Thread by @normative

I very much doubt county schools are teaching “critical race theory,” for the same reason I doubt they’re teaching vector calculus. But the label does a good job obscuring what concrete elements of the curriculum parents are objecting to.

https://twitter.com/iamamnanawaz/status/1402360950246760452

I have no trouble buying that there’s some actually cringy struggle-session stuff being pushed in some schools. I’d also bet many parents want their kids to learn mythologized history where systemic racism is a footnote. “CRT” as a vague umbrella term obscures the details.

I just skimmed half a dozen articles on Loudon County schools & “Critical Race Theory” and it’s striking how thin on specifics they all are. Parents are convinced it’s become part of the curriculum, which administrators deny, but there was virtually nothing concrete.

It all seems very abstract—lots of quotes from parents along the lines of “CRT is racist and bad,” surprisingly little “this is a thing my kid was taught, and I found that lesson objectionable.”

It seems like the (or anyway one) inciting incident here is actually an “equity training” for the *teachers* rather than the students, aimed at addressing the racial achievement &. discipline gaps in county schools. lcps.org/site/default.a…

Again, it would not exactly be shocking if a DEI training included some watered-down CRT ideas, possibly in a dumb or offensive form. But I don’t know how you ask the question “are we systematically failing our students of color?” without bumping into concepts that sound CRTish.

This is an important point. The campaign to make “Critical Race Theory” a bogeyman has ended up associating a lot of the basic academic vocabulary for talking about race with CRT specifically. Which is like thinking “supply & demand” is a Keynesian buzzword.

https://twitter.com/roderickgraham/status/1402664514265432069

That’s going to poison the well if you now have a bunch of parents & teachers under the impression that any mention of, say, “institutional racism” or “privilege” is automatically Scary Marxist Critical Race Theory. Which may be the point.

If the vocabulary for talking about those topics is branded as SMCRT, you can make the topics themselves off-limits. Now you don’t have to say “I don’t want to talk about institutional racism, that makes me uncomfortable.” You can say “uh oh, that sounds like SMCRT!”

Which, of course, would be a problem. Because you can definitely dig up harmful or misguided material from diversity trainings, but… you just can’t teach history accurately if it’s verboten to say “systemic racism.”

And you’re going to have a hard time addressing indisputable racial disparties in the school system if it’s automatically “ideological” or “pushing an agenda” to ever ask teachers to reflect, well… “critically”… on how race might shape their interactions with students.