You Are Making A Whole Lot Of Assumptions About My Worldview

It’s hard not to be an activist these days. As society gets more and more passionate about more and more things (all while thinking less and less), the potential for extremism is at an all-time high. And stoking the flames of that extremism is a steady stream of information, ready to support whatever viewpoint you already hold.

In my article, Do Critical Race Theorists Know What Racism Is?, I highlighted the dishonesty surrounding the debate about Critical Race Theory (CRT).

I asked whether it made sense to allow the bickering about what technically qualifies as CRT to obfuscate far more pressing questions about the insanity happening in some schools.

And I pointed out that not only did the “anti-CRT bills” dominating headlines last year not even mention CRT, but anybody who would claim to be against racism should wholeheartedly approve of protecting children from the racist ideas they prohibit.

Mick had no problem focusing on the dishonesty, but, for numerous reasons, had a harder time looking at the big picture.

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Mick:

Back in March, Christopher Rufo, one of CRT’s leading critics, freely admitted that he’d set out to confuse the American public about what CRT is:

It’s crazy that this guy explicitly said this in writing and the vast majority of people don’t seem to know or care.

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Steve QJ:

It’s crazy that this guy explicitly said this in writing

It really is. But it's also a symptom of how legitimately crazy some race “education” has become and how many people are just focused on that.

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Mick:

I'm not sure if the takeaway from a right wing operative explicitly saying that they manufactured a controversy and hysteria to muddy the waters of discourse and keep people from engaging or thinking critically is that "race education" is getting crazy.

Like, the person who manufactured the controversy is saying that they manufactured it. The response shouldn't be "wow, this is a sign that he's onto something with this thing he admitted he made up to score political points"

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Steve QJ:

I'm not sure if the takeaway from a right wing operative

So many people, both left and right, need to get past this simplistic, binary thinking. Christopher Rufo was only able to generate this controversy because there is a significant kernel of truth in what he's saying. Otherwise you have to assume that every single person (including numerous black people) who has an issue with some aspects of race education is an idiot who can't think for themselves and was taken in by this one man.

Rufo dishonestly branded every instance of race-related craziness as CRT. But the fact is, the craziness already existed. And some of it really is based on offshoots of CRT. If you refuse to acknowledge this because a "right wing operative" made you aware of it, you doom yourself to never see the whole picture. A functional worldview can't be built around the belief that every word that comes out of the mouth of anybody to your political right is a wholesale lie.

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Mick:

You are making a whole lot of thinly veiled assumptions about my worldview here that I frankly do not appreciate.

Respectfully, this person literally admitted to manufacturing this controversy. Perhaps there is merit to the argument that there was fertile soil for this whole debate to grow in, but the explicit fact remains that this person made this argument up specifically to make discourse more difficult. That is an observed fact and we can see it in action even here with our own discussion because instead of talking about other, better ways of discussing how race is addressed and taught about in America, we're instead debating the merits of something someone specifically said they were using to create controversy.

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Steve QJ:

You are making a whole lot of thinly veiled assumptions about my worldview here

They're not veiled at all!😅 I don't have any means for judging your thoughts other than the words you're writing here. So assumptions are inevitable. But they're just based on your replies. If you're focused on Rufo's politics instead of considering the problem he's pointing to, it's hard not to infer certain things from that.

Speaking of which, Rufo didn't admit to manufacturing this controversy, he admitted to "freezing the brand" of CRT and "putting all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category."

I'm sure we'd agree that this is dishonest.

But again, those “various cultural insanities” already existed. Rufo didn't manufacture them, he lumped them all together under one “brand”. And while it's true that this makes discourse (or at least productive discourse) more difficult, productive discourse is impossible when any attempt to address some of the genuinely troubling things happening in race education is dismissed as "right-wing" or racist. Especially, as I point out in the article, considering that these "anti-CRT bills" don't even mention CRT.

Talking about the controversy is more important than talking about how its been inaccurately branded. If your focus is on the latter, I'd say you're missing the larger point.

As for race education, I've written at length about how it can be improved: Teach history accurately and honestly. Encourage intelligent, nuanced conversation about race where ideas can be discussed freely and imperfectly. Don't reinforce the idea in children's minds that they're defined or divided by the colour of their skin. And certainly not by the experiences or actions of people whose skin happened to be the same colour. It's tragic that these even need to be stated explicitly in 2022.

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Mick:

Teach history accurately and honestly. Encourage intelligent, nuanced conversation about race where ideas can be discussed freely and imperfectly.

I don’t mean to sound dismissive when I say this, but I would take your arguments a lot more seriously if you acknowledged that these anti-CRT bills, which are a direct result of Rufo’s work, would literally make this illegal to do in schools.

With language as broad as banning teachers from advocating “any doctrine or theory promoting a negative account or representation of the founding and history of the United States of America,” (Proposed New Hampshire Bill, others can be found at this link) it would be illegal to do what you’re describing here.

Again, perhaps there is some merit to the argument that there was fertile soil for this controversy to take root, but that doesn’t help anything with the fact that people, particularly people who are very sympathetic to white supremacists if not white supremacists themselves, now have a blank check to write whatever unhinged legislation they want.

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Steve QJ:

With language as broad as banning teachers from advocating “any doctrine or theory promoting a negative account or representation of the founding and history of the United States of America,” (Proposed New Hampshire Bill, others can be found at this link) it would be illegal to do what you’re describing here.

No, you don't sound dismissive at all, but this is actually a perfect example of the importance of getting your information first hand. I get that not everybody has the time or the inclination to spend hours reading legislation or verifying the accuracy of online claims. But you have to understand how often second hand information is partial or flat-out inaccurate.

I was surprised by the link you provided, not only because I read the New Hampshire bill while researching this article, but because I'd visited that same page. “Did I miss something?!” I asked myself.

Nope.

“Proposed” text is not actual text. All bills go through a number of changes from original draft to final draft. And while I didn't see a version that contained this text, the version that was passed doesn't contain it. As for your fears that teaching race history would become “literally illegal”, here's some of the wording from the final bill (the full bill can be found here):

I. The general court hereby finds and declares that practices of discrimination against any New Hampshire inhabitants because of age, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, creed, color, marital status, familial status, mental or physical disability, religion, or national origin are a matter of state concern, that discrimination based on these characteristics not only threatens the rights and proper privileges of New Hampshire inhabitants but menaces the institutions and foundation of a free democratic state and threatens the peace, order, health, safety and general welfare of the state and its inhabitants.

II. Nothing in this subdivision shall be construed to prohibit racial, sexual, religious, or other workplace sensitivity training based on the inherent humanity and equality of all persons and the ideal that all persons are entitled to be treated with equality, dignity, and respect.

III. Nothing in this subdivision shall be construed to limit the academic freedom of faculty members of the university system of New Hampshire and the community college system of New Hampshire to conduct research, publish, lecture, or teach in the academic setting.

[emphasis mine]

Sadly, white supremacists have always had a blank check to write whatever unhinged legislation they want. And don't get me wrong, this is obviously cause for concern and vigilance. But writing a bill is not the same thing as passing a bill. The fact that racists exist is not cause to uncritically swallow the most inaccurate, alarmist takes that click-hungry websites decide to throw up on the internet.

Again, I think we agree that there are problems in race education. I see them both in the way the evils of slavery and segregation are sometimes downplayed and even denied (I link to examples of this in the article) and in the agenda driven revisionism of things like the 1619 project. In both cases, I think the question of whether these are most accurately described as CRT is largely irrelevant.

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As I said to Mick, most people don't have the time or the inclination to double-check every piece of information they read. This is fine. But it means we're forced to take certain ideas on trust. And given the emotive, divisive way ideas are often presented nowadays, we'll inevitably form strong opinions that are wholly or partly inaccurate.

Which is why, in this age of so much information, it's so important that we learn to hold those strong opinions weakly. That we don't dismiss ideas simply because we don't like the politics of the person who raised them. That we leave room for the possibility that there’s more to an issue than we gathered from that catchy headline we read. 

There are always going to be things we disagree about. There are always going to be noble causes worth fighting over. There’s nothing wrong with being an activist. As long as we know what we're fighting for.