Gravlen wrote:How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict Over Critical Race TheoryAs Rufo eventually came to see it, conservatives engaged in the culture war had been fighting against the same progressive racial ideology since late in the Obama years, without ever being able to describe it effectively. “We’ve needed new language for these issues,” Rufo told me, when I first wrote to him, late in May. “ ‘Political correctness’ is a dated term and, more importantly, doesn’t apply anymore. It’s not that elites are enforcing a set of manners and cultural limits, they’re seeking to reengineer the foundation of human psychology and social institutions through the new politics of race, It’s much more invasive than mere ‘correctness,’ which is a mechanism of social control, but not the heart of what’s happening. The other frames are wrong, too: ‘cancel culture’ is a vacuous term and doesn’t translate into a political program; ‘woke’ is a good epithet, but it’s too broad, too terminal, too easily brushed aside. ‘Critical race theory’ is the perfect villain,” Rufo wrote.
He thought that the phrase was a better description of what conservatives were opposing, but it also seemed like a promising political weapon. “Its connotations are all negative to most middle-class Americans, including racial minorities, who see the world as ‘creative’ rather than ‘critical,’ ‘individual’ rather than ‘racial,’ ‘practical’ rather than ‘theoretical.’ Strung together, the phrase ‘critical race theory’ connotes hostile, academic, divisive, race-obsessed, poisonous, elitist, anti-American.” Most perfect of all, Rufo continued, critical race theory is not “an externally applied pejorative.” Instead, “it’s the label the critical race theorists chose themselves.”
The next day, I spoke by phone with Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor with appointments at Columbia and U.C.L.A., and perhaps the most prominent figure associated with critical race theory—a term she had, long ago, coined. Crenshaw sounded slightly exasperated by how much coverage focussed on the semantic question of what critical race theory meant rather than the political one about the nature of the campaign against it. “It should go without saying that what they are calling critical race theory is a whole range of things, most of which no one would sign on to, and many of the things in it are simply about racism,” she said. When I asked what was new to her about the conservative movement against critical race theory, she said that the main thing was that it had been championed last fall not by conservative academics but by Donald Trump, then the President of the United States, and by many leading conservative political and media figures. But the broader pattern was not new, or surprising. “Reform itself creates its own backlash, which reconstitutes the problem in the first place,” Crenshaw said, noting that she’d made this argument in her first law-review article, in 1988. George Floyd’s murder had led to “so many corporations and opinion-shaping institutions making statements about structural racism”—creating a new, broader anti-racist alignment, or at least the potential for one. “This is a post-George Floyd backlash,” Crenshaw said. “The reason why we’re having this conversation is that the line of scrimmage has moved.”
As she saw it, the campaign against critical race theory represented a familiar effort to shift the point of the argument, so that, rather than being about structural racism, post-George Floyd politics were about the seminars that had proliferated to address structural racism. I asked Crenshaw whether she thought that the anti-racism seminars were doing good. “Sure, I’ve been witness to trainings that I thought, Ennnnnh, not quite sure that’s the way I would approach it,” she said. “To be honest, sometimes people want a shortcut. They want the one- to two-hour training that will solve the problem. And it will not solve the problem. And sometimes it creates a backlash.” Many liberals had responded to the conservative campaign against critical race theory by arguing first that those loudly denouncing it often had no idea what they were talking about, and second by suggesting that the supposed grassroots outrage was really the work of Republican operatives. Both responses made sense, but Crenshaw was suggesting a deeper historical pattern, in which the campaign against critical race theory was not an aberration but long-lasting retrenchment. “The fact is there aren’t any easily digestible red pills,” Crenshaw said. “If we’re really going to dig our way out of the hole this country was born into, it’s gonna be a process.”
On this, at least, Rufo might not have disagreed too much. His adaptation of the term “critical race theory” was itself an effort to emphasize a deep historical and intellectual pattern to anti-racism, and he, too, found it predictable that people encountering it for the first time would be outraged by it. The rebranding was, in some ways, an excuse for politicians to stage the same old fights over race within different institutions and on new terrain. At my lunch with Rufo, I’d asked what he hoped this movement might achieve. He mentioned two objectives, the first of which was “to politicize the bureaucracy.” Rufo said that the bureaucracy had been dominated by liberals, and he thought that the debates over critical race theory offered a way for conservatives to “take some of these essentially corrupted state agencies and then contest them, and then create rival power centers within them.” I thought of the bills that Rufo had helped draft, which restricted how social-studies teachers could describe current events to millions of public-school children, and the open letter a Kansas Republican legislator had sent to the leaders of public universities in the state, demanding to know which faculty members were teaching critical race theory. Mission accomplished.
Also,
What critical race theory is -- and isn't
Tennessee state Sen. Brian Kelsey, a Republican, argued last week on Twitter that critical race theory is harmful to students because it "teaches that American democracy is a lie."
Yeah, cause it fucking is. I'd rather be honest with the kids than make them think they're living in a free country when they're not. It's especially telling that Brian Kelsey is a member of the
American Union of Fascists Republican Party, which has been actively trying to overturn an election and purge voters from rolls, a hallmark of a country whose democracy is indeed a dirty, filthy lie.
Posted: Sun Jun 20, 2021 2:41 am