Today’s Equivalent to the Salem Witch Hunt: Critical Race Theory
It took three hundred years for Massachusetts to get around to formally acknowledging the harm done by the most notorious case of mass hysteria in Colonial America: the Salem Witch Trials.
Over the past year, our most recent episode of politically induced delirium has taken shape. Now citizens, instead of being accused of being in league with the devil, are being accused of being possessed by Critical Race Theory.
Sixteen states have passed or are in the process of enacting legislation banning the teaching of what, until recently, was known as a graduate-level legal theory.
Here in San Diego, a group of concerned parents, led by Frank Xu, Co Founder and Board President of Californians for Equal Rights Foundation, are picketing board of education meetings throughout the county. KKKUSI is proudly featuring their every move, even when just a handful of people show up.
Mr. Xu, and all of those interviewed by local newsmedia, have made it clear that they have no idea about the specifics of what they are opposing. They couldn’t identify Critical Race Theory if it was transformed into animal form and bit them in the ass.
This ignorance hasn’t stopped a so-called grassroots movement from injecting the topic into virtually any discussion of public institutions. Facts don’t matter as long as the focus of the right wing effort is fear. This isn't about what people think. It’s about what people are being induced to feel.
https://twitter.com/JakeLobin/status/1407726368402587648?s=20
The demonizing of Critical Race Theory has its ideological roots in the Great Replacement fable used by white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups. Now it's been sanitized for mass consumption by a willing and/or gullible media.
An early mention of Critical Race Theory in the context as a danger to society hails back to a July 2020 story complaining about colleges hiring diversity officers in the Daily Caller, a right wing media site co-founded by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson.
A month later, Twitter posts from the Russian media organ RT containing the words "critical race theory" began to appear. Multiple researchers have since found evidence suggesting the topic has been astroturfed and amplified by coordinated, inauthentic activity.
I am NOT suggesting that the current hoo-haw is a Russian plot. It’s clear following the social media campaigns surrounding the 2020 election that they and other state-inspired actors no longer feel the need to create controversy; there are plenty of internet based “researchers’ willing to do the heavy lifting in return for a moment of fame.
In October, then-President Donald Trump began including the topic in social media, calling it a classic communist divide and conquer tactic. Right wingers Candace Owens, Dan Bongino, Turning Point USA, Steve Bannon, Gateway Pundit, and Jack Posobiec all joined the fray.
Google searches on the phrase show that it really took off following the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. Now it’s become central to GOP strategy aimed at creating a backlash that will vault them back into power.
Via Politico:
Earlier this month, Republicans at the North Carolina GOP’s annual convention jumped to their feet with enthusiastic applause when Trump called for a ban on critical race theory from the local school level to the federal government. Some top Republicans aren’t coy when they talk about the electoral benefits that stoking such a culture war issue could provide.
“I look at this and say, ‘Hey, this is how we are going to win.’ I see 50 [House Republican] seats in 2022. Keep this up,” [Steve] Bannon said. “I think you’re going to see a lot more emphasis from Trump on it and DeSantis and others. People who are serious in 2024 and beyond are going to focus on it.”
Jessica Anderson, executive director of the Heritage Foundation’s advocacy arm, said critical race theory is one of the top two issues her group is working on alongside efforts to tighten voting laws. A former Office of Management and Budget official in the Trump administration, Anderson’s Heritage Action for America put out a pamphlet on Monday calling critical race theory a “destructive” ideology and urging voters to call on their lawmakers to support anti-critical race theory bills introduced by Reps. Chip Roy (R-Texas) and Dan Bishop (R-N.C.). It also urges voters to use Freedom of Information Act requests as a tactic to identify critical race theory-tied elements in schools’ curricula.
“It could turn out to be one of the most important conservative grassroots fights since the Tea Party movement,” she said.
A typical response to the right wing frenzy has been to calmly state the facts, namely that Critical Race Theory is a field of study and isn’t taught below graduate level education. Or to say (correctly) that the topic is being used to stand in for any teaching about race and racism and U.S. history that makes conservative white people uncomfortable.
That’s great, and it’s important to remember the sandwich method of responding to political falsehoods, namely:
State the reality
Mention the fallacy
Restate the reality.
I’d like to call readers attention to an interview with sociologist Victor Ray about the moral panic over Critical Race Theory. Here’s snip:
CRT was developed by Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and others to examine how racial power in the United States is reinforced, sometimes explicitly and sometimes through what seem like neutral laws that nonetheless work in discriminatory ways. So, zoning in schools now doesn’t have explicit racial criteria, but because of the United States’ history of residential segregation, the schools end up highly segregated. Racially neutral law or policy can nonetheless produce deeply unequal racial outcomes.
What it takes to counter a fear based campaign is an emotional response so compelling that it clears the air.
Sixty seven years ago this month, Joseph Welch, special counsel for the U.S. Army, effectively ended the historical political travesty headed by Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Via History.com:
On June 9, 1954, McCarthy again became agitated at Welch’s steady destruction of each of his arguments and witnesses. In response, McCarthy charged that Frederick G. Fisher, a young associate in Welch’s law firm, had been a long-time member of an organization that was a “legal arm of the Communist Party.” Welch was stunned. As he struggled to maintain his composure, he looked at McCarthy and declared, “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” It was then McCarthy’s turn to be stunned into silence, as Welch asked, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”
The audience of citizens and newspaper and television reporters burst into wild applause. Just a week later, the hearings into the Army came to a close. McCarthy, exposed as a reckless bully, was officially condemned by the U.S. Senate for contempt against his colleagues in December 1954. During the next two-and-a-half years McCarthy spiraled into alcoholism. Still in office, he died in 1957.
I am holding out hope that yesterday’s remarks to Congress by Army General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will herald the beginning of the end of this made-up fear campaign.
https://twitter.com/JimLaPorta/status/1407747283672784898?s=20
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