Welcome to the “new, but not
improved GOP now solely owned and operated by one Donald John Trump.” Along
with constant string of lies and now lots of “Dog
Whistles.”
Some background: “Dog whistles” are not new and the current ones can be traced back to the civil rights days of Ronald Wilson Reagan and a well-know at the time, the late Lee Atwater Days and the extract of his quote posted below (c. 1981) vis-à-vis his southern strategy...
Now, up to date, let’s lay it out plain and simple: The GOP
is anti-everyone who is not white in America – period. From Atwater’s days
until now (1981 to 2021 = 40 years) the GOP “Dog Whistles” are reborn and in
full bloom with the CRT (Critical Race Theory) issue.
CRT is the GOP’s newest boogie man laid out in this fine LA
TIMES article and seen in recent VA election outcome that showed the winner or
governor, Glenn Youngkin, sold CRT like a pro and now it’s running like a wild
fire totally out of control across the nation.
“Democrats
decry GOP's focus on critical race theory (CRT) as a racist dog whistle. What's
their next move?”
This is really a big “non-issue,” issue. Why? Simple:
Republicans will basically believe anything they are told to believe. Now, you
can believe that or not, I strongly believe it. My belief is based on the hard
evidence, proof and facts, all of which Republicans hate with a passion.
Details of this latest is below. Recall that Reagan link above because it sets
the scene.
A bit more on this subject from a
survey NBC News here in part:
Teachers nationwide said K-12 schools are not requiring or
pushing them to teach critical race theory, and most said they were opposed to
adding the academic approach to their course instruction, according to that survey obtained by NBC News with this story headline:
“Teaching critical race
theory isn't happening in classrooms, teachers say in survey”
“We don’t get it. This objection is being pushed upon us, and it’s
not even happening in our classes,” an English teacher in the Phoenix area
said.
Despite a roiling culture war that has blown up at school
board meetings (photo above) and led to new legislation in statehouses across
the country, the responses from more than 1,100 teachers across the country to a survey conducted by the Association of
American Educators, a nonpartisan professional group for educators,
appeared to suggest that the panicked dialogue on critical race theory made by
lawmakers and the media does not reflect the reality of American classrooms.
Lynn Daniel, a ninth-grade English teacher in the Phoenix
area said: “We’re saying: What is the fuss about? We don’t get it. This
objection is being pushed upon us, and it’s not even happening in our classes.
I don’t understand it.”
The association surveyed
its professional membership between June 24 and June 29 and received 1,134
completed responses, nearly 900 of them from traditional public schools.
More than 96 percent said their schools did not require them to teach
critical race theory, and only 45 percent said that teachers should have the
option to add it to their lesson plans.
Critical race theory is an academic study at the undergraduate and graduate level that aims to examine the role of racism in the modern era and the ways it has become woven into the social fabric. Academics in the field argue the U.S. has institutionalized a racial caste system. Increasingly it has also become an amorphous, catch-all term used by the conservative movement as fodder for political debate.
In the past month, GOP-controlled
legislatures in 22 states have proposed legislation to limit teaching of
concepts of racial equity and white privilege under the umbrella of “CRT.”
Five states — Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, Texas, and Tennessee —
have signed bills banning the teaching of critical race theory
Let me now pause and
insert this question from
Ed Week: What is critical race theory anyway?
Critical Race Theory (CRT) is an academic concept that is
more than 40 years old. The core idea is that race is a social construct, and
that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also
something embedded in legal systems and policies.
The basic tenets of emerged out of a framework for legal
analysis in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s created by legal scholars Derrick
Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado, among others.
A good example was in the 1930’s when government officials
literally drew lines around areas deemed poor financial risks, often explicitly
due to the racial composition of inhabitants. Banks subsequently refused to
offer mortgages to Black people in those areas. That
was labeled “Red Lining” (here from the NY Times).
Noteworthy:
Recall this
historical case (NPR September 20, 2016).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Added to this debate is this
fine article from the Washington Post with this headline:
“Opinion: Democrats can
win the debate over critical race theory. Here’s how.”
Democrats, beware: Glenn Youngkin’s successful campaign for
governor of VA will serve as a template for
Republican candidates eager to exploit fears of CRT by demanding “parental
control of education.” Democrats must do a better job of responding than
Youngkin’s hapless opponent, Terry McAuliffe, did.
The absolute worst thing Dems can say is what
McAuliffe said:
“I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
At some level, he was right; there would be chaos if
every teacher had to run every lesson plan by the parents of every student. But
his comment came across as tone-deaf after parents had spent 18 months
supervising their kids’ education at home — and stewing about shuttered
classrooms. McAuliffe paid the price for not feeling parents’ pain.
It’s also not productive to argue, as many on the left have, that critical race theory, or CRT, isn’t being taught and that raising the issue is nothing but a dog whistle to racists. It’s true that “parental control” has become the new “states’ rights” — a deceptively anodyne slogan for tapping racist fears.
It’s also true that even those who are most hysterical
about CRT have trouble defining it.
Even Fox News host Tucker
Carlson admitted: “I’ve never figured out what CRT is, to be
totally honest, after a year of talking about it.”
But as a practical,
political issue, none of that matters. CRT might have started off as an
esoteric academic theory about structural racism.
But it has now become a generic term for widely publicized excesses in diversity education, such as disparaging “individualism” and “objectivity” as examples of “white supremacy culture” or teaching first-graders about micro-aggressions and structural racism. You don’t have to be a Republican to be put off by the incessant attention on race in so many classrooms.
George Packer wrote in the
Atlantic in October 2019 that he knew “several mixed-race families that
transferred their kids out of a New York City school that had taken to dividing
their students by race into consciousness-raising affinity groups.”
Packer spoke for many liberal parents when he protested the
tendency to make “race, which is a dubious and sinister social construct, an
essence that defines individuals regardless of agency or circumstance.”
Packer cited Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) as example saying:
“We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice; we
don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice.”
This is the kind of stupid wokeness that Democratic strategist James Carville blamed for his party’s setbacks in VA and NJ — and it is something that Democrats need to disavow if they want to win outside of deep-blue enclaves.
Democrats should admit that,
even as racism remains a pervasive problem, some efforts to combat it backfire
if they exacerbate racial divisions or stigmatize White students.
But while acknowledging some conservative concerns as legitimate, Democrats also need to call out the GOP’s cynical and destructive use of the CRT issue just as an earlier generation of liberals protested all the lives then Sen. Joe McCarthy (R-WI) was destroying in the name of anti-communism, liberals today need to focus on the collateral damage that Republicans inflict in the name of fighting CRT.
They are
trying to ban books and fire educators. In short, they are practicing the very
“cancel culture they decry.
Seven
states have outlawed teaching CRT, and 13 others are considering such
bills. These laws have provoked opposition even from staunch conservatives,
such as David
French, who worry about the chilling effect on speech. French lives in a TN
county where right-wing activists are trying to use an anti-CRT law to purge
from the curriculum books about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ruby
Bridges. They even take issue with Normal Rockwell’s painting “The Problem
We All Live With,” which shows Bridges being escorted to her New Orleans
elementary school in 1960 by federal marshals enforcing desegregation.
The chairman of the TX House Committee on General
Investigating demanded on
October 25 that schools in that state report whether they stock any books “that
might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of
psychological distress because of their race or sex” — and included 850
examples of such suspect works.
In Southlake, TX an anti-CRT law was even invoked by a
school administrator who instructed teachers to offer an opposing perspective on the Holocaust. What would that be —
neo-Nazism?
James
Whitfield, the first Black principal of a high school in Colleyville, TX is
in the process of being fired. His apparent offense was writing, after the
George Floyd murder, that systemic racism was “alive and well” and asking students
and parents to be “anti-racist.” (The school district denies that
CRT was a factor in its decision.)
In Blountville, Tenn. a teacher was fired in
part for assigning an article by Ta-Nehisi Coates arguing that Trump was
elected by harnessing white grievances.
Conservatives argue that CRT, with its focus on group identity, is un-American. But what’s more un-American than attempting to ban books and fire teachers for their views? That’s what happens in China.
Democrats can win the CRT debate if they call out the illiberal excesses of the
woke left and the anti-woke right.
My 2 Cents: I could go on and on with this story, but I think the links above outline my feelings up-to-date – hopefully yours, too.
This is a very divisive topic and not totally understood or presented as one for rational discussion – it’s too damn hot as the original LA Times piece outlines above and it’s harmful to the nation as a whole.
Why can’t we discuss topics, issues, and differences in an atmosphere that seeks to provide accurate information, rational discussion, and common-sense solutions?
Simple: The
politics is just too raw, nasty, and ugly. That is not the America I know,
served for decades, and cherish above all other nations.
I’m pretty sure the vast
majority feel the same way – so, how do we work to overcome this raw hatred we
have seen over the past few years overwhelming us across all lines?
I really don’t know the
answer to that question … but I do know one helpful thing we can to and that is
to stick with the truth, the facts, and proof regarding disruptive issues like
this.
The question of course is
how? How do we convince those locked in place beside Trump to unlock them and
their mind set to seek the truth and not just follow the hype and lies and
misinformation that is surely harmful to us all.
That’s about it for today.
Thanks for stopping by.
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