Thread by @normative

🧵A few thoughts about the way the branding of the new boogeyman as “Critical Race Theory” has made the discussion around it polarized and unproductive, to the benefit of (and probably as intended by) those who did the branding…

https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1457358348454711296

First, it’s of course true that K-12 schools are not "teaching Critical Race Theory” any more than they’re teaching vector calculus. And this is the instinctive response of people who had some sense of what “critical race theory” was before it became a buzzword.

But most people had never heard of CRT before it became a buzzword. To them it means “a fuzzy constellation of stuff happening in schools I’m uncomfortable with.” And that is very explicitly the point of the folks mounting the crusade.

"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” washingtonpost.com/education/2021…

The plan, explicitly, is to hijack the label—evoking an abstruse academic theory that might motivate a secret elite plot—to slap on a whole cluster of loosely related phenomena. And the fact that it’s inaccurate is, somewhat ingeniously, a component of its effectiveness.

Because, predictably, people with at least a passing prior acquaintance with CRT say “that’s absurd, nobody’s teaching that to 9th graders.” Which is literally true. But *the stuff in schools people are vaguely uncomfortable with* is, indeed, happening.

So when people say “this is nuts, schools aren’t teaching CRT,” it feels like gaslighting. Because the folks who just learned the term don’t mean the same thing by it. They mean “whatever’s going on in my kid’s school I’m uneasy about.”

So now the sense of a conspiratorial agenda is reinforced: “Well they’re denying it’s happening, but my kids told me all about X, Y, & Z… What are they trying to hide?"

Keeping the dispute at this level of vague abstraction also tends to short-circuit any potentially fruitful discussion of the merits of particular things people are concerned about. Because there’s a wide range of concerns, with widely varying degrees of merit to them.

Some parents just want their kids to learn a sanitized rah-rah version of U.S. history, and would prefer racism be treated as a kind of unfortunate footnote to a stirring history of liberty. That attitude is reflected in a lot of the anti-CRT legislation we’ve seen.

And the correct response to those parents is: “Well, I’m sorry, and I know it’s not quite how you remember learning things as a kid, but it’s accurate and kids should learn about it."

That said, not *all* the concerns are born of jingoistic delusion. There are more specific things happening in classrooms that are DEI adjacent & either legitimately objectionable or act least reasonably debatable.

Understandably, because the folks driving the moral panic are acting in bad faith, even liberal folks who might agree some of the specific manifestations are misguided don’t want to legitimize the panic by allowing as much.

This is very much a recapitulation of what we saw happen with the 1619 Project, which had a number of fairly significant factual errors, but also sparked a backlash that had as much or more to do with what it got right than what it got wrong.

Maybe I’m naive, but I tend to think in both cases, you’d get a surprising level of consensus if you sat normal people down for an hour of quiet discussion. “Yes, OK, these five things were wrong, the other stuff is right."

The function of the package deal is to try & push the folks with legitimate or at least debatable objections into a coalition with the folks who have illegitimate objections, as though there’s some unified thing they’re all taking issue with.

And in a sense, they’ve effectively weaponized their own bad faith. Because you get Dems & progressives saying “this manufactured moral panic is racist dogwhistle BS,” which at the top it is.

But this ends up alienating a bunch of parents with particularized concerns, some of whom are sincere but misinformed, and some of whom may even have fair objections.

Trump tried the same trick: “The attacks on me are really expressions of contempt for you, my supporters.”

Sometimes I suspect being so OPENLY bad faith about it (Rufo was explaining his Master Plan on public Twitter, after all) is itself strategic. You bait out a response that (correctly) treats it as bad faith...

… allowing them to turn around and tell parents: “See, they’re calling YOU a racist if you have any issues with the curriculum. Or at least what we’ve told you is the curriculum."

In a sense this is a classic terror tactic: Goad the adversary into a response that hits a civilian population, then recruit off it.

* some of you are apparently very fancy & learned some vector calculus in high school. nevertheless.