Though the current project started as a series of posts charting my grief journey after the death of my mother, I am no longer actively grieving. Now, the blog charts a conversation in living, mainly whatever I want it to be. This is an activity that goes well with the theme of this blog (updated 2018). The Sense of Doubt blog is dedicated to my motto: EMBRACE UNCERTAINTY. I promote questioning everything because just when I think I know something is concrete, I find out that it’s not.
Hey, Mom! The Explanation.
Here's the permanent dedicated link to my first Hey, Mom! post and the explanation of the feature it contains.
A Sense of Doubt blog post #2305 - Ole Tyme Countrified Racism Tea Party
A Sense of Doubt blog post #2305 - Ole Tyme Countrified Racism Tea Party
We do not all protest the same way. Yesterday, my stylist said there are better ways to protest than standing on a corner shouting at traffic wearing his Che Guevara shirt.
I don't prefer to protest in the street either.
I protest in writing, like this blog, and I protest by trying to educate students to think for themselves.
I challenge students to work for the world that they want to live in: be the change: ideas can change the world.
Typically, I do not feed them the ideas I want them to have, though I often present various ideas for them to consider, even ideas that in some cases are not my own, such as my example persuasive brainstorming for the reactionary and unoriginally named "Blue Lives Matter." Because there's no support and appreciation for the police. No, no. And because, you know, police are recognized racial minority that used to be enslaved to white masters in police farms. Yup.
Anyway, enough of my snark. There's plenty of snark in the Wonkette shares here in this post.
Primarily, FOX NEWS has stoked a "Satanic Panic" about the idea that Critical Race Theory is being taught in public schools to children, not just high school persons nearing adulthood, but actual YOUNG children, like the fifth grader who comes over every Saturday to mow your lawn.
Thankfully, the entire country is not intellectually bankrupt. But FOX NEWS and other propaganda-like, fear-mongering re-programming media systems are trading ratings for inciting panic.
Inflammatory language on my part? Sure. Because I know the same accusations of brain washing, false information, and libel are hurled by the right wing at the left and our righteous indignation.
From the simple perspective that CRITICAL RACE THEORY has been around for 40 years and has been an impetus for much of the teaching in higher education when teaching about race, though the origins of CRT were for use in legal scholarship, it seems very fallacious that ALL OF A SUDDEN there's moral panic that CRT is dividing children, breeding hate, and accusing well-meaning white people of being racist.
Isn't all that the EXACT thesis of Robin DiAngelo's book White Fragility?
I feel that anyone who opposes the teaching of Critical Race Theory should first be required to pass the following test:
What is Critical Race Theory? You have five minutes and 500 words. Go.
And yet all in a lather for being accused of racism, led by Mister Former President, the "least racist person you know" (even though there's sound recordings of him saying very racist things), conservatives like the HERITAGE FOUNDATION accuse CRT of being the cause of all kinds of things many of which are completely unrelated to this academic ideology.
"One conservative organization, the Heritage Foundation, recently attributed a whole host of issues to CRT, including the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, LGBTQ clubs in schools, diversity training in federal agencies and organizations, California’s recent ethnic studies model curriculum, the free-speech debate on college campuses, and alternatives to exclusionary discipline—such as the Promise program in Broward County, Fla., that some parents blame for the Parkland school shootings. “When followed to its logical conclusion, CRT is destructive and rejects the fundamental ideas on which our constitutional republic is based,” the organization claimed" (Sawchuck, para 13).
Um, yeah.
Right.
It's a very difficult thing for these fragile white people to acknowledge their own complicity in racism either due to their silence, their own self-apologizing for being racist (have they ever said "I am not racist but..." which is a clear signal that a racist thing is about to come of their mouth), or their aid and comfort to policies, laws, systems, bias, mindsets, privilege, and ALL THE THINGS that contribute to the systemic racism not only deeply baked into America everywhere, in everything.
I know from doing the work that confronting my own complicity in racism and the white privilege (UNEARNED white MALE privilege at that) that I enjoy and that people of color do not has been a difficult road or denial, self-abnegation, self-examination, rationalization, de-rationalization, awareness expansion, and so much more. And I have realized that the work is not done, the work may never be done because racism is baked in so deep, programmed so automatically, almost like an instinct, that I will continue to uncover the ways in which it influences me and my world, my country, the people around me, for the rest of my life.
But this process of self-analysis is both humbling and frightening in the vulnerability one must open up to in order to move along in the process.
I want to be an antiracist, and yet, I still let moments pass in which I could make a stand for antiracism and I choose the path of least resistance.
It's difficult to take the stand all the time. But principles are most valuable when sticking to them and acting on them is difficult, risky, painful, and unpleasant. If not, then we would have much greater societal transformation rather than denial, cowardice, and fear.
CRT argues that systemic racism is so deeply ingrained in our very way of life and all the policies, laws, and organizational systems that support it that it is often almost unrecognizable.
The push back against this idea is the same I receive from those who have internalized the sexist systems of our country, both men and women who feel that they benefit from those systems, the same push back I receive in teaching white privilege in the class room.
Don't think there's any such thing as white privilege or you do not enjoy its benefits? Read this:
The fight for equality and the fight against racism is going to continue to be painful until everyone accepts that it will be painful. Equality cannot be achieved artificially or easily. IN fact, equality will only be achieved through making things unequal for a time period until balance can be achieved.
Think of a teeter-totter on the playground. The left side has a really heavy kid and he's holding it down, and the right side is all the way up in the air with a light person. Can we just pull down the light person and get to the mid-point of balance? Or will the right side probably come down past the mid-point of balance and equality and come back up until that sweet spot can be found?
If you care to know more about CRT, in addition to the Ed Week article by Sawchuck I have quoted above and below, see this article:
On to some snarky WONKETTE. Consider donating. I do.
"Critical race theory is not a synonym for culturally relevant teaching, which emerged in the 1990s. This teaching approach seeks to affirm students’ ethnic and racial backgrounds and is intellectually rigorous. But it’s related in that one of its aims is to help students identify and critique the causes of social inequality in their own lives" (Sawchuck, para 21).
Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that racism is a social construct, and that it is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.
The basic tenets of critical race theory, or CRT, emerged out of a framework for legal analysis in the late 1970s and early 1980s created by legal scholars Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado, among others.
A good example is when, in the 1930s, government officials literally drew lines around areas deemed poor financial risks, often explicitly due to the racial composition of inhabitants. Banks subsequently refused to offer mortgages to Black people in those areas.
Today, those same patterns of discrimination live on through facially race-blind policies, like single-family zoning that prevents the building of affordable housing in advantaged, majority-white neighborhoods and, thus, stymies racial desegregation efforts.
CRT also has ties to other intellectual currents, including the work of sociologists and literary theorists who studied links between political power, social organization, and language. And its ideas have since informed other fields, like the humanities, the social sciences, and teacher education.
This academic understanding of critical race theory differs from representation in recent popular books and, especially, from its portrayal by critics—often, though not exclusively, conservative Republicans. Critics charge that the theory leads to negative dynamics, such as a focus on group identity over universal, shared traits; divides people into “oppressed” and “oppressor” groups; and urges intolerance.
Thus, there is a good deal of confusion over what CRT means, as well as its relationship to other terms, like “anti-racism” and “social justice,” with which it is often conflated.
To an extent, the term “critical race theory” is now cited as the basis of all diversity and inclusion efforts regardless of how much it’s actually informed those programs.
One conservative organization, the Heritage Foundation, recently attributed a whole host of issues to CRT, including the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, LGBTQ clubs in schools, diversity training in federal agencies and organizations, California’s recent ethnic studies model curriculum, the free-speech debate on college campuses, and alternatives to exclusionary discipline—such as the Promise program in Broward County, Fla., that some parents blame for the Parkland school shootings. “When followed to its logical conclusion, CRT is destructive and rejects the fundamental ideas on which our constitutional republic is based,” the organization claimed.
(A good parallel here is how popular ideas of the common core learning standards grew to encompass far more than what those standards said on paper.)
Does critical race theory say all white people are racist? Isn’t that racist, too?
The theory says that racism is part of everyday life, so people—white or nonwhite—who don’t intend to be racist can nevertheless make choices that fuel racism.
Some critics claim that the theory advocates discriminating against white people in order to achieve equity. They mainly aim those accusations at theorists who advocate for policies that explicitly take race into account. (The writer Ibram X. Kendi, whose recent popular book How to Be An Antiracist suggests that discrimination that creates equity can be considered anti-racist, is often cited in this context.)
Fundamentally, though, the disagreement springs from different conceptions of racism. CRT thus puts an emphasis on outcomes, not merely on individuals’ own beliefs, and it calls on these outcomes to be examined and rectified. Among lawyers, teachers, policymakers, and the general public, there are many disagreements about how precisely to do those things, and to what extent race should be explicitly appealed to or referred to in the process.
Here’s a helpful illustration to keep in mind in understanding this complex idea. In a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court school-assignment case on whether race could be a factor in maintaining diversity in K-12 schools, Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion famously concluded: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” But during oral arguments, then-justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said: “It’s very hard for me to see how you can have a racial objective but a nonracial means to get there.”
All these different ideas grow out of longstanding, tenacious intellectual debates. Critical race theory emerged out of postmodernist thought, which tends to be skeptical of the idea of universal values, objective knowledge, individual merit, Enlightenment rationalism, and liberalism—tenets that conservatives tend to hold dear.
A few weeks ago, three students at Mead High School, not far from Denver, Colorado, decided to reenact the brutal murder of George Floyd on school grounds. This wasn't a serious dramatic effort intended to draw attention to police violence, but just some young assholes who thought it was a hoot to mock the dead.
Two of the students pressed their knees into the back and neck of their classmate, who was in blackface. (He's apparently a method racist.) They posted the grotesque image on Snapchat with the caption "Bye bye senoirs." Yes, they misspelled "seniors," but the three have more pressing problems than functional illiteracy. Their classmates with human souls shared screenshots of the post and expressed their disgust, but it's unclear what disciplinary action was taken against the students involved. Other students claim the three ghouls were suspended for five days. Mead High Principal Rachael Ayers resigned this week, but the announcement of her departure doesn't mention the racist incident.
Conservatives oppose critical race theory in schools, but that hasn't kept schools free of critical racists. Look, no one is teaching your kids that they're racist because they're white. They're racist because they do shit like this (content warning for people more sensitive than teenage racists):
Snapchat
Floyd's death was supposed to have sparked what the media repeatedly calls a “national reckoning on race." That reckoning never materialized. Here's a sampling of some of the grossness we've received instead.
A student at Gastonbury High School in Connecticut submitted a yearbook quote that was attributed to Floyd. It read: "It is a quite special secret pleasure how the people around us fail to realize what is really happening to them." Floyd never said this, nor did Marilyn Monroe. It was actually Adolf Hitler. No one accidentally fucks around and stumbles upon a Hitler quote. This was deliberate. Most Hitler quotes read like supervillain purple prose, so it's weird that the yearbook editor or faculty adviser didn't take the precaution of Googling this one.
Principal Nancy Bean said “we are saddened and distressed by what happened," but apparently not enough to reprint the yearbooks.
According to images of the "Current Events" section of the yearbook, one photo showed a crowd of mostly Black men next to an overturned car with a caption reading, "Black Lives Matter riots Started in Minneapolis in may of 2020." A photo on the opposite page showed mostly White men surrounding the U.S. Capitol with the caption, "Trump supporters protesting at the capitol."
That “protest" was a siege on the Capitol. They're still arresting fools! Revisionist history is how America maintains its exceptionalism, but at least let the dust settle before sprinkling around the fairy dust. The yearbook also included a photo of the one-term loser that declared, "President Trump WAS NOT impeached," but here in reality, the thug was impeached ... twice.
West Broward High School, near Fort Lauderdale, Florida, suspended distribution of its yearbook because of complaints regarding a Black Lives Matter spread.
Senior Elise Twitchell said school administrators decided to stop selling and distributing the $90 yearbook last week without consulting with the editors after parents complained. She said the yearbook editors were told that the pages were not objective because they didn't include a conversation about Blue Lives Matter, a pro-police countermovement that emerged after Black Lives Matter amid growing criticism of law enforcement.
Those big babies in blue are incapable of processing Black Lives Matter's very simple request: Don't kill us. There's apparently no way they can avoid killing us without putting their own lives in jeopardy. They're also too intellectually lazy to come up with an original cop-promoting, self-serving slogan that doesn't steal Black people's intellectual labor.
Broward County Public Schools released a statement announcing that the yearbooks were back on sale but with "an insert noting that the views expressed are not sponsored by the District." Yes, "Black Lives Matter" is still a controversial statement.
Now that vaccination rates are leading to more things opening up again, Americans are eager to start traveling, going to the beach, seeing movies, and, for some, showing up at public forums and accusing fellow Americans of trying to destroy America through socialism, or whatever is the rightwing panic flavor of the month. Case in point: a meeting yesterday of the Loudoun County (Virginia) School Board, which featured a packed auditorium and a lot of shouting.
Hooray, we're able to gather together again!
There have been a LOT of angry feels in Loudon County lately. An elementary PE teacher was suspended after insisting at a recent board meeting that his religious beliefs would prevent him from ever using a hypothetical trans student's preferred pronouns (a judge has now ordered the teacher reinstated). A group of parents wants a supposed "dirty novel" removed from ninth grade English classes, too.
And a whole bunch of parents are super aggrieved over what they're certain is the teaching of "critical race theory" in the schools, although the district's interim superintendent, Scott Ziegler, explained at a June 2 board meeting that the schools aren't teaching CRT to students. Rather, as the Washington Post reports, Ziegler has
explained that the school system is about two years into racial equity work spurred initially by a pair of high-profile reports that found widespread racism was imperiling Black and Hispanic students' progress in the county. In response, Loudoun produced a 22-page "Plan to Combat Systemic Racism" that called for developing alternative forms of discipline, hosting teacher trainings to foster "racial consciousness" and forbidding students from wearing the Confederate flag.
But no part of the plan involved teaching students critical race theory, Ziegler emphasized repeatedly[.]
To make matters worse, Ziegler noted that social media is full of images in which the school system's logo gets photoshooped onto various texts allegedly aligned with CRT, as "evidence" that innocent children are being taught all sorts of terrible things that aren't actually being taught. At yesterday's school board meeting, the board voted to hire Ziegler for the superintendent post full time, possibly because he's already been going around putting out these dumb culture war fires already.
Fox News and other rightwing media have been all in on the CRT nonsense, too, and some parents are trying to recall the entire school board because of all the CRT that's supposedly oppressing white kids. It probably doesn't help a hell of a lot that the county's racial equity program involves an approach labeled "culturally responsive teaching,"because look at how that's abbreviated!
Big surprise: Discussions of the alleged anti-white propaganda that's supposedly running rampant in Loudon County schools have been remarkably short on actual examples of curricular materials telling little white kindygartners they're personally responsible for slavery.
At last night's board meeting, 121 members of the public signed up to speak, and they were ANGRY. The crowd was quite unhappy, if not quite able to point to specific materials or lesson plans they had a beef with.
One parent objected to the schools "training our children to be social justice warriors" and "to hate our country," and another said they would "fight to the bitter end ... if you teach my children that they are racist just because they're white." Again, if any of the parents actually had examples of that happening, we haven't seen them, although I'll confess that when I asked for examples in that Twitter thread, I was assured it was everywhere. I'll save you the details, which were mostly links to rightwing fulminations about CRT, and one guy who said the bookWhite Fragility is a "CRT textbook," though he was a bit fuzzy on which schools it's being assigned in.
This is all very reminiscent of the 2009 Stupid Season, when Democratic members of Congress went home to hold town halls and were met by people screaming about death panels and Obamacare is Hitler and the like. With Fox News and the rest of the wingnuttosphere whipping up the moral panic, expect to hear a lot more about the evils of critical race theory, even though it's mostly just the same old Culture War blatherskite in a shiny new-panic wrapper. Also, it's Marxism, and how can you people sit there and defend Marxism? Are you going to let George Soros burn your city to the ground like he did Seattle and Portland, which are both now just miles of ash from horizon to horizon?
In conclusion, we are very glad that in many parts of the country, vaccination rates are making it safe to go out again, and if you don't mind, we're going to stay mostly at home just like we did before the lockdowns anyway.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2106.10 - 10:10
- Days ago = 2169 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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