So the new flavor of the past year for right wingers who wish to talk about anything but climate change and class- and race- based systemic economic inequality is Critical Race Theory (CRT), which I have been reading about since the 1980s, starting most famously with the now late, often great Derrick Bell (who has been dead for nearly a decade now), and Mari Matsuda, who I have some vague memory of being critical about something she did or said many years ago--but I can't remember what, and is frankly, at this point, irrelevant. I decided this morning to look up CRT in Wiki to see what I am missing in this recent media generated controversy, as I just can't get much excited about this controversy beyond seeing the current controversy over CRT as another right wing diversion tactic.
CRT is already in many curricula in history textbooks I am seeing, and most importantly for my claim-of-authority here, using. I see today's textbooks as an immense improvement over textbooks used in the early 1970s when I was in high school. What I see in CRT is a demand that we recognize how law was used in our society to create racial stratification, and how culture created and reinforced that stratification, in a manner which directly led to depriving those with darker skin of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--and, over centuries, ensured those with darker skin had far less access to money and power, which reverberates into today. In short, it ain't just about slavery, folks.
To the extent the textbooks use personal stories, i.e. "storytelling," the personal stories in the textbooks reinforce, or a part of, informative factual details and evidence-based conclusions. I don't see any essential falseness in the stories, though we know an individual person's perspective may include information that is not able to be verified or can be outright wrong (I recall how my late Aunt Rose and still living Uncle Jack argued, often with anger, over whether the jail building the Polish pro-Nazi police forced them into during WWII, with the intent to execute them the next morning, was a one story or two story building. They escaped, because the building was new, and they used a spoon to push out a couple of large bricks to get out. However, their argument over their memory, and the destruction of that jail before the war was over, leave the singular fact about the building highly uncertain). We also know when a Holocaust survivor is interrogated by a lawyer for a Holocaust denier, the facts of a particular incident can become hazy and inconsistencies arise. Does that mean the Holocaust didn't happen, or that the entire testimony of so many should be disregarded? Of course not. Also, the fact we whose families hail from southern and eastern Europe and Russia, and who arrived here 120 years ago, have had far more success in American society than those brought in chains from Africa two and three hundred years ago, is a continuing issue, NOT one that is ancient history with far less relevance to day to day life today.
Too often, too many of us want to assume conservative critics are litigating the arguments against CRT in good faith. Too often, such critics are not. CRT critics often describe some minor anecdotal story of some teacher at some school (which is funny, because the critics are so concerned with "storytelling" overwhelming fact-based analysis) and then use that anecdotal story to present an argument based upon a "parade of horribles" style against CRT as a whole. What conservatives most appear to fear is that we who are white skinned are taught to better come to grips with how our nation got to where it is, how white people, individually, had certain advantages available as long as the people were deemed white, and how our history is not one steady, inevitable movement toward progress--nor is our history largely based upon a benign or neutral intent, design, and procedure.
I tend to be harsh against flabby thinking, which means I will definitely have criticisms of how CRT is taught, who teaches it, and what language and evidence is used in describing past events or how our society functions. However, I find the idea that CRT should be deemed dangerous or controversial is little more than a ginned-up media debate designed to divide and divert us from the macro economic and climate change issues--and how our institutional and cultural racism causes a disproportionately negative effect on those who are not, again, deemed white. It is not those using CRT in history or literature classes who are the dividers, as much as those who think CRT is some existential issue being foisted upon our nation to undermine our society. We do need to be critical with regard to understanding and evaluating the extent to which structural racism plays a continuing role in our society. We must not sweep systemic and historical racism under a rug of feel-good "we're all equal" rhetoric, which is where conservatives' rhetoric is at, which is ironic on top of being cynical. Remember MLK, Jr.'s most famous portion of his 1963 speech was about his "dream," which for much of conservative rhetoric is converted into some objective fact based upon passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. If we read the conservatives' arguments, they often wax rhetorically that anyone talking about continued systemic and cultural racism is somehow the divider.
This is why I am not against CRT in the abstract, or how it is often used. Yet, I would like to think even Mari Matsuda can remain critical of CRT in particulars. And heck, from what I have seen in various world history textbooks about US actions against Korea and Vietnam, or how they discuss Karl Marx, and the rise of capitalist power in British and other societies, we need more critical theories and evidence based evaluations. History is a continuing argument, but we should demand more good faith from those participating in the argument. Those arguing against CRT, particularly politicians and corporate media commentators, are too often not arguing in good faith.
UPDATE May 11, 2021: Read this article in The Atlantic in this context over the controversy over CRT, and realize, again, how right wingers, particularly from the southern region of the United States, prefer storytelling from perspectives with far more lies than truth, and yet have the audacity to criticize CRT. It is almost as if these apologists for the Confederacy are racist. :)
UPDATE: May 29, 2021: Irami Osei-Frimpong has a slightly different take, in that he is saying CRT is dangerous and controversial precisely because it upends the myths white folks have told themselves about the history of the United States of America. He appears to be saying, "Yeah, white man! This is the truth you hide! You better be afraid! Be very afraid!" For me, I guess I am more hopeful that we are only providing higher levels of truth, and owe it to ourselves, as a society with so many different people, to finally come to grips with our racist legacies, and help each other. I had a quibble with him, too, about the extent to which slavery played a role in the American Revolutionary period of 1774-1776, which I largely based my view on Sean Wilentz's essays in The Atlantic and New York Review of Books, with Wilentz's partial criticisms of The NY Times' 1619 Project. God knows I have, over the past decade or more, had my disagreements with Wilentz's Neo-liberalism and professional-managerial-class assumptions, but I found him fairly compelling here. I posted this at Irami's YouTube page and he kindly responded, accepting my argument the coalition was diverse, and cited to Robin Einhorn's American Taxation, American Slavery (2008). Einhorn's book posits the hostility to taxation is rooted in wanting to maintain the right to own slaves, which again is focused more southward than in Massachusetts, where anti-tax fervor was more about commerce and trade, and how British taxes were operating in a manner that undermined freedom and power of colonists. I do agree with Einhorn that there is a definite connection between the slaveocracy and its descendants who are highly anti-tax in philosophy. Another person responded by citing to the highly polemical The Counterrevolution of 1776 by the great Gerald Horne. I am a major overall fan of Horne's work on a variety of subjects, but I again found that particular book much more polemical than it should have been because, once one moves north of New Jersey, the argument about the centrality of slavery becomes far more difficult to sustain as a thesis.
