Four people at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) have written a personal take on the new laws designed to prevent the teaching of critical race theory (CRT) in campuses and secondary schools. Their views don’t constitute not an official FIRE position but rather raise some considerations about the spate of laws, put in place mostly by Republican states. What I like about FIRE is that they are nonsectarian, defending the civil liberties of students regardless of what ideology is involved. (That’s what the ACLU used to do.)
So in this case, though much of the motivation for these laws could stem from a Republican desire to prevent the teaching of the history of racism and the genocide of Native Americans, Lukianoff et al. argue that there are some genuine motivations for enacting these laws based on what’s happened in classrooms. On the whole, though, the authors come down with the view (a view I’ve expressed myself) that although these laws may be constitutional, they are also undesirable, and that there are other ways to prevent some of the invidious effects of how CRT has been taught in the classroom.
Click on the screenshot to read:
The authors call these bills “divisive concepts bills” (DCBs) rather than CRT bills, as Lukianoff et al. (referred to as “I” in the text) say that DCB better expresses what the bills promote. They make 13 points about the bills. These are not reasons to oppose to bills, but rather things to consider when thinking about whether DCBs should be opposed. I’ll list the points (FIRE’s quotes are indented) and give my own take in type that is flush left.
Note that most of the interest in these bills centers on their use in public secondary schools rather than public universities, which have greater latitude for teaching what the faculty wants.
1. There are dozens of these bills, with possibly hundreds of amendments. And they all differ, making it hard to formulate a blanket opinion. As FIRE says:
Indeed, there are so many that it has made discussion of the bills difficult, with some being clearly unconstitutional, while a few others essentially reiterate existing racial discrimination law and seek to ban the kind of compelled ideological speech that is already prohibited under the First Amendment.
2. Laws that bar the teaching of certain concepts or materials relating to race and gender in higher education are almost always unconstitutional and are contrary to a free speech culture. According to the essay, this constitutes illegal “viewpoint discrimination”. But that applies in universities, and such discrimination is surely illegal. The crunch comes in secondary education (kindergarten through 12th grade), where the law is different.
3 Laws that bar the teaching of certain concepts or materials relating to race and gender in higher education are almost always unconstitutional and are contrary to a free speech culture. Why FIRE thinks DCBs shouldn’t be passed to apply to secondary schools is largely because the parts of CRT that liberal parents object to involve compelled speech, such as attesting that you have white privilege and are racist—speech that is already illegal. Teaching about the history of racism in America, which is why Republicans largely want these bills, isn’t wrong, but is an important part of our history. It’s the compelled thought and speech bits that are illegal. But not all bills mandate that.
4. K-12 curricula are not suddenly political. They have always been political. The point is that curricula are decided in a “democratic manner”, which, I suppose means that the authors think that legislatures have the right to mandate curricula. Two quotes:
. . . what will become the curriculum in most public K-12 schools is democratically decided by a combination of state legislatures, local school boards, and individual schools. As such, they represent the will of the people, as expressed in local and state elections. The individual schools cannot exceed the scope granted them by their school boards, which themselves derive power and authority from the state. There is a large distinction between the expansive role that higher education plays in our society and the restricted responsibilities incumbent upon an American elementary, middle, or high school. Higher education is a gigantic engine not merely for teaching but also for engaging in knowledge-expanding research. As such, it enjoys certain necessary privileges, such as academic freedom.
. . . Because K-12 attendance is compelled by the state and, at public schools, funded predominantly by local taxes, it is understandable that the substance of that teaching is subject to democratic oversight, through state legislatures and elected (or appointed by those who were elected) school boards. Legislators are expected to exercise oversight when citizens with children in the schools voice legitimate concerns about curricular matters.
5. Most of the divisive concepts bills aimed just at K-12 are probably constitutional, given that legislatures have a lot of power to decide curriculum. That doesn’t mean they are above criticism. Restricting teacher’s speech rights is much easier in secondary school than in colleges. Exceptions, as I’ve pointed out, include teaching ID or other forms of creationism, which are banned from public education by the First Amendment (creationism is considered a religious doctrine).
But, as FIRE points out, “legal” doesn’t mean “wise”, especially when the bills prohibit teaching things that make students “uncomfortable”. As the essay notes,
Rhode Island’s H6070 (tabled in committee) bans “race or sex scapegoating,” defined as, in part:
(ii) “Race or sex scapegoating” means assigning fault, blame, or bias to a race or sex, or to members of a race or sex because of their race or sex and similarly encompasses any claim that any particular race or sex is responsible for society’s ills.
This could be read as making basic statements of fact — for example, “In the United States, until 1865, the enslavement of black people by white people was widespread practice,” — unlawful if spoken by a teacher or administrator to a student.
This isn’t the only part likely to cause anxiety for well-intentioned teachers. Many of the bills prohibit “making part of any course” that “any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex.” It is not hard to imagine a student feeling uncomfortable by learning true facts about historical racism, presented reasonably, coming home distraught and telling their parents. Under these bills, parents may argue that the teacher has done something unlawful. This is always an issue when speech restrictions focus on concepts characterized by a subjective reaction like discomfort or guilt, without making absolutely clear that the regulation is targeting behavior intended to create that response in students. Indeed, my book with Jon Haidt, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” emphasized the dangers of focusing on impact over intent.
As Lukianoff et al. emphasize, these constitute “vague speech codes”, which could, and will, lead to both chilling of student speech and lawsuits.
6. Banning specific curricular materials like The 1619 Project in public K-12 schools, whether or not you agree with doing so, is within the power of the government in many states. I object to teaching the 1619 Project not on legal grounds, but on didactic grounds: it’s an ideological program that promulgates a view of history that is largely inaccurate. But banning its teaching is censorship. Its vetting should be done democratically, through legislatures, school boards, and schools themselves.
7. Misleading reporting has muddied the waters. One example are reports that the new Florida law mandates that students and professors must register their individual political affiliation. That simply wasn’t true: the bill mandates a “climate report” on “intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity” in schools which could be useful in seeing how many students feel that they aren’t able to speak freely. FIRE did oppose that bill, but for other reasons
8. Proponents and critics of the divisive concepts bills are largely talking past each other on the issue. This is, I think, the most important of all the points. I’ll quote Lukianoff et al. here;
Proponents of the bills see them as banning sessions where preteens are made to apologize for their race privilege, or where biracial children have been told that one parent probably physically abused the other due to their oppressor status. They look at sections in the bills that ban teaching mandatory guilt, genetic essentialism, and racial superiority and wonder — and assume — that opponents of the bills must be proponents of teaching those concepts.
On the other hand, critics of these bills see bans on the 1619 Project, and vague clauses that arguably reach any discussion of slavery, and interpret them as a highly politicized mandate to teach a certain view of history intended to soften the horrors of slavery and minimize historical racism. They see those who support such laws as wanting children to learn a jingoistic and propagandized version of history. While some on each side are undoubtedly acting in bad faith, the majority are motivated by sincere and valid concerns, and both proponents and opponents are motivated to ignore the valid points of their opposition.
Each side’s distorted impression of the goals of the other side, and of what’s actually in the bills, has been an unfortunate side effect of the media coverage. Those listening to left-leaning outlets and pundits could be forgiven for thinking that the bills outright ban discussion of slavery. Those listening to right-leaning outlets and pundits could be forgiven for having no idea of the breadth and vagueness of a lot of the clauses in these bills, and the chilling effect they may create with teachers making good faith attempts to comply. The media coverage of these bills has been largely lacking in deep-dives into the actual text of the bills, instead relying on broad characterizations of their intent and the motivations behind those introducing them.
As one example, South Carolina’s bill prohibits schools from promoting things like the superiority of one race over another or that an individual bears responsibility “for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex.” The authors point out that these things are already prohibited by laws on racial discrimination and harassment.
And yet the termites continue to dine, as in these examples of real things that happened in school, collected by Bonnie Snyder:
- A biracial high school student in Las Vegas was allegedly singled out in class for his appearance and called derogatory names by his teacher. In a lawsuit, the student’s family alleges he was labelled an oppressor, told denying that status was “internalized privilege,” and told he needed to “unlearn” the Judeo-Christian principles imparted by his mother. When he refused to complete certain “identity confession” assignments, the lawsuit claims, the school gave him a failing grade. He has had to attend counseling.
- Third grade students in California were forced to analyze their racial and other “identities,” rank themselves according to their supposed “power and privilege,” and were informed that those in the “dominant” culture categories created and continue to maintain this culture to uphold power.
- Parents in North Carolina allege that middle school students were forced to stand up in class and apologize to other students for their “privilege.”
- Buffalo public schools teach students that all white people perpetuate systemic racism and are guilty of implicit racial bias.
- Elementary children at the Fieldston School in Manhattan were sorted by race for mandatory classroom exercises.
These exercises are indeed illegal, and some of the proponents of the new bills are worried by stuff like this. They are right to do so, especially because ascertaining that these things happened might be difficult if children’s speech is chilled. I have no doubt that much of this stuff goes on now and yet is unreported.
9. Legislation is not the only way to address the aforementioned concerns. First of all, many of the behaviors prohibited by the new bills are already illegal. This could be remedied with either lawsuits or things like issuing the “warning letters” that are a specialty of FIRE. The other ways are less convincing, involving vague notions of “broader reform with a positive vision and lots of creative thinking and experimentation.” Granted, it wasn’t this article’s brief to outline specific reforms, but rather to give us thinking and talking points. Still, if you don’t think the bills are a good idea, but still shouldn’t be banned in general, you need to figure out a way to eliminate their invidious effects.
10. Critical race theory isn’t a perfect term for the problematic behavior these bills are trying to address. The authors note that the academic version of CRT, as adumbrated by scholars like Kimberlé Crenshaw and Derrick Bell, isn’t what is being prohibited. Instead, it is the more authoritarian versions of anti-racism, as spread by people like Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. The authors consider variants of the latter ideas to be “antiliberal.”
11. The California ethnic studies curriculum helps demonstrate what the proponents of these bills are afraid of. I won’t go into detail here, but the authors consider the California curriculum anti-Semitic. Their essay gives examples.
12. What is the deeper cause of this battle? A breakdown in societal trust and trust in expertise, particularly along partisan lines. One quote from the essay:
While trying to explain the situation in a forthcoming interview with Michael Moynihan at VICE, I realized that at the core of what’s going on is a fundamental lack of societal trust and the lack of trust in expertise. Many parents, even many on the left, don’t necessarily trust K-12 teachers to do the right thing on their own. They believe that without new laws, rather than educating about certain historical facts, teachers will be indoctrinating their children into a bleak worldview.
The authors see no quick fix for this problem. Indeed, it is the reason why we have so much vaccination resistance and opposition to evolution in the U.S.!
Finally,
13. There are going to be lots of lawsuits. That’s for sure!
The authors’ conclusion, with which I again agree, is that “Sometimes the principled thing will make nobody happy.” Apparently the “principled thing” espoused by Lukianoff et al. is that teaching bans are unconstitutional for higher education, but often are not unconstitutional in secondary schools, so they can’t be dismissed or attacked as illegal. Here’s how the authors end:
The reality is, as usual, complicated. Proponents of these bills need to realize that they can’t legislate these ideas out of existence, and that the more egregious bills are not only unconstitutional and thus totally futile, but throw fuel on an already raging culture war fire. Opponents of these bills need to read the bills and be honest about what’s actually in them and recognize that their opponents are motivated by something other than a desire to hide the true history of slavery. It is my hope that, wherever you lie on this issue, this article has given you a greater understanding of the opposing side. And if not, you’re welcome to join those yelling at me across both sides of the aisle!
I’m not yelling, as these are all good points. It’s worth reading the piece and cogitating before you take a stand on the anti-CRT (or anti-DCB) bills.
Although I’m against the anti-CRT bills, for the reasons you state, I doubt whether they’ll make much difference in how this issue sorts out. As you and the article point out, states are generally empowered to determine curricula used in K-12 teaching anyway. The laws are unnecessary. It seems unlikely they’d ever be used to prosecute anyone as the subject is too subjective and there are so many parties involved. Any actual teaching issue would be dealt with, fairly or unfairly, at the local level the usual way, with teachers, their unions, parents, students, school boards, etc. all weighing in.
Although there will be the usual partisan chaos surrounding this issue, it will get litigated. Those of us that fear the excesses of CRT should probably welcome the attention to this issue. Perhaps it will stop the slow creep of CRT’s bad ideas from the Woke bullies in colleges and still improve the teaching of history by adding more facts and realism to how it deals with racial issues. It’s going to be a messy battle though.
Please note that point number 3 should read:
3. Students’ rights to free expression and freedom of conscience should be the first priority in the K-12 context, and public K-12 students should be afforded greater recognition of their First Amendment rights.
Pertinent is Matt Taibbi’s latest on his Substack:
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/is-critical-race-theory-the-wrong
If you can ban CRT by statute, what’s next? Banning the teaching of Marxism? Of socialism? Of Hayek’s free-market economics? Of all things political? (I first read Marx & Engels’s The Communist Manifesto in college, in a political science course, Comparative Government: USSR — back when the fall of the Berlin Wall, not to mention the Iron Curtain itself, was still a gleam in the eye of dead JFK’s jelly donut. 🙂 )
Now, there’s a spectre haunting
EuropeUS public education — the spectre ofCommunismCRT. Teachers of all persuasions, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!In general terms, an emphatic “no,” teaching CRT should not be banned.
But, it should be banned from some specific venues. Just like teaching creationism is. Teaching CRT in sociology classes and philosophy classes, should be fine. Even a specific CRT class, as long as it was an elective, is fine. However, teaching CRT should be banned from literature classes, art classes, music classes, economics classes, shop classes, STEM classes, gym classes, and any other classes that don’t have anything to do with teaching sociology.
I agree. To me it seems ok to show it as an idea that some people believe, but the problem is that is all over. I see it a little bit like brain washing.
Stop calling it a theory!
Call it what it is: Critical Racist Ideology.
And education and educators ought to be politically neutral. It’s not the job of an educator to teach kids what to think, only encourage them TO think.
Perfect!
Exactly. A teacher’s job is to teach kids HOW to think NOT what to think.
The issue with teaching CRT as it is understood is the claim that it is not just one of many lenses or frameworks, but rather the very ether that everything else can be properly understood. So it is the approach that matters, and once you tune the approach of CRT, it becomes another tool of analysis, with a set of strengths and weaknesses that are constantly assessed within a context and either adjusted or discarded as the evidence for its predictive powers comes in.
Marxism is also a lens, and some lenses are better than others, and some are complete junk. I would have no issue with CRT if its predictive powers were by far superior to using lenses of class, luck, genes, social media, diet, religion, intersectionality, feminism, capitalism or classic game theory, or a combination of many. But CRT does not – it’s main (or excessively dominant) predictive claim is that but for racism, all social standings would be equal.
I read somewhere the claim that racism is the unintended consequence of social groups – a very mild us/them promotes social cohesion and cooperation in group. Go Italy!!
The five examples of preposterous “anti-racism” racism listed in section 8 represent something distinct from academic CRT. They reflect the presence of nitwits in the school system, in these instances nitwits under the influence of memes and buzzwords that grew out of CRT. The nitwit-in-education problem requires something other than the legislation under discussion here. What it requires is a change in the system of hiring teachers: requirement for knowledge of subject matter, rather than training in the Schools of Education buzzword mills, which currently hold monopoly power over the credentialing of teachers.
I agree, but I must ask: what in CRT actually prevents such nitwit interpretations? CRT is pretty open-ended and general, and asks one to “question,” as Delgado and Stefancic state, “the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.” [Sorry, Jerry, I know you’ve now heard this from me at least three times in different pages.]
CRT doesn’t really provide any more guidance as to how this post-modernist, deconstructionist “questioning” should go any more than the Bible give a consistent message on morality, marriage, or diet. In a college setting there are more controls (in the form of opinionated and passionate adult students), but with the power differential in K-12 education, teachers can and apparently are becoming prone to fallacies.
Applying the general to the specific (if there is systemic racism that means every white person must be equally racist and culpable); neo-binary thinking (if you’re mixed race who “presents as white” you’re white and culpable, and if you “present” as something else you should not engage in certain activities, think certain opinions, etc.); not to mention the whole ad hominem mistake of group racial guilt in the first place, and essentially giving schools the power to determine race (as the government did during red-lining, but for a “good purpose”!). I just don’t see how, giving humanity’s propensity to fall into simplistic modes of thought resembling the so-called dominant modes of thought but overcompensating on the “other side,” especially given the moral panic/lives-are-at-stake hyperbole surrounding this sudden push.
Yes, CRT is open to interpretation – so much so that people’s brains can fall out.
Just at the time when racism in America in all its glory is front and center in our politics. A good and proper education for many is mostly a thought. The slight of hand used during the Constitutional Convention has been replaced by the slap in the face in many states. Will the democrats have the onions to put this thing in its place or will Jim Crow be the new text book in many states. None of the laws actually uses words that specifically state the racism but neither did the Constitution.
But the complicating your question is, a lot of these bills are NOT “anti-CRT” bills, officially.
So what are they then?
Sorry – I was trying to make a line break, not submit my comment. Take the Idaho Law, for example: it does not simply “ban CRT” but “tenets…often found in ‘critical race theory,'” and then specifies:
(i) That any sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national
35 origin is inherently superior or inferior;
36 (ii) That individuals should be adversely treated on the basis of
37 their sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin;
38 or
39 (iii) That individuals, by virtue of sex, race, ethnicity, reli
40 gion, color, or national origin, are inherently responsible for
41 actions committed in the past by other members of the same sex,
42 race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin.
2
1 (b) No distinction or classification of students shall be made on ac
2 count of race or color.
3 (c) No course of instruction or unit of study directing or otherwise
4 compelling students to personally affirm, adopt, or adhere to any of the
5 tenets identified in paragraph (a) of this subsection shall be used or
6 introduced in any institution of higher education, any school district,
7 or any public school, including a public charter school.
You can read the law here: https://legislature.idaho.gov/wp-content/uploads/sessioninfo/2021/legislation/H0377.pdf
I cannot object to the language of the law here.
This doesn’t sound so bad but that’s only Idaho. Are the other states’ laws similar? Even with this ID law, it hardly seems necessary for it to exist.
The mere presence of a law like this, regardless of what it says, invites abuse. Some overly zealous prosecutor can find some way to spin words like this to criminalize behavior. When you say you don’t object to the language, I suspect you are assuming a reasonable interpretation of the words. It’s pretty easy to imagine an unreasonable interpretation being used in practice. This is the problem with attempts to legislate stuff like this.
I’m not sure Rhode Island has passed their law yet but here it is: http://webserver.rilin.state.ri.us/BillText/BillText21/HouseText21/H6070.pdf
This law gets even more specific.
Suddenly I cannot find the actual language of the Texas bill, which was passed,, but it’s similiar.j(Actually, I’m concerned about what seems to be disappearing in my online searches.)
I think people are going to be surprised if they think these efforts will not survive a court challenge, because the media is now conflating these bills with Critical Race Theory in the same way it claims “conservatives” (which I am not) are conflating it with diversity and inclusion education. I think these bills are merely restating the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
I looked at a few other states and found very similar language (which is the usual case for these types of laws.
There is a difference between teaching a student about a theory and indoctrinating that same student with that theory.
Exactly.
YES, it ABSOLUTELY should be banned. All it is doing is teaching people to hate each other. Nothing good can ever come from CRT, and in fact, it is going to make the world a much more dangerous place for all.
Yes, obviously it has been teaching you so much. Nothing good could come from learning.
But, as FIRE points out, “legal” doesn’t mean “wise”, especially when the bills prohibit teaching things that make students “uncomfortable”.
But the referenced bills don’t prohibit that. The FIRE essay is cited:
It is utterly ridiculous to think that any reasonable judge would agree that prohibiting teaching that a student “should feel discomfort, guilt…on account of his or her race” also prohibits teaching facts that result in students feeling discomfort or guilt. This same disingenuous approach was used in a New York Times editorial by David French and others which said:
Actually however, Tennessee SB 0623 says that schools “shall not include or promote the following concepts…(6) An individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or another form of psychological distress solely because of the individual’s race or sex…”
The description in the editorial is simply false. It doesn’t ban teaching that could lead an individual to feel discomfort. It bans teaching students that they should feel discomfort because of their race. I don’t say that the proposed laws have no defects, but what good does it do their cause if the critics lose their credibility with these types of statement?
Obviously students will take advantage of a ban on teachers causing them discomfort. All they have to do is claim that they were hurt because of their race, color, or national origin. It’s a license for any non-white student to complain about virtually anything. If the teacher objects, they’ll get an earful about how they shouldn’t dare to contradict the lived experience of a delicate POC student. Even if the student’s complaint is eventually rejected, they will have achieved the intended disruption. Teachers are already deep in Hell. This will take them down a couple more levels. Would a smart person really want to be a teacher?
Six items were mentioned in the North Carolina law that was cited in the FIRE essay. For example: “(5) An individual, solely 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.” David French says that there are already laws on the books that cover this. Take a look at the referenced lawsuit filed in Nevada. One of the laws they cite is 2 U.S.C § 2000d: “No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” So somebody has to hire lawyers to file a 48 page lawsuit and conduct an entire trial so that a jury can agree that item (5) above is prohibited by § 2000d. Wouldn’t it be a lot easier to expressly prohibit item (5)? Wouldn’t it greatly reduce the difficulty and the expense of proving violations? What is the benefit of resorting to a much more general anti-discrimination statute?
It is not clear what good banning CRT will do. It is clearly the ideology of American political elites, MSM journalists, corporations and American universities. Assuming these laws make it out of the courts, how can you prevent “CRT” smuggling when the power elite wants to shove it down everyone’s throat? At best, they pull back temporarily and then go full bore again until popular resistance is crushed. The American majority stills prefers color blindness (witness the banning of affirmative action in California despite billionaire and corporate dollars on the other side), but 30 years of relentless propaganda will undoubtedly affect those preferences.
It is impossible to ban something without being able to accurately define what it is. Are you suggesting that having students think critically about American History – warts and all – should be banned?
I view CRT as being cousin to Intelligent Design and Creation Science. It’s ridiculous to think that this discussion should even need to exist
In order for something to exist, it has to be defined.
I don’t think banning something like CRT is going to be super effective. They can always stick a different label onto the same material.
This does seem to be a case where a group has come up with a way to use our own principles to attempt to destroy us.
Yes, I think the goal is destruction. They are trying to teach kids to hate each other and their country, which will probably not make things better for anyone.
The big question for me is why US public school teachers are so committed to starting a race war or smashing western civilization. From my basic web research, it appears that the vast majority of those teachers are White women in their 40s.
When I talk to socialists, I often ask them to describe their life as they imagine it to be after the revolution. They generally seem to really believe that in the new socialist state, their special, individual talents will be recognized, and they will find themselves on the central committee or made commissar. Belief in such things tells me that they have not spent much time studying the history of the movement they support, and certainly have never lived under that system.
As for the teachers, I don’t see their logic at all.
I strongly believe it should be stopped, but not by banning some buzzwords. The problem needs careful and deep analysis of exactly why they want to teach these things to our kids, and exactly who is driving that agenda. Once the facts of the issue are thoroughly understood, we need to find intelligent, non partisan experts to dismantle what the CRT/woke people have started to construct.
I spent the day at the Pacific War Museum. I am not a big believer in that or most wars, but I admire tremendously the sense of duty and sacrifice that was so common among our people fighting in the Pacific theater.
How would the war have progressed if some measurable percentage of new soldiers, sailors and marines showed up at the induction center believing that the US are always the bad guys?
You can admire ‘the sense of duty and sacrifice’ and yet still acknowledge that during the Pacific War the Japanese were portrayed as ‘Apes’, ‘Slant Eyes’ etc. in order to dehumanize them and make killing them easier; the same thing happened in Vietnam. By the same token, the Japanese portrayed Americans as ‘fat capitalists parasites, etc.’
For an excellent history on this check out John Dower’s ‘War Without Mercy’
And in case I am accused of bias, may I add that the Japanese did the same to the Chinese in such horrific atrocities as the ‘Rape of Nanking’
You make it sound like it was a governmental decision to call our enemies nasty names. As far as I know, this happens organically and has probably been going on since man started fighting and talking at the same time.
You can draw a direct line between the federal decision to forcibly remove Japanese Americans from their homes in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor, to the dehumanization of our enemies. I am not sure what you mean by ‘organically’… I take it to mean that people have been killing people for generations, and that is just how it is? Due to the powerful taboo against killing one’s fellow human beings, it is not accident that soldiers, in order to be effective killers have to be programmed to dehumanize their enemy….as we should know only too well, people have to be indoctrinated to hate and dehumanize in order to kill….otherwise, what would be the point of armies and wars?
“I am not sure what you mean by ‘organically’… I take it to mean that people have been killing people for generations, and that is just how it is?”
I don’t know how you get that from what I wrote. I’m talking about people using nasty names to refer to their enemy in a war, not the decision to go to war.
It isn’t necessary to program soldiers to dehumanize the enemy. It happens naturally. The military leaders aren’t going to go out of their way to humanize the enemy of course. They may also discourage humanizing activities. If I recall, there was a soccer game held between German and English soldiers in WWI during a brief ceasefire. The generals weren’t too happy about that, probably because it might lead the soldiers to humanize their enemy and lessen their ability to fight.
I don’t think banning something like CRT is going to be super effective. They can always stick a different label onto the same material.
But look, if we explicitly ban teaching that an individual, solely by virtue of his race, is inherently racist, that’s pretty hard to get around. We already have laws banning discrimination on the basis of race and people are able to claim that teaching the above is not a violation.
Once the facts of the issue are thoroughly understood, we need to find intelligent, non partisan experts to dismantle what the CRT/woke people have started to construct.
So they should just go ahead and teach these things to our kids for a couple of years and then we can come around and undo it later?
Using laws to ban ideas, even ones that sound good, is a bad idea. Why should we bet that such a law won’t be abused in some way by a future badly intentioned enforcer?
Using laws to ban ideas, even ones that sound good, is a bad idea.
Is it a bad idea to prohibit grade schools from teaching students that they should adopt KKK ideology? We have laws on the books that prohibit discrimination on the basis of race. Is it a bad idea to prohibit teaching students that they should discriminate on the basis of race? What is the point you are trying to make?
Why should we bet that such a law won’t be abused in some way by a future badly intentioned enforcer?
You are making an argument against any written laws whatsoever. The English language cannot be interpreted in an infinite number of ways, and judges are there to interpret laws accurately. If we don’t want kids to be taught that an individual, solely by virtue of his race, can be inherently racist then what’s wrong with a law that says that? Why should we instead rely on a law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of race and hope that this gets interpreted to prohibit the teaching that we actually want to address?
“Is it a bad idea to prohibit grade schools from teaching students that they should adopt KKK ideology?”
It’s a bad idea to create a law to do this because ideology is something that is difficult to interpret. While we do have judges and juries to interpret the law, this is more difficult when the criteria for breaking the law is expressing an idea. When determining what to teach, we should defer to educators with review by school boards, students, teachers. We shouldn’t need laws to make this happen. We don’t seem to need a law to prevent the teaching of murder as a conflict resolution method, for example. It’s just a bad idea that doesn’t get taught. If someone tried to teach it, we should have mechanisms to remove them. They shouldn’t have to be criminally prosecuted and sent to jail.
“You are making an argument against any written laws whatsoever.”
No I’m not. That would be ridiculous.
We do have anti-discrimination laws, but they are sometimes hard to judge. Take a recent event when someone murdered a bunch of nail salon employees who happened to mostly be Asians. The question was whether it was a hate crime. It’s hard to tell as many nail salons are run by Asians and the perpetrator did kill some non-Asians. IMHO, it’s best to stick with outlawing crimes that don’t involve reading someone’s mind.
Suppose we discover that a school is teaching that the entire universe came into existence in the year 4004 B.C. over the course of six days. We have determined that teaching this in a science class is a “bad idea” and we want to stop them from doing it. We can’t stop them unless there is law on the books that this is not to be taught, and some would argue in favor of such a law but you apparently would say:
When determining what to teach, we should defer to educators with review by school boards, students, teachers. We shouldn’t need laws to make this happen. … It’s just a bad idea that doesn’t get taught. If someone tried to teach it, we should have mechanisms to remove them.
It sound like you want to defer to the educators but we know that educators, for political or religious reasons, sometimes teach things that we don’t want them to teach, and what “mechanism” is there to control them except for an explicit and binding statement of what is not to be taught?
It’s a bad idea to create a law to do this because ideology is something that is difficult to interpret.
Is that true for my example above? Does this involve ideology that is difficult to interpret, or is it simply a matter of specifying that this is not to be taught in science classes? And suppose we find a school teaching that certain individuals, solely by virtue of their race, are inherently racist. If we want them to stop teaching this, what is the ideological or interpretational difficulty in simply specifying what is not to be taught as fact?
IMHO, it’s best to stick with outlawing crimes that don’t involve reading someone’s mind.
But we’re not trying to read anybody’s mind. We don’t care what the teacher is thinking. We just want to make sure that he or she does not teach that certain individuals, solely by virtue of their race, are inherently racist.
You talk about “banning ideas” as if this is an issue of freedom of speech and that it is somehow “wrong” to be banning ideas. In the first place, freedom of speech protects citizens from government, not government from citizens, and here the speaker is the government. We are only talking about government schools here, and what they mandate should be taught to public school children who are required to be in attendance. The government does not have free speech rights and nobody is preventing any teacher from asserting, outside of class, whatever he or she wishes. These laws are intended to prevent indoctrination of school children through the power of the state, and those who liken it to government control over speech generally must know better. The public school classroom is not the “marketplace of ideas” in which teachers have a first amendment right to teach students that certain races are inherently racist, or whatever else they happen to believe. The curriculum is controlled.
You can always come up with an exaggerated example where our disgust for what’s taught is overwhelming and your law would be easy to interpret. Do you think you can word laws that would cover everything that you’d prefer not to be taught? Of course not. If you try, you will eventually come up with a law that effectively says thou shalt not teach anything that Sean Wood doesn’t like. And therein lies the problem. Any law that is general enough to cover anything you’re likely to object to will be so vague that it’s liable to be willfully misinterpreted. You can keep adding laws to cover new cases but that doesn’t scale well.
Instead, you get educators to come up with an approved curriculum, create a review board to monitor its effectiveness and make adjustments, and have the public be able to elect and dismiss board members. That’s pretty much what most school districts do now, as far as I know.
“You talk about “banning ideas” as if this is an issue of freedom of speech and that it is somehow “wrong” to be banning ideas.”
I didn’t say anything about freedom of speech. I said it was a bad idea to be banning ideas. I did not say you should be jailed for suggesting it.
Any law that is general enough to cover anything you’re likely to object to will be so vague that it’s liable to be willfully misinterpreted.
That’s the trouble with the current situation. We have a law that says “Don’t discriminate on the basis of race,” and people like David French are saying that we should just use such laws as all-purpose solutions to any objectionable teaching of a racial nature. I don’t advocate that at all.
You can keep adding laws to cover new cases but that doesn’t scale well.
I don’t know what “scale well” means. What specific problem do you see with a law that says that in public schools teachers will not teach, as truth, any of the following? Are they difficult to interpret? They don’t cover everything but they cover a substantial amount:
Instead, you get educators to come up with an approved curriculum, create a review board to monitor its effectiveness and make adjustments, and have the public be able to elect and dismiss board members.
Is your point that that teaching as truth the above bullet points might be valid in some circumstances so it should be left to local school boards and communities? Should we also eliminate the law forbidding discrimination on the basis of race and leave that up to local communities?
I am not actually a fan of deciding education on a local basis, though that is how it’s done in the US. It seems to be terribly inefficient. It also results in local school boards being able to inject terrible stuff into their curricula just because the voters in the district weren’t paying attention. I also doubt that in this modern age that what we need to teach kids needs to vary much across the country. On the other hand, it is good that districts can experiment with new teaching techniques and we can compare them nationally, though I suspect that these benefits are largely theoretical.
I am not suggesting that we eliminate the laws forbidding racial discrimination. You seem to insist in reading that into what I said. What I am saying is that it is the kind of law we should only introduce in the most dire circumstances. It should not be used as a model for new laws banning all kinds of other supposedly objectionable ways of thinking. If you are suggesting that laws forbidding racial discrimination have worked so well that we should consider new laws that ban other things, I’m against that.
I don’t view the racial discrimination laws in such a positive light as you apparently do. Yes, I guess we have to have them but they haven’t worked all that well. In part, CRT is a response to that observation. CRT’s defenders are saying that we have all these laws banning racism but it still persists. Time to do something else. I agree that we haven’t eliminated racism as fast or thoroughly as we’d like but CRT is not the answer for reasons well-discussed on this website.
Considering just the six bullet points I listed above, are you in favor of a state-wide rule that teaching these in public schools to school children as fact should be prohibited? You would say ‘no’ if you could imagine a scenario in which any of these things should be taught. You would say ‘Leave it up to the experts’ if it is not clear to you that there is no valid reason for public schools to be teaching these things as fact.
K-12 teachers tend to be compliant. If the state superintendent or a school superintendent requires them to teach a particular concept, most teachers will attempt to comply. If they are told to use materials that suggest certain exercises, they tend to use the materials as provided. They may not have a clue that certain ways of instructing students might be illegal, they follow the workbook as provided by their district. If folks don’t want children to be race shamed, making that prohibition explicit is legitimate and necessary. If it isn’t clearly prohibited, as surely as the sun will rise in the East tomorrow, many teachers will just follow the suggested way to teach the material, discriminatory or not. And, such a prohibition will give good teachers ammunition to withstand unconstitutional demands from motivated state and local educational and political leaders. No child should be race shamed or deliberately placed into racially segregated groups. Whatever it takes to close down that egregiously racist behavior is probably legitimate.
I know of several cases where students have been deliberately humiliated in front of the class by physical education teachers. Does this imply that there should be a law forbidding the teaching of physical education?
Or better procedures to identify and weed out bad apples?
I don’t think I have ever heard of fat people banding together and committing acts of terrorism in the name of the creation of a fat homeland. However, there are groups like the Tamil Tigers or the Irish Republican Army, you have a long history of racial separatists (Black and white) in America, you have lots of ethnic civil wars in post-colonial countries, not to mention what has happened to the Armenians, the Jews, the Tutsi, Bosnian Muslims, etc. etc.
If you believe that one group will always “unconsciously” oppress the other group, then the only true solution can be that the groups separate and form separate nations, otherwise the oppression will never end. There will never be a big enough crutch to actually bring about equality of outcome, and there will never be long-term political support for it. America has already spent more promoting civil rights and racial equality than it ever spent on any war, and a huge fraction of the economy is spent supporting a giant federal bureaucracy and compliance with laws, regulations and executive orders intended to stamp out racism and end racial inequalities [which exists in every multiethnic society in the world, whether a country has any significant population from Europe or has even been a European colony]. Affirmative Action and Political Correctness are already universally despised by proles of all races, religions, and nationalities, its a politically unpopular elite project. The idea that Americans should be taught to identify themselves on “race” (“race” because it includes Arabs and Hispanics which are linguistic not ancestral populations), taught that all inter-“racial” inequality is the result of one evil “racial” group (whites today, but it could be Jews tomorrow if somebody seeks a more unified working class base) and then attribute the evil not to conscious bias from that group (which sounds like an empirically testable hypothesis) but some kind of “unconscious” or miasmic force field emitted from that group (which is not falsifiable but creedal) is inculcating the ideological basis for ethnic separatist movements. If it works, you get Yugoslavia, if it fails, then the elites will come crashing down with it.
Put simply, criticism of ‘CRT’ (whatever that is), has become so broad as to prohibit any teacher from daring to have his students think critically about American History…..
so broad as to prohibit any teacher from daring to have his students think critically about American History
That’s absurd. Most of the prohibitions have no such effect. Take, for example, one that prohibits teaching that:
This doesn’t prohibit a discussion of whether an individual should bear such responsibility, or an examination of the reasoning of groups who assert that they should. It prohibits only teaching that they should. In fact, describe how prohibiting the teaching of any of the following could prevent anybody from thinking critically:
I will take your points individually:
1. A critical examination of American History does not stipulate that one race is inherently superior to another. On the other hand, how do you teach about the Civil War without showing that the Confederacy was built on the idea of white supremacy? Now, that’s absurd.
2. I am a white, middle-aged immigrant from England. I can be aware of, and acknowledge that racist policies were fundamental to the British Empire, as they were to the founding of the United States. To pretend otherwise is to be absurdly historic in one’s thinking.
3. Surely, this goes without saying?
4. Again, no argument from me.
5. An absurd proposition, and one I hope you do not attribute to me?
Finally: “An individual, solely…….etc.” Would you hold as responsible the post World War 2 generation of Germans for the crimes of the Nazis? Of course you would not. However, I would hope you could agree that successive generations of post World War Two Germans should be taught about the horrendous crimes there forbears were responsible for, whether or not it made them ‘feel bad’. So it goes with the Confederacy, slavery, etc.
Correction: #2 should read ‘ahistoric’.
how do you teach about the Civil War without showing that the Confederacy was built on the idea of white supremacy?
Teaching that there were (and are) people who believe in white supremacy is different from teaching that one race is superior to another. The former tells students what some people believed about racial superiority. The latter tells them what they should believe about it.
racist policies were fundamental to the British Empire, as they were to the founding of the United States.
To acknowledge this is to acknowledge reality. But it is one thing to teach that racist doctrines have greatly influenced history. It is quite a different thing to teach that any individual, solely by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist. Is the difference not clear to you?
3. Surely, this goes without saying?
4. Again, no argument from me.
5. An absurd proposition, and one I hope you do not attribute to me?
Then am I correct in assuming that you have no objection to expressly prohibiting the teaching of these things to school children? These were all listed in Trump’s Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping as “divisive concepts” that were prohibited from being incorporated in training material taught to federal employees. The Executive Order was rescinded by Biden. Was Biden correct in doing this?
However, I would hope you could agree that successive generations of post World War Two Germans should be taught about the horrendous crimes there forbears were responsible for, whether or not it made them ‘feel bad’.
Of course, but what is prohibited is teaching that any person, solely by virtue of his or her race, should ‘feel bad’. People are only responsible for what they have done, not for what other people have done, and they certainly do not inherit blame by being of the same race as the perpetrators of an evil.
The Civil War had nothing to do with “White Supremacy”. Lincoln in the Lincoln Douglas debates states he was a White Supremacist. The original plan was to free the slaves and send them to Central America to get them out of America.
Slavery had little to do with “White Supremacy”. Africans sold other Africans to the Arabs and then the Portuguese. They were not “White Supremacists”, they just had domestic enemies to dispose of or they were looking for currency. Slavery was the norm historically, and the idea of abolitionism only got kicking late in the 18th Century in England post-industrial revolution.
“White Supremacy” was a set of political actions undertaken by whites in the South after the Civil War to enforce of system of political disenfranchisement and segregation in public spaces. Conveniently, its politically non-existent (there are more anarcho-syndicalists). There are white separatists who get called “White Supremacists” but they favor the same solution that Black separatists do, and sometimes get invited to Madison Square Garden by them, like Nation of Islam and the American Nazi Party folks. They are not particularly opposed to CRT or “white privilege” as it is a tool for inculcating racial resentment by whites, and “white privilege” is simply reworked Anti-Semitism, so whites indoctrinated by CRT are actually half way on the path to Neo-Nazism, just teach them to blame the Jews and not the whites (“whites” don’t control the media Johnny).
White separatism just requires the oil and water-type argument. A system of white supremacy like in the South is based on racial paternalism. It viewed itself as benign “help” in its ideological justification, Blacks weren’t ready to vote, Blacks in white schools would detract from education because of behavior problems and poor scholarship, etc. However, liberals, while not couching it in terms of “inferiority” when they talk about “victimhood” and they talk about minorities as lacking agency are, of course, engaging in the same kind of arguments that were used to justify slavery and for restricting voting rights. All you are arguing is that Blacks are inferior and their inferiority was caused by white people, so white people have an obligation to “help” Blacks and accept bad behavior by Blacks the same way you are supposed to tolerate bad behavior from children. After all, its not very far from arguing that because of Group X’s debility that they should not be held to the same standards as everyone else to go to because of Group X’s debility that they should not be permitted to vote, or perhaps their white savior should vote as their proxy.
Kendi seems to believe that any group difference is proof of inferiority, and so you either take away everyone’s individual rights and set up a totalitarian-system to make all groups equal, or you are a racist (because difference = inferiority, Blacks are inferior to whites if they are under-represented in accounting in Kendi land). Because difference = inferiority, either difference is caused by the oppressor race, or you believe that one race is inferior to another, e.g. your a racist.
By Kendi’s logic, whites are clearly inferior to Asian-Americans (test scores, crime rates, etc.), so its not clear why we aren’t fighting Asian Supremacy (oh, wait, that wouldn’t align with the Democratic Party’s racial politics).
People are individuals, and they have different abilities and limitations regardless of what ancestral population they are descended from. No two people are the same, and no two groups of people have ever been identical in their abilities and achievements at the same time in the history of the world. That doesn’t make one group inferior or one group superior. It doesn’t mean that one group can’t oppress another group, or render assistance to another group. Further, it doesn’t mean that a group can’t screw itself on its own either. This stuff is truly disgusting.
Bravo Sean Wood.
Proponents of these bills need to realize that they can’t legislate these ideas out of existence
Right, but they can keep their children from being indoctrinated with them in school.
Many are so vague that they arguably forbid teaching about slavery or racism at all, even uncontroversial and anodyne statements of historical fact. Rhode Island’s H6070 (tabled in committee) bans “race or sex scapegoating,” defined as, in part:
Who is being assigned blame by this on account of his or her race? Is it the white people until 1865 who enslaved black people? To the extent that this sentence does assign blame on the basis of race that is something that should not be taught. There were many white people at that time who did not enslave anybody and who opposed slavery. But more importantly, if the statement says that the blame is attributable to a race rather than to individuals then it is teaching falsehood. If that blame was attributable to a race then it is still attributable to that race, since the same race is in existence. Is racial guilt to be taught in schools?
I think that most legislation of this type is trying to prevent the assigning of blame to people today on account of their race. Who thinks that this should not be prevented, or that it should only be prevented by filing lawsuits in federal court?
It is no secret why the moral panic surrounding ‘CRT’ is originating in states controlled by Republicans…moral panic, endless culture wars, deflection from a total absence of policy that will actually help working and middle class people is all they have….aside from shoveling tax breaks to the one percent and their donor class, it is all they have…beside voter suppression as a response to non existent ‘voter fraud’.
All the froth/hyperventilating on CRT would be better spent examining how and why, on January 6, a coup against the United States came into being and almost succeeded.
This comes perilously close to a Roolz violation. Please do not tell us what we should be concerned about, or about how we should spend our time. Got it?
Rules?
Read “Da Roolz (Commenting guidelines)” on the left sidebar or here.
If the Confederacy was not an entity built on the belief of ‘White Supremacy’, then what was it? It is a fallacy to propose that the term ‘White Supremacy’ loses its relevance when applied to the Civil War, simply because the term only gained currency in the late 19th, early 20th century. The reason for the existence of the Confederacy was built on the belief that the white man is inherently superior to the black man (not ‘states rights’, etc.). If that is not ‘White Supremacy’, then what is it?