- fighting inflation
- de-funding the police
- critical race theory
Inflation is something we hardly understand other than that prices are rising. Usually this coincides with higher salaries to pay those prices, but it is a trend we don’t want to encourage. Fortunately we have the Federal Reserve Board to tell us when to get alarmed. They are not alarmed yet, so the Republicans are stirring up anxiety over nothing.
De-funding the police was a great slogan, but no rational person wants the police to be under-funded. What we do want is specialists in psychology and social work to work more closely with the police by sharing some of the revenue devoted to law enforcement. “De-funding” is a radical slogan designed to inspire change, not a literal policy, unless you are actually radicalized. Republicans want voters to believe defunding is literally what Democrats plan to do to law enforcement. Again something we don’t understand, but think we do.
“Critical race theory” is a dog whistle for indoctrination of students to a radical version of American history. This is another term we do not understand, but think we do. “CRT originated among legal scholars like Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado, who argued that
racism and white supremacy were defining elements of the American legal system—and of American society writ large—despite language related to “equal protection.” https://www.thoughtco.com/
critical-race-theory-4685094
CRT is a legal theory used to recognize inequalities in the way law is constructed– nothing to do with education. American history in our textbooks and popular mythologies do have flaws, and it is worthwhile to point out those inaccuracies, but that is not “critical race theory.” It does make a great soundbite, however, and that is why Republicans insist we are falling under the spell of CRT.
We should be wary of election issues that can be reduced to 5-6 syllables. They have music, but they may not have accuracy. A few more syllables on the subject of critical race theory would be illuminating.
Comical “race theory” is the claim that teachers are indoctrinating our students with an unfairly negative interpretation of American history. It is comical, because secondary teachers are taught, first and foremost, not to indoctrinate students about anything. Students are taught to make critical choices about how they understand history. Did the United States have a “manifest destiny” to invade Mexico and capture the region we know as the southwest? Some argue for this theory, and some understand it as imperialism in disguise. Students are challenged to decide.
One U.S. textbook reads “The years 1880-1910 seemed full of contradictions . . . During Reconstruction many people tried hard to help the black people in the South. Then for years, most white Americans paid little attention to the blacks. Little by little there grew a new concern for them.” [The American Adventure, Social Science Staff of the American Research Council of America (Boston: Allyn and Bacon 1975)]. This is pretty much how I viewed the Jim Crow era until recently. Today I realize that this period of American history was the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan and public lynchings of Blacks. I realize that state laws were formulated to prevent Blacks from voting during this period. I have learned about “sundown towns,” many of them in the north, where Blacks could not be seen on the streets after sundown or they would be arrested. Many of these laws persisted late into the Twentieth Century.
If textbooks stumble into silly generalizations like “Little by little there grew a new concern for them” during this period of time, students need to critically refute them. Teachers may bring primary sources, autobiographies and video documentaries for students to read and view and compare to the uncritical approaches in their textbooks. We might call this “critical reading” or “critical thinking,” but never “critical race theory.” This is far from the indoctrination that politicians are associating with critical race theory. It is the opposite: critical literacy.
Republican candidates are counting on us to neglect looking closer at these issues. They are depending on the six-syllable soundbites to get us riled and ready for posting on Facebook.
Partly our own education is to blame. Most of us in the Boomer generation were taught to read and digest, not to critique. If we were taught American history in an uncritical way, we should hope for better for our grandchildren. We should be glad to hear that they found errors in their textbooks, and they used reliable evidence to make their points. They should grow up to be critical consumers of every form of literacy. That does not make them critical race theorists. That makes them smart.