Absurd "Conservative" Whining about "Critical Race Theory"
As usual, Republicans are up in arms about something they know nothing about.
I put “Critical Race Theory” in scare quotes here because Republicans are upset about something that they use that term to denote, but what they are upset about bears effectively zero resemblance to the actual body of thought that properly goes under the name.
It is entirely reasonable to suspect that, if Marjorie Taylor Greene wants to stop it, chances are excellent that it largely beneficial to the Republic. She and her trans Mississippi doppelganger, Lauren Boebert, were the only two members of the House to vote against a bill to reauthorize the C.W. Bill Young Cell Transplantation Program and National Cord Blood Inventory, a matter of considerable controversy, to the two dumbest, most rigid members of the House, apparently. Greene has annoyed fellow Republicans with her pointless motions to adjourn, among other amateur tricks she has pulled in her first year.
Greene has introduced a bill that purports to prohibit the teaching of Critical Race Theory in the service academies of the U.S. military. She has secured the support of her namesake and geographical neighbor, Mark Green from Tennessee. According to Green:
“Critical Race Theory is based on a massive and purposeful misunderstanding of the American founding, American history, and America as it exists today. This is a Marxist ideology created to tear American institutions down. It teaches Americans and members of the Armed Services to judge one another by the color of their skin instead of by the “content of their character.” America should never go back to this kind of thinking. A curriculum based on Critical Race Theory seeks to divide Americans instead of unite them.”
Except that, as loyal Trump toadies, neither Greene nor Green likely reads or learns much, one would be tempted to ask them to explain in detail what is Critical Race Theory and to offer some specific examples of scholarship that properly bears the name, then offer, just to start, one obvious example that comes up from a simple web search, such as this interesting and important article. Such an effort might be mildly amusing, but it would serve no practical purpose, since all Greene and Green are doing is engaging in the typical grandstanding of Republicans who are loath to admit that they and their Party have nothing of substance to offer to the republic and are running solely on the rapidly dying fumes of “white supremacy,” which is all they have had since Richard Nixon taught them to use it to win elections in 1968.
Although we typically default to federal officials, a similar stream of effluvia currently emanates from several state legislatures. The Trump toady governor of Oklahoma, Kevin Stitt, recently signed a bill that, according to various reports, purportedly prohibits teaching Critical Race Theory in educational institutions in the state.
As is often the case, always, but especially in the age of Trump, this claim is simply false. The term appears no where in the bill. It does prohibit mandatory “gender or sexual diversity training or counseling,” which makes more sense than it might seem to, given that racism and sexism typically go hand in hand, and that Republicans are using transgender persons along with their usual African Americans as scapegoats to keep their “white supremacist” base lathered up.
The meat of the bill states:
No teacher, administrator or other employee of a school district, charter school or virtual charter school shall require or make part of a course the following concepts:
a. one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex,
b. an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously,
c. an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of his or her race or sex,
d. members of one race or sex cannot and should not attempt to treat others without respect to race or sex,
e. an individual’s moral character is necessarily determined by his or her race or sex,
f. an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex,
g. any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex, or
h. meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are racist or sexist or were created by members of a particular race to oppress members of another race.
It is worth noting in passing how much the ideas in this bill borrow from the distinctively liberal Civil Rights Act, in prohibiting differential treatment on the basis of race or sex.
Like Republican voter suppression bills, this is a solution in search of a problem. Anyone who has taught much of anything in the past thirty years or so well knows that no one even suggests any such thing in a classroom, at least not explicitly, although more or less explicitly racist lessons about slavery still pop up with regularity that should alarm the likes of whoever wrote this drivel.
To summarize a large, growing, intellectually demanding, immensely valuable body of scholarship, we know from anatomists, physiologists, and related experts, that "race” does not exist as a scientific question. Apart from a greater propensity to sickle cell disease among African Americans, there is no important difference between them and white people. Blood is interchangeable between the “races,” and we have long known what slave owners always knew, that sex between individuals of different “races” can easily produce offspring. But we also know that “Black” people still typically fall out at the bottom of most metrics of social well being. What really matters for people’s lived experience is less anatomy or physiology than what importance the culture attaches to those differences. People have various eye colors, but this has never served as a basis for invidious discrimination, unlike skin color.
Critical Race Theory grew out of the realization of several legal scholars, initially mostly African Americans, that the law plays an outsized role in perpetuating the cultural significance of the differences in skin color among humans, which should be trivial but is not.
One important point here that would be funny, except that nothing about racism is funny, is that the white elected officials who dream up and enact these idiotic bills are committing the core conceptual move of racism — refusing to listen to or take seriously what Black people say about their lives and experiences. They are proving a core claim of Critical Race Theory and proving its necessity in our society. Our morally and intellectually obtuse friend, Rep. Green, above, relies on the current favorite version of this form of arrogance when he misuses quotation marks around “content of their character,” thus implicitly invoking leading African American civil rights activist, the Reverend dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whom Rep. Green’s “white supremacist” ancestors likely reviled during his lifetime, but whom the likes of Rep. Green are only too happy to coopt for their own, racist purposes in the present, when Dr. King is not here to speak for himself or his “race.”
Critical Race Theory does aim at systemic racism, or the point that systems of justice and economy and all others, can continue to produce racist outcomes even if the people using them have no apparent racist intent. This is an established principle in U.S. law. It is not any claim about anyone being “inherently” anything. That is not a terribly interesting question for Critical Race Theory, which is mostly concerned with actual outcomes.
There is also the important point that, while Critical Race Theory has branched out from law, where it started, to numerous other disciplines, one would be hard pressed to find anyone teaching it even to undergraduates, certainly not at the K-12 level. It is mostly a function of post graduate education. Some precocious high school students might find it very interesting. I would have been happy to study it in college had it existed then.
But statutes purporting to prohibit anyone from teaching it are “conservative” in the worst sort of the word — reactionary and provincial, lashing out mindlessly at what proponents perceive to be a threat, a classic case of shoot first and don’t bother to ask questions later. The effects on the intellectual life (!) of any state that has to labor under the burden of such statutes will be entirely deleterious.
Despite the obvious evidence of the last four presidential elections, too many Republicans, in thrall to Trump, still believe that overt racism will help them win national elections. This is part of their strategy to keep their “white supremacist” base lathered up. The only good news is that they are certainly wrong in this belief.