The CRT worldview makes slavery the central event of history, and oppression by whites the central theme. That’s what’s going on in the Nikole Hannah-Jones quote above. How do those folks perceive immigrant groups that come here and tell their kids to shut up and work hard? I think that leads straight to the idea that Asians are complicit in “upholding white supremacy.” And even white people like John Oliver get in on that narrative.
Of course from our perspective we are just raising our kids according to our culture. In broad strokes, both east and south Asian cultures tend to be deferential to authority and emphasize an internal locus of control. If you ask my mom why bangladesh is poor, she’ll point to corruption and other moral failings, not British colonialism. Whether that is accurate or not, that’s completely at odds with the CRT worldview, which emphasizes an external locus of control—blaming oppression by whites for everything.
Nikole Hannah-Jones is a journalist, not a Critical Race Theorist. Find a better descriptor for this (perhaps prevalent) "worldview" than "the CRT worldview". Prompted by a bunch of unproductive discussions like this one, I took some time and actually read a bunch of CRT journal articles, and none of these discussions intersect what actual CRT work says. That may be as much a fault of popular culture and pop sociology as it is HN's, but either way, it's annoying.
It is easy to make a case that Nikole Hannah-Jones essentializes the transatlantic slave trade. But it is unreasonable to generalize from Hannah-Jones to a whole field of study without evidence.
Nikole Hannah-Jones has a degree in African American Studies, so I think the label is perfectly apt. It's like "supply-side economics." It's a useful label for political ideas that are adjacent to an academic theory of the same name.
Hannah-Jones has a bachelors in history. My sister has a degree in Russian Literature. But she's a lawyer, not a literature critic. Hannah-Jones is not a Critical Race Theorist. That is an actual thing, and your education brought you closer to it than Hannah-Jones' did.
https://profiles.howard.edu/nikole-hannah-jones (“Hannah-Jones holds a Master of Arts in Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and earned her Bachelor of Arts in History and African-American studies from the University of Notre Dame.”).
The ship has sailed on trying to limit “CRT” to its original academic meaning. People needed a word to refer to the ideology that had suddenly become prominent in public discourse, and “CRT” won. See: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/please-just-fucking-tel...
No, I don't think I will defer to the culture warrior Freddie deBoer on this. Hannah-Jones is a journalist, not a theorist or an academic, and words mean things.
DeBoer is just describing the phenomenon: We needed terms for ideas which are increasingly prevalent but resist labeling. So we appropriated “CRT” for that purpose. Words mean things, of course, but they can mean multiple things according to popular usage. “Nicole Hannah-Jones thought” is the dominant meaning of “CRT” today. Almost nobody means to refer to some obscure branch of legal academia.
I'd be much more amenable to that if the people "appropriating" terms like CRT weren't doing so to tar actual CRT theorists, but they are, so I'm not at all amenable to it in this case.
If you don't agree with using the term "CRT" to label the kind of views espoused by people such as Nikole Hannah-Jones – is there another label you'd support instead?
It depends on how specifically Hannah-Jonesian the critique is. Is the issue here 1619ism? That's a fair label for what she represents. Is it more broadly Kendi-style "anti-racism"? I think if you put scare quotes around "anti-racism", that's fine too. Is it political correctness? The modern term for that is "wokeism" (no quotes needed).
"Woke" is also an appropriated term. But it's original meaning is actually pretty close to its current meaning; I remember a Lexicon Valley episode where one of McWhorter's academic guests observed that "woke" is what you'd call your crazy uncle at Thanksgiving who thought the flouride in your toothpaste was a government mind control system.
Did you see this article containing screenshots of an ethnic studies course at a California high school, with slides about "Critical Race Theory"? https://reason.com/2022/01/31/critical-race-theory-taught-in... Some might accuse the "whistleblower" of being a "grifter", now that she's swapped her teaching career for the conservative speaking circuit – but, I doubt the screenshots are faked, because if they weren't real, surely the school would have come out and said that to rebut her criticism of them.
Maybe that course is an outlier, but it does serve as a counterexample to the narrative that "CRT is not being taught in K-12 schools". But, if they are teaching CRT (even by name) in some schools, how close is the CRT they teach to the original academic theories? Given my personal experience at how badly schools can mangle things – I still remember the bizarre errors in my high school computing studies textbook, and the interactions I had with teachers in which I tried to explain why the textbook was wrong, and they couldn't understand anything I was saying – it wouldn't surprise me if high school CRT had little in common with the scholarly version.
But if that's true – wouldn't it just show that critics are not the only people appropriating the term "CRT"? In which case, if people on "both sides" are appropriating "CRT", how is its appropriation any worse than that of "woke"? If you'll accept the appropriation of the latter, why refuse it for the former? With "scare quotes", if need be.
Can you be more specific about which slides you want me to respond to? CRT does have a position about what nominally race-neutral school board policies mean when reframed through race. That's unsurprising, because since Buchanan v. Warley, most racial policy in the US has been nominally race-neutral.
I don't think CRT should be taught to grade schoolers. It's complicated and all you can give students who barely understand civics is a bunch of fortune cookies.
Neither slide contains much content, so they don't really tell us how Rancho San Juan High School (Salinas, CA) has been teaching Critical Race Theory – but they are evidence that they have been teaching it.
Were they teaching it accurately? We don't have enough information to say. But, it wouldn't surprise me that, even if the original scholarly theories have some legitimacy, a high school tasked with teaching them would mangle them into something else entirely.
I don't dispute that there are misguided K-8 schools that have been teaching CRT, or what they think CRT is. They shouldn't be.
There would be a more compelling argument here if either of those slides said something outré. But neither does, so I don't know what I'm supposed to do with this.
> I don't dispute that there are misguided K-8 schools that have been teaching CRT, or what they think CRT is. They shouldn't be.
Okay, that was my whole point though – "CRT" has been appropriated to mean something different from the original academic theory – and not just by the "anti-CRT" crowd, by "pro-CRT" folks too. So why not just accept that "CRT" now has two meanings, the original scholarly meaning, and a colloquial meaning, and they are different, even though the later grew out of (distortions of) the former?
The appropriation of "CRT" isn't really any different than the appropriation of "woke", which you seemed more okay with.
If those slides had said something that contravened CRT rather than summarizing it, I think that'd be a valid argument. But they say almost nothing at all.
Let's forget the slides for now. In hindsight I think I made a mistake in bringing them into the conversation, since I was just trying to use them to demonstrate something which you agree with anyway–but I didn't realise that when I brought them up.
This is your comment to which I was responding:
> I'd be much more amenable to that if the people "appropriating" terms like CRT weren't doing so to tar actual CRT theorists, but they are, so I'm not at all amenable to it in this case.
And then you said (my emphasis):
> I don't dispute that there are misguided K-8 schools that have been teaching CRT, or what they think CRT is
Doesn't your statement support the idea that "CRT" has evolved in popular usage to mean something different from the original academic theory, and that evolution hasn't purely been due to CRT critics, people who promote/teach "what they think CRT is" have also played a role in that evolution? And hence, that evolution can't be solely blamed on people trying to "tar actual CRT theorists"? Which undermines your argument for resisting it.
No, because, again, you haven't shown that schools are teaching something that isn't CRT while appropriating the term "CRT" to describe it. In fact, we have no idea what these schools are teaching, so we have not all that much to discuss.
The CRT worldview makes slavery the central event of history, and oppression by whites the central theme. That’s what’s going on in the Nikole Hannah-Jones quote above. How do those folks perceive immigrant groups that come here and tell their kids to shut up and work hard? I think that leads straight to the idea that Asians are complicit in “upholding white supremacy.” And even white people like John Oliver get in on that narrative.
Of course from our perspective we are just raising our kids according to our culture. In broad strokes, both east and south Asian cultures tend to be deferential to authority and emphasize an internal locus of control. If you ask my mom why bangladesh is poor, she’ll point to corruption and other moral failings, not British colonialism. Whether that is accurate or not, that’s completely at odds with the CRT worldview, which emphasizes an external locus of control—blaming oppression by whites for everything.