Cold open: Hell of a way to die clip
Why Is Critical Race Theory?
Clips:
- “concerned parents” are just right-wing talking heads who happen to have kids
- Moms for Liberty
- What CRT is
- CRT created by
- Derrick Bell, a professor at Harvard who left in 1980 due to what he viewed as the university’s discriminatory hiring practices.
- Kimberlé Crenshaw
Critical theory is an approach to social philosophy that focuses on reflective assessment and critique of society and culture in order to reveal and challenge power structures…. Max Horkheimer described a theory as critical insofar as it seeks “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them.”
(wikipedia)The basic tenets of CRT include that racism and disparate racial outcomes are the result of complex, changing, and often subtle social and institutional dynamics, rather than explicit and intentional prejudices in individuals. CRT scholars view race and white supremacy as an intersectional social construct, which serves to uphold the interests of white people at the expense of marginalized communities. In the field of legal studies, CRT emphasizes that formally colorblind laws can still have racially discriminatory outcomes. A key CRT concept is intersectionality, which emphasizes that race can intersect with other identities (such as gender and class) to produce complex combinations of power and advantage.
The late Harvard Law professor Derrick Bell is credited as the father of critical race theory. He began conceptualizing the idea in the 1970s as a way to understand how race and American law interact, and developed a course on the subject. In 1980, Bell resigned his position at Harvard because of what he viewed as the institution’s discriminatory hiring practices.
Bell had been the only Black law professor among the faculty, and in his absence, the school no longer offered a course explicitly addressing race. When students asked administrators what could be done, Crenshaw says they received a terse response. “What is it that is so special about race and law that you have to have a course that examines it?” Crenshaw has recalled administrators asking. The administration’s inability to see the importance of understanding race and the law, she says, “got us thinking about how do we articulate that this is important and that law schools should include” the subject in their curricula.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_race_theory
The university rejected student requests, responding that no sufficiently qualified black instructor existed. Legal scholar Randall Kennedy writes that some students felt affronted by Harvard’s choice to employ an “archetypal white liberal… in a way that precludes the development of black leadership”. In response, numerous students, including Kimberlé Crenshaw and Mari Matsuda, boycotted and organized to develop an “Alternative Course” using Bell’s Race, Racism, and American Law (1973, 1st edition) as a core text.
The first formal meeting centered on critical race theory was the 1989 “New Developments in Critical Race Theory” workshop, an effort to connect the theoretical underpinnings of critical legal studies (CLS) to the day-to-day realities of American racial politics.
In 1995, pedagogical theorists Gloria Ladson-Billings and William F. Tate began applying the critical race theory framework in the field of education, moving it beyond the field of legal scholarship. They sought to better understand inequities in schooling. Scholars have since expanded work in this context to explore issues including segregation, relations between race, gender, and academic achievement, pedagogy, and research methodologies.
Common themes (just a link)
- Is it being taught in our schools?
- who is Christopher Rufo
- Rufo’s lies and agenda Christopher Rufo tweet re: CRT
We have successfully frozen their brand—”critical race theory”—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.
The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think “critical race theory.” We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.
@realchrisrufo on Twitter
This reminds me yet again of these quotes from the founder of the Council on Public Relations, Edward Bernays.
Propaganda got to be a bad word because of the [Nazi] Germans using it, so what I did was to try and find some other word, so we found the words Council on Public Relations.
From Adam Curtis, Century of the Self, 2002. RDF Television/BBC
Bear that in mind any time you hear discussion of “PR” — it is and always has been propaganda in service of consumerism (Bernays explicitly sought to encourage consumerism and materialism (not the good kind)), racist wars and occupations, and the idea that the endless greed exhibited in our society is actually good. This is what “democracy” means to people like Bernays and Rufo:
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. Vast numbers of human beings must co-operatein this manner if they are to live together in a smoothly functioning society.
Edward Bernays, 1928. Propaganda (New York: Ig Publishing 2005), page 48
Both quotes were sourced from Raoul & Bonner’s, Advertising Shits In Your Head.
- Race is a legal and social construct
- CRT is a reaction to BLM
Credits
- Some More News: Why Is Critical Race Theory
- What a Hell of a Way to Die: This Is The End feat. Joe Kassabian
Outro clip
- More on the conditions on the grounds in Afghanistan as viewed by Afghan veterans
- https://twitter.com/HellOfAWay/status/1432468006987309062
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasht-i-Leili_massacre