What is CRT or Critical Race Theory in real-world terms?


What is CRT or Critical Race Theory in real-world terms?
What is CRT or Critical Race Theory in real-world terms?
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It is hard to say that something is good or bad for society if you do not truly understand its history, what it meant when it was first created and what it means now.  It would be the same as making an assumption about no deposit codes Fair Go if you have no idea what the phrase “no deposit code” actually means.

Some parts of CRT I agree with, for example, when teaching children American and World History, that we should teach all parts – the good, the bad, and even the ugly.  But that would include people from all cultures, not just White people (European descent people) acting in bad faith to Black people (people from Africa) or Native Americans.

Teacher: Slavery existed in the United States from 1610 to 1865.

Student: Teacher, slavery still exists in parts of the world today.

Teacher: We don’t talk about that.

The above conversation happened in my son’s 3rd grade classroom.  That is why I disagree that there is systemic racism in the United States and it all comes from White people (European descent) trying to put down Black people (people from Africa).

Here is another example from my own personal experience:  I was attending a “People of Color” meeting as a guest speaker.  I’m White.  Another guest speaker was speaking.  He talked about a program he was going to lead over the next 2 years.  During the first part, 3rd year of high school students were going to learn how to do a long-term, group research project.  During the next year, students were going to actually do a year-long research project.

What he was describing sounded exactly like the AP Seminar Course and the AP Research Course.

“In AP Seminar, students investigate real-world issues from multiple perspectives, gathering and analyzing information from various sources in order to develop credible and valid evidence-based arguments. AP Seminar is a prerequisite for AP Research. Completing AP Seminar and all its required assessment components is necessary for students to develop the skills to be successful in AP Research. In AP Research, students cultivate the skills and discipline necessary to conduct independent research and inquiry in order to produce and defend their scholarly work.”

So I made the suggestion that the project should be made into an official AP Seminar and AP Research Course.  The response that I got back was, “These are not AP Students”.  I was surprised, but since I was not a “person of color”, I walked away and never spoke about that meeting again.

But let’s think about this for a minute.  What is an “AP Student”?  Technically, it is any student who is enrolled in an AP Course.  It does not matter if the student is enrolled in one AP class or 10 AP classes.  Most students only take 1 AP course during their whole high school.   Nobody would ever tell a white student unless your whole schedule is all AP courses, you can’t take any AP courses.

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But that is exactly what the leaders of this “People of Color” student support group (who were all People of Color) were doing.

These students were being asked to do the same exact same work with the exact requirements as students taking AP Seminar and AP Research, but they were being denied the reward of having that designation on their high school transcript.  Not to mention the kids were being denied potential college credit, which equals “free money”.   And let’s not forget that nobody knows how many lives could have been changed by a student realizing “Hey, I just did the equivalent of two college-level courses.  If I can pass those classes, then I can handle college.”   They were not denied that by White people.  They were denied that opportunity by the leaders of the People of Color Student Support Group, who were all People of Color.

The systemic racism in this scenario is what every single person reading this article knows without a single doubt in their mind, that if a group of White students were asked to do the work of two college courses, but not provided the opportunity to earn the college credit, the school board, the teachers, and everybody else involved, would never hear the end of it from their White parents.

But are stories like this being taught or are they being ignored?  No different than the conversation between the teacher and the student: “slavery still existing in the world today” and the teacher’s response of “we don’t talk about it”.

What was the definition of Critical Race Theory in 2018 according to Encyclopedia Brittanica (Wayback Machine)?

This is an exact quote, word for word, from Encyclopedia Britannica on March 10, 2018.  I used the Wayback machine website to find this.

“Critical race theory (CRT), the view that race, instead of being biologically grounded and natural, is socially constructed and that race, as a socially constructed concept, functions as a means to maintain the interests of the white population that constructed it. According to CRT, racial inequality emerges from the social, economic, and legal differences that white people create between “races” to maintain elite white interest in labor markets and politics and as such create the circumstances that give rise to poverty and criminality in many minority communities. Though the intellectual origins of the movement go back much further, the CRT movement officially organized itself in July 1989.”

I have only one example in my personal life where I witnessed “black people being held back” or systemic racism, and it was in the example I mentioned above.  But the white person in the group, me, was not the one who was holding the black students back.  It was the leaders of the Black Community themselves that were holding the Black students back.

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Also from this article …

“Instead of drawing theories of social organization and individual behavior from continental European thinkers such as G.W.F. Hegel and Karl Marx or psychoanalytic figures like Sigmund Freud as its theoretical predecessors, as CLS and feminist jurisprudence had done, CRT was inspired by the American civil rights tradition through figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and W.E.B. Du Bois, and from nationalist thinkers such as Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, and Frantz Fanon. Being steeped in radical black thought and nationalist thinking, critical race theory advanced theoretical understandings of the law, politics, and American sociology that focused on the efforts of white people (Euro-Americans) to maintain their historical advantages over people of color.”

Malcolm X is a communist.  Frantz Fanon’s mentor was a communist.  The Black Panther’s goal was to overthrow capitalism, which they believed would end the oppression of Black people.

As a White person, I am all for doing everything possible to help black children be successful in school, so they can be successful in life.  But you do not have to replace capitalism with communism in order to accomplish that.  Every single communist country denies people the freedom to emigrate from their country.  So if people living in communist countries are not living there of their own free will, how can anybody say that communism is a great way to run a country?

What was the definition of Critical Race Theory in 2021 according to Encyclopedia Brittanica (official website)?

Now let’s look at the current definition of Critical Race Theory from Brittanica’s website:

“critical race theory (CRT), intellectual and social movement and loosely organized framework of legal analysis based on the premise that race is not a natural, biologically grounded feature of physically distinct subgroups of human beings but a socially constructed (culturally invented) category that is used to oppress and exploit people of color. Critical race theorists hold that racism is inherent in the law and legal institutions of the United States insofar as they function to create and maintain social, economic, and political inequalities between whites and nonwhites, especially African Americans. Critical race theorists are generally dedicated to applying their understanding of the institutional or structural nature of racism to the concrete (if distant) goal of eliminating all race-based and other unjust hierarchies.”

If you continue to read the article, there is not one mention of communism or any of the people whose theories were used to create the CRT philosophy.  If we are talking about the difference between 1960 (the height of communism), and 2020, one could say, people change and philosophies change.  But the article was brand new in 2018 and it is only three years in the future.  And Black Lives Matter, a branch of, or cousin of, CRT was in full swing in mid-2020.  So, we are talking 2 years.  Nobody changes dramatically in two years.

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The article claims that the communist views from CLS (Critical Race Scholar, from college professors), and is not part of CRT (Critical Race Theory), the curriculum these same college professors created.

And here is the CRT view on the traditional Democratic Party:

“critical race theorists believed that political liberalism was incapable of adequately addressing fundamental problems of injustice in American society (notwithstanding legislation and court rulings advancing civil rights in the 1950s and ’60s), because its emphasis on the equitable treatment under the law of all races (“color blindness”) rendered it capable of recognizing only the most overt and obvious racist practices, not those that were relatively indirect, subtle, or systemic. Liberalism was also faulted for mistakenly presupposing the apolitical nature of judicial decision-making and for taking a self-consciously incremental or reformist approach that prolonged unjust social arrangements and afforded opportunities for retrenchment and backsliding through administrative delays and conservative legal challenges.”

To put it simply, the Democratic Party that supports CRT (and everything else that goes with it) is not the Democratic Party of the 1980s and 1990s or even early 2000s.

I was raised in the Democratic Party that believed that it did not matter what your skin color was, everybody should be held to the same standard.  Yes, some students do need more support.  If a child does not have a full belly, it is hard to concentrate in school.  If a student does not speak English in the home, they are going to need extra language learning support.  If a parent is not college educated, they are going to need tutoring help.

“Some CRT theorists hold that race is an artificial association or correlation between a set of physical characteristics—including skin color, certain facial features, and hair texture—and an imagined set of psychological and behavioral tendencies, conceived as either positive or negative, good or bad. The associations have been created and maintained by dominant groups (in the United States, whites of western European descent) to justify their oppression and exploitation of other groups on the basis of the latter’s supposed inferiority, immorality, or incapacity for self-rule.”

I am not even going to begin talking about this.  “Passing a football in a playground between a small group of friends is going to spread COVID, but gathering in large groups to protest, which turned into smashing windows, mass stealing, burning down buildings, committing rape, murder, etc. does not spread COVID.”  That must be some genetically engineered virus that can tell the difference between kids passing around a football in a park and “political activism”.

Summary

Some of what CRT is saying is true, but you can not separate the official CRT from communism, and you can’t say that all “holding black people back” is the result of White actions or non-actions.


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