On critical race theory – Spencer Bokat-Lindell in NYT:

‘Last month, the Florida Department of Education voted to restrictwhat public-school children can learn about the past. From now on, teachers may not define U.S. history “as something other than the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.” One concept, in particular, was singled out for prohibition: critical race theory.’

(…)

‘The furor over critical race theory owes its greatest debt to Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist and documentarian. Rufo came to prominence in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, which compelled millions of Americans — many of them white — to attend racial justice protests, read up on racial inequality and register for webinars on how to raise antiracist children.
Many felt newfound hope that the injustices of 400 years of white supremacy — injustices manifest in policing, health care, infant mortality, wealth, unemployment, education, housing and water quality — could be remedied, but only if Americans were willing to confront the immensity of the challenge. “The marching feet say what the Congress cannot yet hear: Our national history and character carved these scars into our body politic,” William Barber II, Liz Theoharis, Timothy B. Tyson and Cornel West wrote last June. “Policy tinkering will not heal them.”’

(…)

‘In one antiracism seminar Rufo unearthed, white employees of the city of Seattle were shown a slide listing supposed expressions of “internalized white supremacy,” including “perfectionism, objectivity, and individualism.”’

(…)

‘Critical race theorists tend to share several key assumptions, as Janel George, a law professor at Georgetown, explains at the American Bar Association website:

• Race is not a biological fact but a social construction.
• Racism is not aberrational but an inherited, ordinary feature of society.
• Racial hierarchy is primarily the product of systems, not individual prejudice.
• Racial progress is accommodated only to the extent that it converges with the interests of white people.
• Lived experience, not just data, constitutes relevant evidence to scholarship.’ (…)

‘Such ideas inspired a 1990s critique by Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard historian and literary theorist. “The First Amendment will not, true enough, secure us substantive liberties, but neither will its abrogation,” he wrote, while also crediting critical race theorists with “helping to reinvigorate the debate about freedom of expression.” Justin Driver, a professor at Yale Law School, has also critiqued the conception of progress as a story of white accommodation, an idea developed by another major critical race theorist, Derrick Bell. While useful to some analysis, Driver wrote in 2015, Bell’s thesis lends itself to conspiratorial thinking and betrays a “low regard for Black agency.”’

(…)

‘More broadly, some on the left argue that race plays an outsize role in the national discourse around inequality. The academics Adolph Reed and Walter Benn Michaels, for example, describe the idea of a racial wealth gap as an “argumentative sleight-of-hand” that obscures the primary driver of inequality in America, racial and otherwise: neoliberal capitalism.
“It’s the fixation on disproportionality that tells us the increasing wealth of the one percent would be OK if only there more Black, brown, and L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ billionaires,” they wrote last September. “And the fact that antiracism and anti-discrimination of all kinds would validate rather than undermine the stratification of wealth in American society is completely visible to those who currently possess that wealth — all the rich people eager to embark on a course of moral purification (antiracist training) but with no interest whatsoever in a politics (social-democratic redistribution) that would alter the material conditions that make them rich.”’

(…)

‘In The Times, a group of writers across the political spectrum cast the threat in existential terms. “These laws threaten the basic purpose of a historical education in a liberal democracy,” they write. “Though some of us share the antipathy of the legislation’s authors toward some of these targets and object to overreaches that leave many parents understandably anxious about the stewardship of their children’s education, we all reject the means by which these measures encode that antipathy into legislation.”’

Read the article here.

A nuanced article.

To outlaw critical race theory in universities is ridiculous and counterproductive.

Whether critical race theory and seminars where ‘white people’ are trying to get rid of “internalized white supremacy,” including “perfectionism, objectivity, and individualism” is helpful? I doubt it.

Just imagine seminars for Jews where Jews are trying to get rid of ‘internalized Jewish supremacy’ including ‘perfectionism, objectivity, and individualism’.
Let’s call this theory Critical Jew Theory.

From the right and from the left, reality is worse than satire.
The human condition? Funnier than ever.