I like Patrick Frey, better known online as Patterico, even if we tend to disagree about many things. But we did agree on two things, that the current spate of laws being proposed and enacted to prohibit the teaching of critical race theories in K-12 public schools are bad laws, poorly written, vague and overbroad, often unconstitutional and will wreak havoc on both education and law.
Law is hard, and expressing in the blunt instrument of words what you’re trying to accomplish is hard when the goal is simple and straightforward is often too difficult to do. Expressing something as ephemeral as a prohibited concept is likely impossible. But at the same time, both Patrick and I agree that indoctrinating students into an array of CRT, Kendian anti-racist curricula, dumbing down education to accommodate excuses for disparate outcomes, is a legitimate problem that needs to be addressed.
The laws prohibit teaching CRT, but CRT isn’t really the problem. It’s become a catch-all, mislabeled in large part although somewhat understandably, for what has become a point of attack against progressive shifts in educational theory and curriculum shifts. Was America founded upon universal principles of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, or was it founded to be a racist nation dedicated to maintaining slavery, but wrapped up in lies perpetrated by slaveowners to cover their true purpose of subjugation of black people? Has America progressed since then or are we just pretending that our society is neutral while imposing whatever version of Jim Crow we’re on at this point?
It’s hard to explain critical race theory, which is grounded in viewing everything through the lens of race. This is one of the reasons why it has served so well as a right-wing bogeyman, on the one hand, and a rallying cry for progressives on the other.
In a recent piece in The Week, Damon Linker criticized the left for being what he called “anti-anti-critical race theory,” sidestepping legitimate objections to what he described as a “pernicious” phenomenon.
Parents protesting critical race theory, he wrote, “do not want their children taught in state-run and state-funded schools that the country was founded on an ideology of white supremacy in which every white child and family today is invariably complicit regardless of their personal views of their Black fellow citizens.” He compared the anti-anti-critical race theory camp to leftists in the 1950s who, while condemning McCarthyism, dismissed justified concerns about Soviet Communism.
Michelle Goldberg believes herself to be an honest broker in this “maddening” debate.
My own position is basically anti-anti-critical race theory, in that I disagree with some ideas associated with C.R.T., especially around limiting speech, but am extremely alarmed by efforts to demonize and ban it. There’s certainly some material that critics lump in with C.R.T. that strikes me as ridiculous and harmful. I’ve seen the risible training for school administrators calling worship of the written word “white supremacy culture.” There’s a version of antiracism based on white people’s narcissistic self-flagellation that seems to me to accomplish very little.
But I’m highly skeptical that many public schools are teaching that “every white child and family today is invariably complicit” in white supremacy. Rather, the campaign against critical race theory is doing exactly what Rufo wanted it to: taking inchoate anger about what’s often derided as wokeness and directing it onto public education. In some ways, it’s like the campaign against sex education, where conservative activists would either cherry-pick or invent lurid anecdotes to try to discredit the whole project.
Before turning to the issues in her self-flagellating serving critique, note that she too can tell you what’s wrong with those seeking to demonize it, but what she cannot explain is what it is and what’s meritorious about it. Some (and perhaps it will happen in the comments here) will string together a series of vapid jargon that neither says nor means much of anything, smug in the belief that they’ve regurgitated pseudo-intellectual gibberish to make their case. It doesn’t.
But Goldberg’s more fundamental mistake is that she frames this as a fight between the forces of good, even if somewhat misguided in its silencing of speech and ideas that fail to adhere to its orthodoxy, and evil as represented by Christopher Rufo. This isn’t a battle between Rufo and Kendi, or right-wingnuts and the rest of society.
Concern about the downward spiral in education (there are correct answers in math, at least in K-12 math), about the language policing and trigger warnings, back when trigger warnings had yet to be found triggering, have existed long before anyone heard of Rufo, long before CRT became the bogeyman of the moment. And then seized upon by conservative legislators whose only weapon are poorly conceived and badly drafted laws. The failings of these misguided efforts is so obvious that even Jeffrey Sachs has been able to provide a reasonably cogent critique. And Greg Lukianoff of FIRE has done a thoughtful dive into the cesspool.
But Goldberg makes two fundamental errors. The first is her assumption that the concerns raised are only held by right-wing extremists. This is understandable given her myopia and presumption that much of the array of woke ideology is entirely fine and good, and thus uncontroversial. Of course schools should teach that the country is divided into privileged and oppressed groups, because it is.
Of course this is the view of the majority because she’s just a normal intelligent person and that’s what she believes, and no decent intelligent person could believe otherwise. Except there is a wide berth of people, from liberals to moderate conservatives, who believe schools have no business teaching students to be racially decent people in geometry class.
The other mistake is that since this isn’t happening in her child’s class (even if it is but she’s okay with it as it hasn’t reached the stage where her kid has to confess her white supremacy and find some feet to wash), it’s not a real problem but a manufactured political wedge. There is no question that it’s happening. Waiting until it’s a fait accompli, at children’s expense, has never proven a wise strategy. And this is the point of folks like Damon Linker, and even someone as thick as Jeffrey Sachs. These laws are bad, but distinguishing between teaching and indoctrinating needs to be addressed before the damage is done. And the damage is being done.
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Oliver Traldi warned us at the outset of this next front in the culture war that we would battle over rhetoric as the woke (yet another word in the ever-deepening pile of self-descriptors for progressives that have morphed into unusable pejoratives) desperately avoided confronting the insinuation of their ideology into education, all the while pretending it’s not happening and is just some right-wing moral panic. Two plus two does not equal five, and whether a second-grader should be made to feel shame and guilt for slavery isn’t your subject to teach to someone else’s children.