Thread by @timjacobwise

Those attacking Critical Race Theory want us to get bogged down explaining why they don't understand CRT, or what CRT really is. Don't fall for it. Flip the frame. By their own admission, they seek to lump all discussion of racism, past or present, under the CRT label...

THREAD

...Bc they don't want any analysis of racism as a historic or contemporary force in the U.S. This is why even books like To Kill a Mockingbird are coming under attack, and books looking at segregation are being called "divisive" because they cast whites in a 'bad' light (2)...

Rather than spend time trying to explain what CRT is, expose their real agenda: canceling truth about history and its lingering effects. Censorship. Book banning. And as I said in an earlier thread directed at one of their main attack dogs, their approach would cancel MLK...(3)

Make THIS the main rebuttal. The laws being passed in statehouses ban teaching anything that could make members of a racial group feel stigma, or cause division or feelings of guilt, or suggest racism had been foundational to America. That means you can't read MLK...(4)

Or listen to any of his speeches except the I Have a Dream speech, and even then not the whole thing -- just the "content of their character" line (which the right misinterprets). Bc in that speech MLK said America had given Black folks a bad check. As in, from the start...(5)

As in, from the founding of the country. As in racism was foundational to the nation. He didn't view it as an aberration of just a few bad apples, but systemic and ingrained and said so in all of his books (which no right-winger has ever read)...(6)

Likewise, kids couldn't read King's Letter from Birmingham Jail, bc it specifically calls out white moderates. I suspect white folks could "feel bad" seeing whites called out like that, so it too would have to go, so as to protect precious white people's feelings (6)...

And in his book Why We Can't Wait, he endorsed affirmative action, which he did again in a 1965 interview and again (along with reparations) by 1968. But since those are "divisive" and suggest whites today must accept some responsibility for history, it would be banned...(7)...

In his last address to SCLC, King referenced the importance of Black pride and affirming Black beauty, a self-affirmation he said was "made compelling by the white man's crimes" against Black people. I mean, talking of "the white man's crimes?" My goodness! Can't have that! (8)..

And then, in an essay written before his death but published after it, King blasted white America for "ingrained and tenacious racism." But to say white America has ingrained racism will give some white folks a sad, so we must ban the teaching of this awful racist man! (9)...

Fact is, MLK made white people uncomfortable. Most whites hated him till the day he died. Go back and check the polls back then. Most whites despised him and viewed him as divisive. Because he called bullshit on the country and on white racism in particular (10)...

Conservatives only accept the sanitized version of him. But the real MLK would have to be banned under these attacks on CRT and antiracism education more broadly. So this should be our line of response: Conservatives want to cancel MLK...(11)

Let's force them to deal with the reality of King's critique of America. Make THEM admit he was a radical critic of the nation and thus they have to disown him (which is hard to do now bc of his secular saint status)...(12)

...or watch them dance around the truth while we expose the pernicious truth of their agenda and expose the nation to the real MLK -- the one they should have known all along, and will now have to contend with. Either way, put these assholes on the defensive...END