(1)>>The Critical Race theory , and (2)>>Cancel Culture has aims to "re-write" as much of American History as possible . CRT is not merely an academic theory. In their 2011 book, “Critical Race Theory: An Introduction,” law professors Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado -- Goldberg cites Delgado as “a key figure in the movement” -- stresses that CRT is simultaneously a form of activism grounded in a radical perspective that “questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.” SO is the Critical Race Theory grounded in anarchist philosophy at a glance ? Here is some reasons why supporters of this theory were reflecting on the effects of the 1968 Civil rights act, which seemed to have not completely eliminated racism in the US. Some lawyers in the 80s saw black civil rights as a "legally solved" problem, implying more application of existing laws was the answer to racism. I agree America has problems , there is no escaping the fact of slavery , Jim Crow , lynchings were a part of U.S. history, can't be erased sadly. History is history . (3)>>America is not the only nation in the world that had slavery , slavery still exists in some parts of the world right now in the 21st century . Crucially we must recognize racism , am in agreement for that that . Here's the problem with critical race theory. It attributes virtually all difference in performance and outcome to racial discrimination, when often times it does not. Asian Americans is the best performing group when it comes to academics, and they face the highest bully and harassment rates of all racial groups in academia and workplace. In this example, the theory that the unequal performance is due to racial discrimination completely falls apart. LAST YEAR Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget ordered federal agencies to “begin to identify all contracts or other agency spending related to any training on ‘critical race theory,’” which it described as “un-American propaganda.” (4)>>The conservative government in Britain declared some uses of critical race theory in education illegal. “We do not want teachers to teach their white pupils about white privilege and inherited racial guilt,” said the Tory equalities minister, Kemi Badenoch. “Any school which teaches these elements of critical race theory, or which promotes partisan political views such as defunding the police without offering a balanced treatment of opposing views, is breaking the law.”And yet the theory seems to have ironically shifted to an individualistic, invasive, and shaming dogma that focuses on white privilege and using guilt to motivate raced-white people to act. I don’t see guilt as a sustainable fuel. And I don’t think it’s helpful to make generalizations about any individuals. To me, this seems to be destroying solidarity.According to the (5)>>CACAGNY screed, CRT claims that “you are only your race” and that “by your race alone you will be judged.” The theory of intersectionality—belies the point, of course, arguing that race operates along with other key determinants of social positioning such as class, gender, disability, and so on. Nor do I know of any serious CRT scholar who would endorse the CACAGNY qualification that, in intersection “with other victimization categories” like gender, “race is always primary. Without addressing specifics of critical race theory, I agree it needs more work as long as it is controversial and people are divided over it. It's a binary issue with lefties wanting it and righties hating it, and we can't put something like that in schools.
Do Americans REALLY CARE ABOUT CRT ?
Apparently out of the 65% of Americans who've even heard of CRT, 38% are ok with it, while a whole 58% aren't. I.e., despite what the narrative that's been pushed ("CRT good, actually, only evil right wingers want it banned because they're racist"), the majority of Americans don't want CRT. And that divide is even bigger when you look at people who are strongly in favor of it, 25%, and strongly opposed, 53%.That means that there's many people who are probably just passively accepting of it because they've been blasted with the whole "you're probably a conservative if you disagree" attitude.
The 1619 Project.
The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.So the project isn't really historical research, but a collection of journalistic articles, that show American history through a very narrow lens, often overlooking the broader picture. (6)>>It seems odd to me that 1619 was the story of America. Seems more the story of Brits, Spaniards, and the French starting up a horrible trade route 150 years before the idea of America came forth. Still seems like an odd place to start, a ship of black slaves arriving instead of native Americans. The history of America stretches much further back.The letter sent to the Times says, “We applaud all efforts to address the foundational centrality of slavery and racism to our history,” but then veers into harsh criticism of the 1619 Project. The letter refers to “matters of verifiable fact” that “cannot be described as interpretation or ‘framing’” and says the project reflected “a displacement of historical understanding by ideology.” Wilentz and his fellow signatories didn’t just dispute the Times Magazine’s interpretation of past events, but demanded corrections. The letter disputes a passage in (7)>>Hannah-Jones’s introductory essay, which lauds the contributions of black people to making America a full democracy and says that *“*one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery” as abolitionist sentiment began rising in Britain.This argument is explosive. From abolition to the civil-rights movement, activists have reached back to the rhetoric and documents of the founding era to present their claims to equal citizenship as consonant with the American tradition. The Wilentz letter contends that the 1619 Project’s argument concedes too much to slavery’s defenders, likening it to South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun’s assertion that “there is not a word of truth” in the Declaration of Independence’s famous phrase that “all men are created equal.” Where Wilentz and his colleagues see the rising anti-slavery movement in the colonies and its influence on the Revolution as a radical break from millennia in which human slavery was accepted around the world, Hannah-Jones’ essay outlines how the ideology of white supremacy that sustained slavery still endures today.“To teach children that the American Revolution was fought in part to secure slavery would be giving a fundamental misunderstanding not only of what the American Revolution was all about but what America stood for and has stood for since the Founding,” Wilentz told me. Anti-slavery ideology was a “very new thing in the world in the 18th century,” he said, and “there was more anti-slavery activity in the colonies than in Britain.” How can you attribute the characteristics of European society to the core of America’s foundation when the founding of the American government was purposely constructed to address the issues of European society? (8)>>Slavery did not come from the American founding. Here’s what the former slave and legal scholar, Frederick Douglass had to say. “Abolish slavery tomorrow, and not a sentence or syllable of the Constitution need be altered. It was purposely so framed as to give no claim, no sanction to the claim, of property in man. If in its origin slavery had any relation to the government, it was only as the scaffolding to the magnificent structure, to be removed as soon as the building was completed.” The constitution was not pro-slavery or anti-slavery but pro-precedent and before George Washington was even president the legal precedent was overwhelmingly against slavery. Take the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 as an example.The reality is that slavery resulted from those who ignored the constitution and by the 1820s and begun to write laws conflicting it, specifically when it comes to slavery. Like Douglass, Henry Clay, and Lincoln said, slavery didn’t grew as a progressive institution over time and was not engendered directly from the founding. It wasn’t until the confederacy wrote their own constitution, that an American constitution included the word slavery.Many people don’t realize that the American revolution was very much like a 1st civil war. No one seems to ask themselves what happened to the loyalists and how did they influence politics? Did they like the American constitution or did they want to progress beyond it?
Canceling out the Cancel Culture .
It’s hilarious how often “cancel culture isn’t real” has come up recently. Taring down the statutes of confederate monuments , defacing the Lincoln Memorial . Burning , looting , in the name of social justice was the "norm" last year 2020 . Cancel culture, as defined by social media users, is when a collective group of individuals on the internet “delete” someone for their views on social issues regarding sexuality, race and gender .(9)>>The term “Cancel Culture” needs to be retired. It's more about censorship Cancel Culture is just adult accountability. The truth is, people with power and influence facing tangible consequences for the dangerous filth they generate. Canceling, also known as Deplatforming, is to inhibit a person's ability to voice a thought or opinion that people may consider objectionable or offensive.The proclivity of human tribalism along with the networking ability of social media has resulted in groups attempting to bury other voices through manipulation such as slander, threats, or group shaming. When “cancellation” targeting journalists or academics comes from the right, it is almost invariably met with a strong pushback from within the profession. This is already the case with both (10)>>Emily Wilder and Hannah-Jones.When “cancellation” targeting journalists or academics comes from the left, it almost invariably comes from within the profession. And I think it's obvious to note that there are far more Leftists in Academia today than conservatives by large measure which would logically result in a more prominent Left cancel culture. Those allegedly engaged in “cancel culture” reject this partisan characterization. Their goal is to publicly call out powerful public people for harmful or prejudicial conduct or beliefs, or to remove from public view symbols that represent historical injustices toward particular groups. The goal is moral accountability and social justice, inspired by movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. Yet even if free speech was never an ideal that liberals truly lionized, there is mounting evidence that some progressives don’t even recognize it as a legitimate right. There have been concerted campaigns by political activists, intellectuals and the Twitterati to silence — and, worse, harass, intimidate and destroy — people who say things that are wrong, unscientific, bigoted, hateful, or that are simply insensitive or give aid and comfort to President Donald Trump and Republicans in general.Recent victims of these efforts include a motley crew of scientists, pundits and writers, some of them self-described liberals. They include respected epidemiologists, such as John Ioannidis, who dared to question the consensus around the COVID-19 lockdown approach to containing the virus — but did not necessarily deny basic facts about the pandemic, even if some of his initial predictions proved wrong. Public intellectuals also are on the list. Consider Steven Pinker, who has been accused by his critics — fellow colleagues, no less! — of “moving in the proximity of scientific racism” and “supporting [centrist] New York Times columnist David Brooks” (two unrelated accusations) when he actually argued that we should not censor or ignore controversial or even wrong work by scientists and thinkers that he, in fact, disagrees with. Cancel culture has become so widespread, it has ruined lives, damaged reputations, and jeopardized the futures of young people whose lives have barely begun.Despite the freedom that is given on the internet, users can sometimes feel the need to attack anyone who doesn’t share their same views.Social media has the power to influence the way people see the world around them. Some trends only last a matter of days, but trends like cancel culture can go on for years and continue to gain momentum over time.
NOTES AND COMMENTS:
(1)>>The Critical Race theory. Critical Race theory says that systems, not just people, can be racist. We mostly think about racism from the perspective of one person hating a group of people because of prejudice. Society is a system of laws and bureaucracy that far outlives those that create them. Even a non-malicious bias can cause huge problems in implementation of these laws - not to mention malicious acts. Zoning laws, voting districts, criminalization of things highly correlated with race - all these things can cause self-perpetuating systems that disadvantage one race to the benefit of another even as they appear "race-neutral" on their face. In fact, those administering and enforcing those systems need not be racist at all.Critical Race Theory focuses on these systems and tries to unpack the assumptions that created them, and critique whether those assumptions are correct on their face, simply seem correct due to self-fulfilling prophecies, or are outright maliciously false.The pushback comes from 1) malicious actors who want the systems to remain unfair, and 2) non-malicious actors who don't want to examine and be made to feel bad about just doing "their job" as part of society or 3) those who fear if systems change the system might end up disadvantageous to their race instead. (2)>>Cancel Culture . It would be great if "cancel culture" was entirely about justice for people who were abused or oppressed, but it really seems to be more about thought control disguised as justice for abused and oppressed people. Cancel culture is a mindset that rushes to throw band aids over mouths without ever wondering or caring what the underlying cause is. That willful blindness (and in some it's blameless ignorance) hurts what I believe is the underlying good that people want to do. And applying cancel culture to historical figures is beyond ridiculous. It's one thing to take issue with confederate monuments, but when you're stripping the names of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson off of schools in the name of social justice(as SF school district has announced) you've gone too far, and basically taken up a position in which you will literally never be able to satisfy every fragile offended person because there will always be some new complaint. It's the if you give a mouse a cookie of social justice.Moderate voices on the Left, fearful that the current cultural revolution has/will devolve into tyranny where opposing voices are forcibly silenced, have signed an open letter pleading with the radical Left. Signatories include Gloria Steinem (feminist and journalist), Garry Wills (historian), and J.K. Rowling (author of the Harry Potter books).(3)>>America is not the only nation in the world that had slavery. By far the most shocking result to emerge from his years of polling is this: Students overwhelmingly believe that slavery “was an American problem . . . and they are very fuzzy about the history of slavery prior to the Colonial era. Their entire education about slavery was confined to America.” The New York Times, whose “1619 Project” advertises that it now “aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding.” Why 1619? Because, says the Times, that is the date of the arrival of the first slaves to the land that would a century-and-a-half later be called the United States. Because America’s “true founding” arose out of slavery, this institution is the key to understanding America’s uniqueness as a country and culture. Of course, it is important to study the history of slavery in this country. But what if America was not unique in holding slaves? What if America didn’t invent slavery, as our students have come to think? In our “Just Google It” era, the answers to these questions, though apparently not provided by some universities, are easily found on the website, FreeTheSlaves.net. Reading it should be your first step toward learning the full facts about slavery worldwide. No, slavery was not primarily an American phenomenon; it has existed worldwide. And, no, America didn’t invent slavery; that happened more than 9,000 years ago. Finally, slavery did not end in the world with the passage of the 13th Amendment; there are 40 million people enslaved even today.(4)>>The conservative government in Britain declared .Strictly speaking, critical race theory is an academic field that originated in the US around 40 years ago. As the British academic Kojo Koram notes, it began as an attempt by legal scholars to understand why black communities experienced discrimination in the criminal justice system, even though they were formally guaranteed equal rights. Today, the term has become a kind of shorthand in US politics for an approach to race relations that asks white people to consider their structural advantage within a system that has, historically, been profoundly racist. When the Black Lives Matter protests spread to the UK this summer, they ignited a fraught national conversation about racism. Many responded by offering solidarity to the thousands of young black people who took to the streets to protest at their own experiences of racism, and demand that Britain more fully acknowledge the injustices in its history. But it also prompted a backlash, one that the government has increasingly thrown its weight behind, seeking to portray the movement as dangerously extreme.Last month, the culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, told museums that they risked losing public funding if they took down statues as a result of pressure from campaigners. The Department for Education told schools in England that they were not to use materials produced by anti-capitalist groups, or teach “victim narratives that are harmful to British society”. In his Conservative party conference speech earlier this month, Boris Johnson accused Labour of being on the side of those who “want to pull statues down, to rewrite the history of our country … to make it look more politically correct”. (5)>>CACAGNY screed. The Chinese-American Citizens Alliance of Greater New York (CACAGNY) has explicitly denounced Critical Race Theory as a hateful, divisive fraud. Asian-Americans are a minority group discriminated against by CRT and expected to carry water for it. According to CRT's victimization ledger, all whites are oppressors, and all "people of color" are oppressed. CRT argues that unequal economic outcomes among different races in our society result from white power and white privilege. Asian Americans punch a big hole in that worldview. As a group, their economic achievement has surpassed that of all other racial groups, including whites. Last year's Department of Labor statistics even showed that the median weekly earnings of Asian women surpassed white men's earnings. Because Asian Americans' economic achievement and educational attainment resist CRT narratives, irritated activists have tried to eject Asian Americans from the "people of color" category. Last November, the North Thurston public school district in Washington state released an "equity report" in which it grouped white and Asian American students together, while placing everyone else in the "students of color" category. The school district only apologized after an outcry from the community's Asian American families.(6)>>It seems odd to me that 1619 was the story of America. The overstated significance of 1619—still a common fixture in American history curriculum—begins with the questions most of us reflexively ask when we consider the first documented arrival of a handful of people from Africa in a place that would one day become the United States of America. First, what was the status of the newly arrived African men and women? Were they slaves? Servants? Something else? Unfortunately, the same insidious logic of 1619 that reinforces the illusion of white permanence necessitates that blacks can only be, ipso facto, abnormal, impermanent, and only tolerable to the degree that they adapt themselves to someone else’s fictional universe. Remembering 1619 may be a way of accessing the memory and dignifying the early presence of black people in the place that would become the United States, but it also imprints in our minds, our national narratives, and our history books that blacks are not from these parts. When we elevate the events of 1619, we establish the conditions for people of African descent to remain, forever, strangers in a strange land.In late August 1619, the White Lion, an English privateer commanded by John Jope, sailed into Point Comfort and dropped anchor in the James River. Virginia colonist John Rolfe documented the arrival of the ship and “20 and odd” Africans on board. His journal entry is immortalized in textbooks, with 1619 often used as a reference point for teaching the origins of slavery in America. But the history, it seems, is far more complicated than a single date.European trade of enslaved Africans began in the 1400s. “The first example we have of Africans being taken against their will and put on board European ships would take the story back to 1441,From an Anglo-American perspective, 1619 is considered the beginning of slavery, just like Jamestown and Plymouth symbolize the beginnings of "America" from an English-speaking point of view. But divorcing the idea of North America's first enslaved people from the overall context of slavery in the Americas, especially when the U.S. was not formed for another 157 years, is not historically accurate.(7)>> Hannah-Jones’s introductory essay. All of this is absolutely worthwhile and correct, but it's worth pointing out that one very specific element of the 1619 Project materials has caused more controversy than any other among historians. This is the assertion made by the project leader, the NYT journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, in her introductory essay, that the American Revolution was not a war fought in the name of liberation and freedom, but, rather, one undertaken to ensure that the institution of slavery survived at a time when it was already possible to fear that sentiment in Britain was becoming increasingly abolitionist. (Hannah-Jones caused further upset by suggesting that Nazi Germany based its racial policies on those of the contemporary United States, but this controversy was drowned out by the far greater one caused by her remarks about the Revolution.) They say that it's too cynical – that it offers a dark vision of an America that has made much less progress than most Americans think. “It is this profound pessimism about white America,” The Atlantic pointed out in a story on the controversy, “that many of the 1619 Project’s critics find most galling.” They say that it exaggerates the significance of slavery to the decision of the American colonists to rebel – Hannah-Jones suggests that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery,” specifically from rising abolitionist sentiment in Britain.They say it over-stresses how systemic racism is in the US – which may in turn cause political paralysis and promote the belief nothing can be done about the problem. There were also objections to the idea that the progress that has been made is fragile and potentially reversible. (8)>>Slavery did not come from the American founding. Not every Founding Father who bemoaned the practice is guilty of hypocrisy, however. The following men — along with John Laurens, Samuel Adams, Robert Paine, and Oliver Ellsworth, among others — not only spoke out against the institution publicly, they refused to participate in the enterprise in their personal lives as well.The founding fathers, said Lincoln, had opposed slavery. They adopted a Declaration of Independence that pronounced all men created equal. They enacted the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 banning slavery from the vast Northwest Territory. To be sure, many of the founders owned slaves. But they asserted their hostility to slavery in principle while tolerating it temporarily (as they hoped) in practice. That was why they did not mention the words "slave" or "slavery" in the Constitution, but referred only to "persons held to service." "Thus, the thing is hid away, in the constitution," said Lincoln, "just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or a cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death; with the promise, nevertheless, that the cutting may begin at the end of a given time." The first step was to prevent the spread of this cancer, which the fathers took with the Northwest Ordinance, the prohibition of the African slave trade in 1807, and the Missouri Compromise restriction of 1820. The second was to begin a process of gradual emancipation, which the generation of the fathers had accomplished in the states north of Maryland.To make America’s Founding contemptible, one must hide, ignore, and distort the Founders’ writings and thoughts. Irresponsibly omitted from this narrative is the fact that not a single major Founder endorsed slavery. On the contrary, the Founders unambiguously saw slavery as evil. George Washington said, “there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it,” and Thomas Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration of Independence calls the slave trade an “execrable commerce” and an affront “against human nature itself.” Gouverneur Morris called slavery a “nefarious institution” and “the curse of heaven,” and John Jay said, “It is much to be wished that slavery may be abolished. . . . To contend for our own liberty, and to deny that blessing to others, involves an inconsistency not to be excused.”Franklin, Madison, Adams, and Hamilton spoke strongly against the institution of slavery, too. (9)>>The term “Cancel Culture” needs to be retired. The cancel culture concept was used during the Trump administration to object to what political conservatives considered unfair criticism or “cancelling” of a person — or a symbolic representation of an historical person — that leads to some significant consequence, such as a loss of social support, reputation, communication platform, or income. For these conservative critics, cancel culture represents a judgmental mentality that unfairly seeks to condemn those with whom it disagrees or to dishonor and erase U.S. history. In so doing, it attempts to control what people think and violates the free exchange of ideas. (10)>>Emily Wilder. Associated Press had fired Emily Wilder, a recently hired reporter, after conservative activists and media targeted the 2020 Stanford graduate over her college involvement in Students for Justice for Palestine and her past social media posts. Wilder, who says she has been “canceled,” was apparently told that she was being fired for violating AP’s social media policy during her brief time at the organization, but her request to know which specific posts were in violation was denied.To many, this is evidence that critics of Israel are specifically singled out for “cancellation.”
