The truth about George Floyd's Death
How George Floyd Actually Died
An adrenaline-caused catecholamine crisis leading to bi-lateral heart failure seems the most likely cause.
Showing posts with label BLM. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BLM. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 14, 2023
Wednesday, November 23, 2022
When Ideology Trumps Empathy - Dems are All Hypocrites - Heather McDonald
When Ideology Trumps Empathy - Dems are All Hypocrites
When Ideology Trumps Empathy - City Journal Essay
It turns out that black lives really don’t matter. In the run-up to the 2022 midterm elections, conservatives had relentlessly raised the alarm about the post–George Floyd crime surge: homicides had risen 29 percent in 2020 (the largest increase on record), and they have continued rising since then. Democrats and their media allies responded either that crime was a racist fiction or that, because post-Floyd crime levels nationally were still lower than they were in the early 1990s, there was nothing to see here, folks, move on!
These opposing positions were tantamount to saying that black lives matter or that they don’t. Black Americans have borne the brunt of the increased violence since the George Floyd race riots. Their share of homicide victims went from 53 percent in 2019 (blacks are 13 percent of the national population) to 56 percent in 2020. At least an additional 2,164 black lives were lost in 2020 over the 2019 count, compared with an increase of 950 white and Hispanic homicide victims combined in 2020. Such disparities only worsened in 2021 and 2022. In 2020, blacks between the ages of ten and 24 died of gun homicide at 20 times the rate of whites in the same age range. In 2021, blacks between the ages of ten and 24 died of gun homicide at nearly 25 times the rate of whites of the same age.
It’s the only racial disparity that progressives don’t care about.
Thursday, April 14, 2022
Frank James - NYC Subway Shooter (Black Nationalist - Move on, nothin to see here!
Nabbed New York Terror Shooter Suspect Is Black Nationalist Who Praised 9/11 and Called for Killing 'All the Whiteys'
Now that the suspected New York train shooter has been arrested by the police, charges of terrorism and hate crimes can’t be far behind. Or can they?
As PJ Media has reported, suspected terrorist Frank James was a supporter of the black separatist group Nation of Islam. His recorded rantings on his YouTube channel and Twitter account were full of his racist poison. YouTube has already disappeared his channel with Frank James’s hundreds of videos.
But there’s one comment in particular that may sound eerily familiar to those who were sentient beings on 9/11/01 and remember its aftermath.
One of the most shocking comments uttered in response to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon and the attempted attack on the White House or Congress was said by Senator Barack Obama’s spiritual advisor and pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.
Barack Obama’s Chicago minister, who officiated the Obama’s wedding ceremony, declared before cheering parishioners that the Islamist Al Qaeda attack was America’s “chickens coming home to roost.” It was so divisive that Obama, then running for president, had to disavow Wright and gave a speech on race to distract from the poison coming from the pulpit of the church he’d belonged to for 20 years.
Related: FBI Blows It Again: Knew About Subway Terrorist’s Racist Videos and Had Him on Watch List
James, who, as we reported, calls himself a “prophet of doom,” described 9/11 as “the most beautiful day, probably in the history of this f***ing world.”
James was also quite upset that new Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is married to a white man. “I had no idea, with that African name, that she would be married to a white man. … Our black sister Supreme Court Justice, power to the people, is married to a f**king white man. (Crying) I don’t believe this sh*t. Oh, God! Wait a minute. This motherf**ker right there, there he is. There he is! White man! Black sister, Ketanji, married to a white man.”
He posted positive things about Black Lives Matter shooter Micah Xavier Johnson, who murdered five Dallas Police officers.
Will the Leftist media memory-hole the name of the racist terror suspect and stay mum on hate crime and terror charges against the man, as they have done with other Leftist killers?
Victoria Taft is an award-winning journalist, writer and terrestrial radio talk host, heard in Seattle and on the rest of the Left Coast. Listen to her twice weekly “Adult in the Room Podcast.” Find her at VictoriaTaft.com Parler, MeWe, Minds, Locals, Twitter & Facebook. Her book mocking antifa will be out this year. For media inquiries write: Victoria@VictoriaTaft.com
Friday, December 10, 2021
The Media's Color-Coded Parenting Standard
Prosecuting Mas-Shooters Parents (Racial????)
EYE ON THE NEWS
The Media’s Color-Coded Parenting Standard
White parents of school shooters are culpable; black parents of inner-city gangbangers are blameless.
December 9, 2021
City Journal December 2021
Wednesday, November 24, 2021
Friday, October 29, 2021
Flogging Slavery at Fort Sumter & The Warning of Thomas Sowell
The Long Article - 1619
Flogging Slavery at Fort Sumter & The Warning of Thomas Sowell
While the U.S. Park Service grossly overstresses slavery in their presentation of our national history at Fort Sumter, S.C., Thomas Sowell issues a dire warning about the progressive effort to balkanize America and rule over the ruins.
Several weeks ago, I wrote a long post about the 1619 Project and the laudable Prof. Sean Wilentz. In it, I discussed how far left academia and progressives in the media have teamed to falsely rewrite our national history. Their goals are to delegitimize our constitution and the foundations of our nation. According to these modern race hustlers, we are a nation whose defining characteristic was, at our founding, and continues to be, incurable racism. That, they insist, is the only salient fact about our nation. And we are, according to them, a nation whose unpardonable original sin is slavery.
That post very much came to mind when I toured Fort Sumter the other day and listened to an official presentation of the history of that site from a Park Ranger. I am sure the Ranger was only repeating an approved script, but it was a horrid script that dwelt only on slavery, With ringing outrage in her voice, she dwelt on how slaves built Fort Sumter, then discussed the evils of slavery, and finally, finished with a discussion of how each of the 4,000,000 bricks used in the construction of the site was made by slaves and how each brick represented a freed slave when freedom somehow magically came in 1865. Ms. BWR, who heard the same presentation, described it as:
[T]he only takeaway lesson was that America enslaved people and abused them. [The Park Ranger] managed to reduce the grand panoply of American history, and the drama of the Civil War, to a one-note issue.
What that Park Ranger articulated was a history wholly written by the same race hustlers of the same ilk that gave us the 1619 Project. Nothing matters to our national history but slavery — though the number of people, and in particular white men, who died ending slavery both in America and as an accepted practice in the world never makes it into the script. Nor does the fate of Charleston and the South in the years after the Civil War, etc.
Enter the venerable Thomas Sowell, now age 91, who has taken time from his retirement to pen an article in the Jewish World Revue. In it, Sowell opines on the existential stakes of the progressive left’s racial attack on America — one that in the long run will be more destructive to blacks than any other group. Sowell does so in the context of the Virginia Governor’s race soon to be decided:
This is one battle in a much bigger war, and the stakes are far higher than the governorship of Virginia or the Democrats and Republicans. The stakes are the future of this nation.
When school propaganda teaches black kids to hate white people, that is a danger to all Americans of every race. Anyone at all familiar with the history of group-identity politics in other countries knows that it has often ended up producing sickening atrocities that have torn whole societies apart.
If you have a strong stomach, read about the 1915 atrocities against the Armenians in Turkey, “ethnic cleansing” in the Bans, or
lkathe reciprocal atrocities between the Sinhalese and Tamils during their civil war in Sri Lanka.
Do not kid yourself that this cannot happen in America. The relations between the Sinhalese and Tamils in Sri Lanka were once held up to the world as a model of intergroup harmony.
They got along better than blacks and whites have ever gotten along in the U.S. But then a talented demagogue polarized the country with group-identity politics, to get himself elected prime minister.
Once he was elected, he was ready to moderate his position. But you cannot just turn group hatred on and off, like a light bulb. He was assassinated and the hatred continued on.
There is a point of no return in America as well. And we may be nearing it, or perhaps past it.
Low-income minority students, especially, cannot afford the luxury of having their time wasted on ideological propaganda in the schools, when they are not getting a decent education in mathematics or the English language.
When they graduate, and go on to higher education that could prepare them for professional careers, hating white people is not likely to do them nearly as much good as knowing math and English.
This may be a new issue to some people, but such irresponsible indoctrination has been going on for decades. Back in 1993, my book “Inside American Education” had a long chapter titled “Classroom Brainwashing.”
Anyone who reads the school propagandists’ own words quoted there can find that a sickening experience as well.
Parents who protest the arrogant abuse of a captive audience of children are performing an important public service. They deserve something better than having the Biden administration’s Attorney General threatening them.
But this whole issue is far older and far bigger than the Biden administration. It will be a cancerous threat to this country, long after the current administration is over.
Poisonous indoctrination will not stop unless it gets stopped.
Do read the entire article. Would that this man were 51, not 91.
Image: Currier and Ives’s Bombardment of Fort Sumter.
Sunday, October 3, 2021
National School Boards Label Concerned Parents as Domestic Terrorists!
Concerned Parents Are 'Immediate Threat' Says National School Boards Association President—Some Are Even Domestic Terrorists!
What’s not so understandable (unless you’re a leftist) is the reaction to the pushback by those in the top echelons of our educational system. Case in point, on Thursday, National School Board Association (NSBA) president Viola Garcia sent out a hysterical—yet revealing—letter not to school board members or parents, but to the president of the United States, Joe Biden.
After fawning all over Biden’s “leadership to end the proliferation of COVID-19,” Garcia proceeds to ask “for federal law enforcement and other assistance to deal with the growing number of threats of violence and acts of intimidation occurring across the nation.” The letter cites several articles describing hostile behavior at school board meetings and other events as evidence of an “immediate threat.” And who does Garcia and the NSBA say is perpetrating this nationwide “immediate threat”? Why America’s concerned right-wing parents, of course.
It’s revealing this letter was sent to Biden and not local school boards or local law enforcement. Why would Garcia feel so entitled to contact the president? Could it be she believes Biden owes the left something after supporting his basement-dwelling campaign? Does Biden owe the teachers’ unions and other numerous educational associations something? Is it payback time?
Tellingly, Garcia writes that “attacks against school board members and educators for approving policies for masks to protect the health and safety of students and school employees” are also “because of propaganda purporting the false inclusion of critical race theory within classroom instruction and curricula.” She deceptively claims that “critical race theory is not taught in public schools and remains a complex law school and graduate school subject well beyond the scope of a K-12 class.” Tuned-in parents know CRT is taught in public schools but that it has simply been renamed “ethnic studies.” Just ask the teachers’ union.
Like a good little leftist, Garcia throws in the obligatory placation for free speech. “Local school board members want to hear from their communities on important issues,” claims Garcia. “However, there also must be safeguards in place to protect public schools and dedicated education leaders as they do their jobs.” However, also like the left, everything she writes afterward negates that placation. You see, free speech is all well and good until parents don’t agree with the job the school board is doing; then it’s time to sic the feds on them for speaking up while labeling that speech “threats” and “violence.”
“Now, we ask that the federal government investigate, intercept, and prevent the current threats and acts of violence against our public school officials,” writes Garcia, “through existing statutes, executive authority, interagency and intergovernmental task forces, and other extraordinary measures to ensure the safety of our children and educators, to protect interstate commerce, and to preserve public school infrastructure and campuses.” Calling for the federal government to use vague “other extraordinary measures” to “investigate” parents sounds pretty intimidating and threatening to me, Ms. Garcia.
Not only does Garcia, blame parents for “threats and intimidations” instead of her own failed leftist school boards, but she also raises the crazy bar to high by equating upset parents’ attempts to speak at school board meetings as “equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.” She even calls for numerous federal law enforcement agencies to target those parents.
“NSBA specifically solicits the expertise and resources of the U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Secret Service, and its National Threat Assessment Center regarding the level of risk to public school children, educators, board members, and facilities/campuses,” Garcia writes. “We also request the assistance of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service to intervene against threatening letters and cyberbullying attacks that have been transmitted to students, school board members, district administrators, and other educators.”
Instead of writing a letter to villanize taxpaying parents who don’t agree with leftist policies of leftist school boards, Garcia should wake up and realize that she and her leftist cronies have poked the wrong bear.
I have news for the left: Engaged and concerned parents speaking at a school board meeting are not “domestic terrorists.” Our children do not belong to you. We see you and we see what you are trying to do. The pushback will continue no matter how many letters you write.
Saturday, August 14, 2021
Ashville NC Under Siege ' Thank you Progressives
‘Ongoing Violent Issues’: Person Shot 10 Times In Tourist NC City That Defunded Police
Police in Asheville, North Carolina, are asking for help to find the suspect who left someone hospitalized and in critical condition after shooting them 10 times on a porch Wednesday.
Investigators are considering the act a continuation of the rising incidents of violent crime in the months since the city cut the police budget, according to local outlet WLOS. “We are investigating it and do believe it’s possibly related to ongoing violent issues in the city of Asheville, yes,” Detective Sergeant John Zeigler said.
“Asheville police say 17 shell casings from three different guns were found at the scene,” WLOS further reported. “The victim was taken to the hospital, where police say they’re in critical but stable condition. Detectives have identified a person of interest in this case but still need your help.”
The rising rate of crime in Asheville has landed the city of approximately 90,000 people in the top 10% most violent cities in America, according to FBI crime data.
By Gabe Kaminsky
“In Asheville, North Carolina, violent crime is more than twice as common as it is nationwide. In 2019, the most recent year of available data, there were a total of 695 violent crimes reported in the city — or 742 for every 100,000 people,” according 24/7 Wall St., an independent financial news and opinion website.
Amid calls from far-left activists to defund the Asheville Police Department (APD) by half following the death of George Floyd, the Asheville City Council voted 5-2 last September to cut their budget by 3%.
“Since January 1, 2021, the Asheville Police Department has responded to 348 calls for service reporting gunshots or a person shot,” according to WLOS. “In addition, 27 people have been shot in Asheville during the same time period.”
The APD made international headlines in June when they released a list of crimes to which their force was no longer able to respond because of the exodus of officers. As The Daily Wire reported at the time:
In a Wednesday press release, the APD explained they have lost 84 officers since January 1, 2020, which is a devastating number for a force that employs just 219 people. Response times even to crimes such as homicides have increased three minutes during peak hours, APD Chief David Zack recently said.
“There will be things that we simply cannot get to,” Zack told the Asheville City Council’s Public Safety Committee on Tuesday. “We’re talking it’s taking us almost three minutes longer to get to those very serious calls.”
“Our detective unit right now is completely gassed out with the volume of serious investigations that they have to address. And we will have to triage those. Those officers are having to work extremely long hours,” Zack also said.
[…]
Wednesday, July 28, 2021
Two-thirds want BLM riots probed, more than Jan. 6
What America Wants - Probe BLM Not Jan 6th
Two-thirds want BLM riots probed, more than Jan. 6
66% of Likely U.S. Voters think Congress should investigate last year’s violent protests, in which more than 2,000 police officers suffered injuries in the line of duty. Democrats have been pushing for a partisan, witch-hunt-type investigation into the crowd of Trump supporters who were trespassing on federal property on January 6.
Tuesday, July 13, 2021
TX Dems - F-----g Idiots (Hypocrits)
“So as I understand it, Democratic legislators fled the state of Texas to prevent the large legislative majority from enacting a voting reform bill. They flew to Washington, D.C., where they rallied for ending the filibuster so that Democrats’ slim majority can pass a voting ‘reform’ bill.”
Saturday, June 26, 2021
The Inevitable Fruits of Critical Race Theory
The Inevitable Fruits of Critical Race Theory
by Paul Bradford
A black man went on a multistate shooting spree over the weekend. The suspected gunman, Justin Tyran Williams, said he specifically targeted white men in his rampage that left five wounded. “Basically, [Williams] explained throughout his life, specifically white males had taken from him, and also what he described as military-looking white males had taken from him,” Columbus (Georgia) Police detective Brandon Lockhart testified Monday.
A racially motivated mass shooting would be the number one news story on CNN . . . were the races reversed. But a black man intentionally shooting white men is just not that interesting to those outside of conservative media.
One could dwell on the lack of coverage or how it’s closer
to the average mass shooting than the stereotype pushed by the media. (The majority of mass shooters are actually black.) But the most heinous aspect about this crime is the shooter’s motivation. It would be easy to dismiss it as the fixation of one deranged individual. Antiwhite resentment, however, is actively encouraged by the prevailing ideology in our schools and institutions. Critical race theory wants all of its adherents to think the same way as Justin Tyran Williams.
Progressives Stymie Education
Counterfeit Civics
by Peter W. Wood
The National Association of Scholars opposes the proposal, “Educating for American Democracy.” The proposal has attracted some well-meaning supporters, but they are mistaken about what Educating for American Democracy—EAD—would bring into being.
Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy is a “framework” that prescribes how American K-12 schools should teach civics. That word “framework” is part of EAD’s official self-description, and it deserves a closer look. In this case, the so-called “framework” is really a well-developed plan to impose a politically progressive program of instruction on almost all American students. The framework determines the ideas to be taught and the means by which these ideas would be conveyed and enforced. The content of EAD is antithetical to how the vast majority of Americans understand our country.
Precedents
We have been here before, several times. In the early 1990s, the academic Left hijacked the National History Standards. Under the Left, those “standards” projected a dismal view of the nation’s past, but a public outcry, led by former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Lynne Cheney, prompted a retreat. In January 1995, the U.S. Senate voted 99 to 1 to repudiate those standards.
Tuesday, June 8, 2021
I'm (kind of) changing my mind about CRT. -TANGLE 6-8-21
I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, ad-free, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum — then “my take.” This is a free look at one of Tangle’s subscribers-only Friday editions.
Today’s read: 9 minutes.
Sometimes, you get it wrong.
Every day, I publish anywhere from 3,000 to 4,000 words in Tangle. A good bit of that writing is my own opinion — either in “my take” or in answers to reader questions. And in those writings I’ve repeatedly heralded the capacity of some people to have their minds changed by new evidence or new arguments, and yet I too rarely demonstrate that exercise for my readers.
I’d like to give it another swing today.
Last week, I wrote about the fight over critical race theory. If you missed that piece, I’d suggest reading it now. But if you’d rather not, I’ll briefly summarize it:
Critical race theory is an academic movement that recognizes systemic racism in American society and examines how that racism impacts the law, institutions and outcomes. It argues that many social problems are influenced more by racial inequity in societal structures than individual or psychological factors. CRT teaches that racism is an everyday experience for people of color, and that white supremacy maintains its power through our systems of government and law.
Many race-related movements, organizations and ideas have grown out of CRT. One of them, today, is the anti-racism movement, which often leans on the teachings of CRT for historical perspectives. Although the two are distinct, they’re conflated all the time. CRT teachings, however, are not just having a resurgence in academia, but are spreading to the corporate world, social clubs, your social media feeds, and into K-12 schools as well as colleges and universities.
In response to CRT “infiltrating” some schools, Republicans have proposed (and in some cases passed) a wave of restrictive legislation across the United States. Some have framed it as “bans on critical race theory teachings,” while others have described the legislation as protecting children from being compelled into self-loathing over their race.
Last week, after summarizing competing arguments from each side, I essentially took the position that banning anything in academic settings was bad, that states were overstepping, summarized positive experiences I’ve had in engaging CRT ideas, wrote that these bills banning its teaching were solving for a problem that doesn’t currently exist (i.e. CRT in K-12 schools is not common), and wrote that U.S. education could improve by engaging in honest conversations about race — and our country’s history with it — more often and not less often.
After writing that piece, I was inundated with emails — from liberals, conservatives, Black school teachers, white school teachers, historians, Constitutional scholars, and just your average parents with kids moving through their public school systems all over the country. I even heard from a couple of K-12 students.
Their emails provided all sorts of different arguments, evidence, and pushback on what I had written (many, too, wrote supportively of my position — which is why I feel especially compelled to “update” some of what I wrote here). Many, many good points were made, and I’d like to address and integrate them here into my own thinking.
First, the left’s view was not properly represented. Many people felt that the “what the left is saying” section was misleading or at least incomplete. They rightly noted that I did not include a single piece of liberal dissent on CRT, despite the fact its presence in schools — and its resurgence more widely — is something many prominent liberals also object to. John McWhorter, for instance, wrote a whole book about the flaws of anti-racism work and critical race theory. I also did not include any dissent from Black thinkers or people of color, when McWhorter is hardly alone. I’ve referenced many of those thinkers before in this newsletter — Richard Loury, Coleman Hughes, Kmele Foster, Thomas Chatterton Williams, etc. — and at least one of them should have gotten space in last week’s edition.
There are also progressives who have called out their peers to do more to fight back on critical race theory in schools, while some Democrats worry that arguing America is racist to its core is simply a bad political play. And there are polls that have shown a combination of Americans simply not knowing what critical race theory is or being opposed to ideas — like the concept of white privilege — being taught to young kids (a note of caution that some of these polls are being conducted by overtly political groups).
Finally, quite a few people on the left have written about the way critical race theory — and some of the ideas born out of it — have harmed Asian Americans. I, regretfully, did not include any of these voices in my original piece.
The bills banning CRT are doing more than “solving a problem that doesn’t exist.” If I could take back a single sentence from my original piece, it’d probably be this one: “Not only that, but most of these bans are solving a problem that doesn’t currently exist.”
There were two reasons why this was a bad argument. The first one is that, even if critical race theory was not particularly common in K-12 schools, that doesn’t mean it’s not worth addressing before it becomes one. If you’re working from the place where you see CRT as a dangerous school of thought, or being applied in dangerous ways, then it’d be a bizarre and silly thing to say that we should wait until it’s a problem to address it. Framing it as solving a problem that doesn’t exist, rather than a worthwhile preventative measure, was an unfair way to raise the issue.
Second is that, based both on my reader responses and some of the supporting evidence they sent in, I think it was unfair of me to say CRT is not common in our schools. The truth is I don’t know how common it is. My writing cited the work of Christopher Rufo, who has been logging some of the more bizarre and troubling applications of anti-racism or CRT in schools. But plenty of parents (parents of color and white parents!) also wrote in with stories about their kids, some in elementary school, being needlessly “segregated” during school hours, or being shamed for the crimes of their ancestors, neither of which are healthy or productive applications of critical race theory to me.
And it’s clear it’s not just them. Teachers and parents
Not all the bills are the same, and generalizing them misses the mark. One other mistake I made in my original piece was not being more intentional about parsing out the specifics of these bills. Bari Weiss hosted two conservative thinkers, David French and Christopher Rufo, on her podcast for a fascinating and illuminating debate about these bills. The conversation showed that there is some division on the right about this as well. It also drove home two other important points:
One, a lot of these bills — both proposed and passed — are vastly different, and it would have been worth my exploring how in greater detail. A New Hampshire proposal, for example, was so broad as to seemingly prohibit the discussion and debate of divisive topics. It has since been updated, and now explicitly protects the teachings of something like critical race theory. “Nothing in this subdivision shall be construed to prohibit racial, sexual, religious or other workplace training based on the inherent humanity and equality of all persons,” the bill now says, and continues; “Nothing in this subdivision shall be construed to limit the academic freedom of faculty members of the university system of New Hampshire and the community college system of New Hampshire to conduct research, publish, lecture or teach in the academic setting.”
But the bill also says:
No public employer, either directly or through the use of an outside contractor, shall teach, advocate, instruct, or train any employee, student, service recipient, contractor, staff member, inmate or any other individual or group, any one or more of the following…
That an individual, by virtue of his or her age, sex, gender identify, sexual orientation, race, creed, color, marital status, familial status, mental or physical disability, religion, or national origin is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive whether consciously or unconsciously.
The problem with a bill like this is how it splits hairs so closely. For instance, I don’t think anyone is “inherently” racist or sexist, and I agree that shouldn’t be taught to kids (though I do think inquiring about such a question in high school or college is fine). I also think there is a fascinating and important discussion to be had about whether we all carry unconscious racism or sexism — and I think it’s okay to be exploring those ideas in school. So by the letter, this bill may not be an issue, but it’s also running so close to a prohibition on teaching controversial ideas that it still concerns me (so that part of my position hasn’t really changed).
The second thing I was reminded of by Rufo and French’s debate was that there is another free speech angle to this, which is that some students are being compelled to say things they may not believe. There are entire books and legal cases about this, but the simple point is your free speech rights protect you not only from being silenced by the government, but also from being compelled by the government to express something. If public school teachers, who are government employees, are, for instance, forcing white students to express their status as oppressors, that becomes a serious issue. My previous writing didn’t address this at all.
French, a former lawyer who (like me) has serious concerns about these Republican bills, made the point that such an instance could be grounds for a lawsuit, even if a bill to try to prevent those instances was misguided and redundant. Rufo disagreed, strongly, that these bills would be shot down as unconstitutional. Which brings me to another point…
Voluntary vs. mandatory. Quite a few people took issue with my personal story about my positive experience with critical race theory, only to note that there was a difference between me voluntarily engaging these ideas and students being forced to engage in them. In other words: school is compulsory in America. And if students are being forced to go to school, and teachers at that school are teaching critical race theory as “truth,” then these students are effectively being indoctrinated.
I don’t find that argument particularly convincing, namely because I think the overwhelming number of teachers are making good-faith attempts at providing a holistic look at issues of race, law, history, etc. However, I do think it’s a good critique of my argument to note that comparing my voluntary participation in certain anti-racism workshops as an adult is not the same as K-12 kids facing mandatory teachings on CRT in public school.
States have a right to do this. This was more of an omission than anything else. A lot of people wrote in to note that determining what curriculum should or shouldn't be taught in public schools is actually a primary responsibility of the states. So again, if you’re working from the position that CRT is dangerous, or that it is being applied in damaging ways, it would be a dereliction of duty for state legislators not to do anything about it.
This, too, is a sound argument. It’s quite possible that some states are going to ban certain kinds of practices in schools and others won’t, and even if I disagree with that, it’s part of life in America that individual states will address these issues differently. To put a fine point on this, a few readers noted that when I disparaged my high school education in Pennsylvania for omitting so much history, they said the education I received sounded nothing like the one they received — i.e. they were taught all about race, slavery, indigenous people and the crimes of European colonizers, and that the fact I wasn’t was more of a reflection of Pennsylvania’s education system than of American education as a whole.
Putting a pin in it. There are two things I want to dig my heels in on, even after reading all your feedback and continuing to look into these bills for the last week.
One, I do not think critical race theory is particularly dangerous on its own. On the contrary, it’s a really valuable and important piece of academia. Like any critical theory, it has its flaws, but in simple terms, it really is just an academic theory that explores the way race (and racism) are embedded in our society’s laws and structures. One issue with writing about CRT is that it seems to mean something different to everyone. To me, CRT is about an academic exploration of the very real and very important ways race impacts different facets of society, and has throughout our history. That is a fairly innocuous thing. To someone else, CRT might be about a return to segregation, race essentialism, and the practice of defining everyone and everything first and foremost by their race. I’d argue that my definition is far closer to the truth, and the latter is about how sloppily “anti-racism” work is being applied by (I hope!) well-intentioned teachers in our schools.
Two, on the whole, I still believe these bills banning CRT are more dangerous than helpful. I haven’t seen one yet that I’d personally vote for. If K-12 students are being taught that they are inherently inferior, superior, or racist, based on their race — or otherwise being compelled to espouse those ideas — they are already protected by our country’s laws. And they can use those laws to seek recourse. On the contrary, some of these bills, the ones that are overly simplistic and broad, have already resulted in the cancellation of a university summer class, while teachers are expressing new fears about addressing issues of race because of this legislation (this was something many teachers expressed to me privately, too).
The things I got wrong and omitted — and the arguments that moved my position — were more about my own naivete about the impact some of this is already having. I shouldn’t have generalized all these bills as equally dangerous or counterproductive. Some are closer to being redundant than radioactive, simply restating prohibitions that already exist on defining anyone by their race, gender, or religion.
I was also wrong to frame the issue as being beyond the power of the states; I was wrong to say that it solved a problem that didn’t exist, or that even if that was true, that made the bills unworthy of our time; I was wrong to frame it as a purely right vs. left issue when a lot of liberals are rightly opposed to the ways CRT or anti-racism is being handled in schools; I was wrong not to acknowledge that CRT has been criticized loudly and effectively by plenty of people of color; I was wrong not to spend more time fleshing out the differences between CRT itself (which, again, I find innocuous) and how CRT is being applied in public schools across the country (which, again, I sometimes find inappropriate).
So what’s there to do? That’s a better and more difficult question. I don’t have a clear, clean answer, but I think continuing to highlight instances where CRT teachings go too far in schools is a good start. I also think engaging the criticisms of CRT, and ensuring they are part of any discussion about CRT in schools, is critical (if you’ll excuse the play on words). And perhaps most importantly, I think we need to continue to avoid the trap of race essentialism — of assuming our Black neighbors have some monolithic opinions on race and politics or that our white neighbors are all thoughtless oppressors.
This debate has illuminated the fact that neither one is true, and that the continued pursuit of nuance, as well as the open debate about challenging ideas born from theories like CRT, are our best chances at moving the country forward in a positive way.
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