CRT tangent from political meme thread and Cis tangent from Musk thread

I don't need to, I'm not a teacher.

 

nor a student, apparently.

 

You certainly don't need to, yet in these threads here you are, spending countless hours trying to persuade people that the way things are taught is wrong, when you yourself can't even answer basic questions on the subject area.

 

Why learn facts when there's a nice sexy conspiracy theory from mouthpieces who act like authority figures?

 

So @Federal Farmer is complaining because teachers are taught the facts they teach and then they bring those teachings to the children.
This is his fucking complaint.
His complaint is with how humans pass on knowledge through teaching.

Even if we went to machines teaching our children, those machines would be programmed with the facts that the children need to learn and they would teach them those facts.

So we casn't teach teachers facts about history because they might teach their children those same facts, and that makes racists feel bad.

This is the fucking argument Federal Farmer is putting out. FF is not understanding why everyone else is facepalming at being presented this argument.

I have to admit that I was completely wrong in every idea that FF had input into any discussion around here.

 

Liberalism, by it's very nature, questions everything. How is it that you espouse the writings of the forefathers, but have no idea what they are actually talking about?

 

A nine year old can be forgiven the reductive dismissal. Grown ass adults not so much.

 

Let us know when any of the folk she's referring to fit that definition.

Or when you do, come to that.

 

"reductive dismissal"?

I tried googling it and all I got was something about labour law and how it's a cousin of a "constructive dismissal" wherein someone's hours are reduced until the job is unsustainable for them.

 

Why would you feel guilty about a children's book?

 

Nonono. UA never feels guilt.

But even hint that he SHOULD (even if you aren't actually doing that, just saying "shit went down") and he goes off on a Hulk rampage.

 

Did UA have a bad sibling that framed him for their misdeeds or something?

 

well, let's see what the UAsual suspects think is so wrong with this book?

 

It's "Roots" for kids, and I'm there for it.

 

That should make @Federal Farmer

 

Banned for nudity and bad language. Would they ban Schindler's List for the same reason?

 

having actually owned that one at one point, I can honestly say I don't think it's directed or entirely suitable to a YA audience. Banning it seems overzealous, but as a hypothetical school administrator I'd rather it be an assigned reading in senior lit than open in the library.
Back in grade 12 we had a course called film and bio. Among them were "Ordeal" by Linda Lovelace and "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl. As a bunch of 17-19 year olds with the guidance of a teacher, we were able to deal with the themes involved... I'm not sure a 14 year old should be checking something as visceral as Maus without that.

 

You know what, I'm feeling... I dunno, bored, or masochistic or something. Picking apart something a lot more intelligent than the usual drive-by postings might be fun, and on a second read, there's quite a bit in that analysis that's at least factual -- or at least verifiable -- if without the implications the author imputes.

So here we don't actually have CRT the academic field, but "the CRT movement". That's interesting, I suspect we'll come back to that later.

The underlined are too universal of assertions for my tastes, but overall there's not much here to complain about. It's pretty clear that this is one possible view of American history and how it shapes social and civic life, and possibly, even probably a useful one, but to claim it's everything social, especially now, is trivially observably wrong.

Hey remember when I said in the other thread that saying "Critical Race Theory" implies "Critical Thinking" is just as stupid as saying "Critical Race Theory" implies "Critical Theory"? Well, look at that, it's the other side of the coin.

Hey whaddaya know, the author has decided to conflate the movement with the scholarship (not that Delgado made it particularly difficult to do that ). Lookit that. How convenient. How convenient indeed.

To be clear, I absolutely disagree with everything in italics (re-underlined by me because quote blocks are always italic). It, specifically, is dangerous nonsense, and should not be taught. But so far there's no evidence presented that it actually is.

Citation needed, after "power".

Citation technically needed, but honestly that's pretty evident. What's not is whether this is the movement or the scholarship. The obvious implication is both.

Bait and switch. Remove the bad parts, it's still a useful framework. This guy would throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The very notion of fairness is one of the most hotly debated topics, and to assume there's some preexisting "generalist notion of fairness" is (and I really love when I get to use this phrase as intended) begging the question.

Citation needed; that's very clearly NOT in that paragraph from Delgado. Arguendo it's true, still no evidence it's being taught in schools.

This much is I think uncontroversial.

Pure opinion.

There are a number of leaps there. If there are structurally determinative* elements (even probabilistic ones), then yeah, that's just obviously true. You can't look at slavery without considering race. You can't look at discriminatory policies without looking at the axis of discrimination. You can't consider marriage laws without considering sex and sexual orientation, or draft registration without considering sex. Far from evil, this is necessary. The goal to eliminate systemic Xism is worthy. At the same time, that doesn't mean that every possible action toward that end is proper or even forward progress, particularly every possible government action.

*I assume this is what the author actually means instead of "structural elements", because a) that's in the title of a couple chapters of Delgado's book, and b) otherwise there's no leap of logic large enough to get from one side of that sentence to the other.

Also by this, one would think Marxists would hate CRT. How *dare* race supplant class as the predominant structurally determinative element?

The parenthetical is just scare words, half of which have nothing to do with the preceding sentence. As for the non-parenthetical, while I'd quibble with "permanent", I don't think I have grounds to dispute the rest. I don't accept the notion (also not taught in schools, but very present in eg the Kendi-worshiping anti-racist movement) that black people are the only ones allowed to have a say in how to ameliorate racism, but it should be obvious that they're likelier to have a more accurate view of how it manifests.

Very sneaky. First sentence is, AFAIK, an accurate depiction of Mr. Bell's view (AFAIC, it's wrong; "a going concern" would be more accurate than "permanent"), but again, is it taught in schools? Is it banned by Republican legislatures? Answer to both seems to be "No." Second sentence sounds like it's still a citation, but is the author's opinion, and so has no descriptive value. Third sentence seems like it should be uncontroversial -- to the extent that there is racism, it should be exposed, no?

This is an empirical question, and the while the answer is not "ubiquitous", it does seem to be pretty darn far from "an aberration". Social efforts to change the norms to make it so ("change the ground truth to match the marketing" -- a VERY worthy task, I might add) are very far from having completely succeeded.

I'm like 75% sure this is the author's opinion, but conceding that it might not be... where's it taught it schools?

This is how you know it's not taught in schools, because schools don't have Critical Race Theorists on hand to adjudicate every interracial interaction. Yes, that's a reductive and arguably stupid argument, but not any more so than all these "therefore"s.

All accurate, at least as to the movement (I haven't paid close enough attention to the scholarship to know if it's in there. Honestly this could all just be inferred from the table of contents of Delgado's book). So, where's it taught?

See, this is where I know that the author is just using "see also," as "be afraid", because intersectionality has basically nothing to do with this (or with probably 80% of the things "woke" leftists claim it is, for that matter.

"In order to engage in identity politics"? No, that's entirely backwards.

No, that's Defund the Police. BLM demands accountability.

Schools? Maybe? Can we please have a citation for schools? And has been pointed out elsewhere, there's overlap between "anti-racist" and CRT, but neither is a subset of the other.

Accurate, AAUI. Where's this taught in schools? What state has anything remotely resembling a ban on teaching this in bill or law?

Sneaky again. The 1619 project is revisionism, but not CRT. Note the author only implies it is, rather than says so outright.

Are we maybe getting back to scholarship? *crosses fingers*

That is a very small part of her description. Technically true, utterly useless.

That's a lot of words to miss the point of intersectionality, which is that people or systems can be discriminatory towards intersections of groups without discriminating against the group as a whole, eg. against black women, when one is not discriminatory against women as a whole or blacks as a whole, and that looking out for discrimination against the larger groups can miss it at the intersections, hence the name. This doesn't match its popular usage *at all* (and IIRC, Crenshaw is frustrated by people using the term to mean things it doesn't. Can't blame her).

Yep, that seems accurate. Where's it being taught?

Delgado's (among others') critique of liberalism is bad. But again, none of that is being taught in schools. I believe (pretty strongly, in fact) in the colorblindness pedagogy. But that's far from incompatible with making sure that one is not ignoring others' or systems' lack thereof in the process. I think teaching kids to watch out for that, and implicitly, their own participation in those systems, is quite compatible with the liberal anti-racism project, and especially for older kids, seems like an excellent introspective exercise. To the extent that's taught, I'm fine with it.

Not taught.

Still not taught.

So, we have a lot implication that doesn't actually follow, more accurate info than I thought on first reading (much of which is genuinely objectionable) that isn't actually taught to children anywhere, and some useful compatible nuggets which probably should be. What's the rush to badly ban teachings that aren't taught? And how are the book bans remotely justified?

 

That's increasingly my thought as well. Want to pass laws that criminalize the teaching of historical facts that hurt white conservatives' delicate fee-fees? Fine, but then we'll use your whining against you.

 

It may well depend on the 14 year old in question, but I read that at 14 (had a copy at home) and I was fine. In fact, I read that several times.

 

Define "fine."

I suspect you're irreparably damaged.

 

Yes, I became diametrically opposed to fascism.

 

https://www.al.com/news/2022/02/ala...y-month-as-state-debates-crt-legislation.html

 

It seems like the same people screaming the loudest about "cancel culture" are desperately trying to cancel any kind of substantive discussion about race

 

And here we get to the crux of the problem. We can go around and around and around in circles playing "gotcha" over how exactly Critical Race Theory is defined. But in the minds of many of the people bitching about it, it's simply "anything that runs counter to white supremacy."

 

Or else they don't appreciate "You're guilty, you didn't earn what you have and you owe a perpetual debt." creeping into mandatory classes.