Response to my "What Critical Race Theory Is Doing To Our Children"
How divisive can a concept be?
My recent post, What Critical Race Theory Is Doing To Our Children generated some interesting comments.
I highlighted several examples of harm this theory is doing. For example:
San Diego Unified School District's decision to abolish turning in homework on time.
Oregon Department of Education released guidance saying that asking students to show their work is "white supremacy."
A Philadelphia elementary school had fifth-graders celebrate "black communism.
Here is a thoughtful response by Ron Collins:
The trickiest problem with this CRT, and wherein most of it most dangerous hazards dwell, is that so much of its founding premises is substantially true.
Take a moment....
Slavery was real, manifest destiny was real, the Indian Removal Act was real, boarding schools for native children were real, the shattering consequences of seizing the wealthier half of Mexico's national territory and throwing an arbitrary border across its population's longstanding ancestral homelands were real, the enslavement of Chinese men into railroad labor and their women into sexual thralldom were real, Japanese internment camps and the vigilante seizure of their assets were real, Jim Crow was real, etc, etc.
Just like climate change or environmental degradation or workplace abuses or the goddamn Hollywood casting couch, the problem arises when one ideological camp is allowed to dominate the discourse on what any of these issues represent, and to commit the oldest political sleight-of-hand in the book with them, which is to imply a precise equivalency between being able to name the problem accurately and thus by default being in sole possession of the only solutions to it.
Just because AOC or the 1609ists can accurately state the obvious, that American police officers and courts have long indulged in racial profiling both at will and by policy (beginning with the nomenclature of the very dispatch calls which send them out), does not postulate in itself that their proposed countermeasures might ever be effective, much less in themselves or having any grounding in either natural justice or constitutional viability.
Just a single example.
I have long been frustrated with this disparity, between what a far-left says are the things we must improve on in our national life (and they're quite often more on-point than we wish they were), and the repressive and essentially Stalinist measures it posits as forcible solutions to them.
I feel as though by now, the fanaticism and fantasism and rank opportunism of the left have become such dangers in themselves, that for me ever to agree with any of their assertions openly would be just to encourage, to aid and abet, them.
The conservative right is absolutely hogtied by this conundrum: the reflex of its rank and file is to minimalize ('yes, some Asians died building that railroad, but in the scheme of things....'), or contextualize ('the Indian wars were in different times'), or rationalize ('there was a war on, and there actually were Japanese spies all over'), disclaim ('well yes, but a few lynchings were then, and this is now, and we're not the guilty parties here....'), or outright deny ('white privilege? WHAT white privilege? I live in a trailer park.....'), and let its responses, to the left's posing an unfortunate past as grounds enough for a totalitarian future, end there.
And, a substantial portion of the endless torrent of minimizings, contextings, rationales, disclaimers, and denials, is also actually true and defensible as arguments. History is complicated , and it doesn't all happen in one place just to one set of witnesses, and even those who had been on hand to witness t firsthand may or may not go on and remember it accurately or fairly later on nor tell the truth about what they themselves saw or experienced.
History is art, not science. What trouble me is wondering why we need to turn the troubled tapestry of American life into an updated 21C version of 'A Clockwork Orange', to address it.
If all the left can come up with to mitigate historic wrongs, and I see no evidence to the contrary, is to throw more and more deficit spending into more and more cash-cows disguised as government programs named with ideological brand jingles, then I am sick of hearing from the left about what our ancestors had been up to, or what big-city cops do all day when I regard those cities' very existence as the dumbest idea the human race ever indulged in.
Mostly I just try to love my neighbor as myself, and keep out of the walk-in traps of social media and partisan rancor which are nothing but a lot of ideological hot air designed mostly to bait clicks and tilt ballot totals.
I highly recommend the rest of this country do the same, and refreshingly enough, day in and day out, is doing exactly the same and mostly better at it than I am and has been all along.
What a handful of self-appointed 'public intellectuals' (grifters with microphones) or political hacks or insular urbane pundits or glad-handing semi-elected officials have to say about American life, whichever side they might be on, they do not have a fuck-all clue how Americans live nor how the nation truly goes about its everyday affairs, nor care to find out. Why encourage them?
We'd be better off to abolish the federal government, dismantle every city of more than ten thousands souls, and make the possession of a smart phone a death-penalty offense, than ever adhere to these clueless wags' supercilious prescriptions on how we are supposed to live and under what form of governance.
Those things aren't going to happen either. Just as flying in jets to liturgize and genuflect about climate change has zero hope of ever easing down some planetary thermostat.
Most folks are onto this, by like age five or so, and just do the best they can to get on with life and be as fair and reasonable as they can get away with. What the beltway and the legacy media and liberal academia have to say about it is just entertainment, and the entertainers are the only ones who don't get this.
Clayton Craddock is a father, independent thinker, and the founder and publisher of the social and political commentary newsletter Think Things Through and host of the Think Things Through Podcast.
Follow him on Instagram, Twitter or read more on his website: claytoncraddock.com
A fundamental question to ask is always, Who benefits? Benefits can have a variety of meanings, such as financial profit, political influence, personal gratification, etc.
In all this CRT mess, with all the hollering and posturing on all sides, who benefits? Most importantly, assuming agreement on the fact of slavery and its subsequent effects,, do those who are disadvantaged by racial discrimination benefit from the CRT wars? I say not at all. Those who benefit are those who are waging the continuing war, not those who suffer (in various ways) from the nation's history of discrimination.
I'm on board with trying to make the world a better place in our own lives. If we treat others as we would have them treat us we make the world a better place.
There is a role for government. But the test of effective government is whether it's programs are actually effective in terms of outcomes and cost effectiveness. Meanwhile, all those of us who can only write letters to representatives and vote when elections arise, can just treat others as we would be treated ourselves.
If the man who called the police because a realtor was showing a house to a man and his son had treated them as he would have wanted to be treated, he would not have called the police and no one would have been handcuffed. (I could burn out my laptop and not run out of material.)
Patience, tolerance, understanding and simple good behavior still have a lot of merit to them.