Thread by @normative

I find myself increasingly frustrated with all sides of this conversation. The right wing media has made a crude caricature of a varied body of academic work their flavor-of-the-week boogieman, while the pushback is veering toward “CRT? Never heard of it. Does it even exist?"

Simultaneously true:
(A) The CRT backlash is badly confused about what CRT is, and often in bad faith.
(B) There really does exist a line of CRT, influential in some ed departments & teacher trainings, that views pedagogy as a locus of activism for racial equity.

That second part, however distorted the noise machine’s picture of it, is not a conspiracy theory or made up. There are books and conferences and everything. Pre-backlash nobody would have seriously denied this part.

And that’s… good. A consciously antiracist pedagogy is a good idea. It’s not the same as “teaching CRT,” which is, you know, for grad students. Particular instances of how that manifests in classrooms may also be ill-conceived...

…which is the kernel of reality that gives a largely fictive moral panic traction. We are having a dumb and dishonest debate. There’s also a legitimate topic we could, in magical Christmasland, be having a conversation about.

I mean, I get this. The valid debate is not realistically available, there’s very little to gain from engaging with the fanfic version, and from Obi-Wan’s “certain point of view,” the thing they are talking about doesn’t exist, so why waste time?

And I guess “why waste time” is that even when Fox moves on & the ed board meetings aren’t circuses, there will be parents with both reasonable & unreasonable objections to stuff that happens in classrooms.

And maybe you can convince some of them their objections are misplaced, or that the valid objections are not usefully parsed in terms of the hegemony of inherently racist CRT ideology. But you’re not going to convince them there’s not a thing bothering them.

And if the only choices they see are the Chris Rufo theory of the case and “you’re imagining things,” a lot of them are going to default to buying the narrative on offer.

I’m not sure this is quite what Jamelle meant, but this seems like an apt analogy, in that McCarthyism was a deranged moral panic launched for cynical political advanatage, but also Soviet esponiage was an actual thing.

(Possibly a slightly uncharitable analogy, in that the actual Soviet espionage was a significantly more serious problem, but structurally pretty on point.)

Juuust to flip back to the original tweet I started rambling from: I didn’t mean to endorse a critique of this particular event. On face this sounds fine to me. Good, even.