It’s plain. Today’s attacks on critical race theory aren’t meant to rebut its main arguments. They’re meant to paint it with such broad brushstrokes that any basic effort to reckon with the causes and impact of racism in our society can be demonized and dismissed.
Crenshaw getting to the heart of the issue: ignorance. It is this ignorance that engenders complacency as the norm for otherwise progressive people when it comes to racial justice in the US.
And that ignorance is no accident. Those who benefit most under the status quo have absolutely no interest in teaching the next generation facts about their nation's history that might lead them to endorse a radical restructuring of the socioeconomic order.
And this must all be situated within the reform-retrenchment dialectic of our history. Antiracist efforts are demonized in order to justify White anti-democratic control.
It’s true: I made a mistake. On Twitter dot com! So I issued a correction. The point Wokal is taking me to task for here is arguably the most inconsequential thing in the entire thread. Great place to start! 🧵
What Rufo wrote is a blatant falsehood. It amounts to “Commie Crenshaw says White bougie Black prole lulz.”
What Crenshaw claims in the excerpt is simple: both CRT and Marxism begin by appealing to a social ontology which is obscured by that society’s dominant self-conception.
Rufo’s latest piece, an op-ed in the WSJ. It’s largely a mashup of many talking points he espoused on his own website and in City Journal.
The feature that stands out: the piece cites no evidence; there is but one broken hyperlink referencing the NYT. 🧵wsj.com/articles/battl…
Rufo outlines the shape his argument will take: he will argue that CRT is not a benign academic concept, that the anti-CRT crowd are not a buncha white nationalists, and that anti-CRT bills aren’t about teaching history.
Ah yes, CRT is a “radical ideology that seeks to use race as a means of moral, social and political revolution. You may read this charitably and think CRT sounds a lot like the civil rights movement. But WSJ subscribers probably just think [[COMMIE ALERT]]