they fear becoming the minority because they KNOW what they have done and how they have treated minorities and they don't want to be on the other end of that stick. NOTHING ELSE impacts race relations other than fear.

Either you knew this or you are just playing a role of the galactically stupid. Either way, that you had to ask someone to explain why there was a difference between the two is precisely the type of foolishness from you up with which we shall not put.

 

[SaulGoodmanEsq]

Explain why.

Maybe I'm not understanding the extent of the metaphor. Certainly you can attempt to extrapolate a trend in nearly anything based on prior events; however, I don't agree that simply because the stock market can take dips and trend upwards over time means that race relations is necessarily doing the same. Not that I'm saying we're going to regress as a society back to slavery but that it could simply stagnate for decades upon decades based on an overkill of anti-wokeness.

They are simply different concepts informed by different metrics with race relations more often being informed by irrational tendencies.

 

[Paul]

Maybe I'm not understanding the extent of the metaphor. Certainly you can attempt to extrapolate a trend in nearly anything based on prior events; however, I don't agree that simply because the stock market can take dips and trend upwards over time means that race relations is necessarily doing the same. Not that I'm saying we're going to regress as a society back to slavery but that it could simply stagnate for decades upon decades based on an overkill of anti-wokeness.

They are simply different concepts informed by different metrics with race relations more often being informed by irrational tendencies.

Things are getting better with ups and downs. However, the trend is improvement.