Mormons and Critical Race Theory

[Morley]

As I understand it, "white fragility" is the concept that talking about race makes white people uncomfortable. You seem to be saying you don't like that concept because it makes you uncomfortable.

This is the genius part about critical race theory, you just pointed out the tautology/self-fulfilling premise built into the theory.

How is this a tautology?

To be a tautology, it would have to be a defining characteristic of white people that they are uncomfortable talking about race. I don't think DiAngelo is saying that.

[Res Ipsa]

What's critical race theory?

Which K-12 schools are teaching it?

A. What Is Critical Race Theory?
The critical race theory (critical race theory) movement is a collection of
activists and scholars engaged in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power. The
movement considers many of the same issues that conventional civil rights and ethnic studies discourses take up
but places them in a broader perspective that includes economics, history, setting, group and self-interest, and emotions and the unconscious.

Unlike traditional civil rights
discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step
progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal
reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.

The Eaton Rapids school district recently purchased a new ELA curriculum for grades K-5 from a company which includes in its teacher training materials a recommendation that teachers decenter the tears of White children. This curriculum company refers to itself as an aspiring antiracist organization that claims the ideas from the book "How To Be An Anti-Racist" form the core of their curriculum. This curriculum also avoids the use of books from the literary canon, because they consider classics to be biased in favor of White people.

Screenshot 2021-12-29 110813.jpg

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Do you have a link to the entire set of materials that the screenshot was taken from? I've grown allergic to out of context snippets.

[drumdude]

I posted the entire textbook here. I posted a link to the website I pulled curriculum examples from. This is a discussion board, I can't post thousands of pages of text into a single post.

I think you guys need to get past your kneejerk reaction that anyone who disagrees with critical race theory is an Atlantic Mike.

[sock puppet]

I live in the same city in which I grew up. I keep in regular contact with several friends that I made in grade school, junior high and high school. Some had financially successful fathers, and but one has not not been able to match his father's financial status. As time has marched on, those who have not so measured up (so to speak) have become embittered, more and more so. Each of them blames it on (a) "handouts" to blacks and/or (b) the "brown invasion" from the U.S. southern border. With time, they are becoming more and more 'white fragile', a few even acting out in deplorable ways. It is prevalent enough, and they spout it frequently to their children and grandchildren--who are in K-12. It is a molding force on these kids, at K-12 ages, and 'white fragility' should be explained before it molds new generations of racial hatred.

FYI, I am an outlier. I have not measured up financially to my father's financial successes, but I insist when talking to them that it is due to decisions I made, not some scapegoated segments of the American population.

[Morley]

I posted the entire textbook here. I posted a link to the website I pulled curriculum examples from. This is a discussion board, I can't post thousands of pages of text into a single post.

I think you guys need to get past your kneejerk reaction that anyone who disagrees with critical race theory is an Atlantic Mike.

I must be out in the weeds somewhere. I still don't understand what your specific beef is.

[drumdude]

I posted the entire textbook here. I posted a link to the website I pulled curriculum examples from. This is a discussion board, I can't post thousands of pages of text into a single post.

I think you guys need to get past your kneejerk reaction that anyone who disagrees with critical race theory is an Atlantic Mike.

I must be out in the weeds somewhere. I still don't understand what your specific beef is.

I think we agree critical race theory is not suitable for K-12. Put it in an AP class if it's for a high schooler. That's all I'm really interested in. Reasonable people can agree or disagree with critical race theory, and it would be a much longer discussion to go through every aspect of it.

[Res Ipsa]

I posted the entire textbook here. I posted a link to the website I pulled curriculum examples from. This is a discussion board, I can't post thousands of pages of text into a single post.

I think you guys need to get past your kneejerk reaction that anyone who disagrees with critical race theory is an Atlantic Mike.

Who said you were Atlantic Mike? Not me. I said you didn't appear to be understanding what you are reading. I'm not going to hunt through a clearly biased website to look for a snippet you posted. If there's not a link to the set of materials the snippet was taken from, then, as a practicing skeptic, I'm going to give it little credence.

I don't care whether you view critical race theory as a helpful analytical tool or not. It's like any other tool for understanding society and how it works -- some parts may work well, some may not. I do care whether people understand it before making sweeping judgments about it.

From the book you linked to: here's a pretty good, general description of critical race theory. As the author says, not everyone who uses critical race theory will agree with everything in the description, but it's a pretty good summary.

F. Basic Tenets of Critical Race Theory

What do critical race theorists believe? Probably not every member would subscribe to every tenet set out in this book,
but many would agree on the following propositions. First, that racism is ordinary, not aberrational—“normal science,” the usual way society does business, the common, everyday experience of most people of color in this country. Second, most would agree that our system of white-over-color ascen- dancy serves important purposes, both psychic and material. The first feature, ordinariness, means that racism is difficult to cure or address. Color-blind, or “formal,” conceptions of equality, expressed in rules that insist only on treatment that is the same across the board, can thus remedy only the most blatant forms of discrimination, such as mortgage redlining or the refusal to hire a black Ph.D. rather than a white high school dropout, that do stand out and attract our attention. The second feature, sometimes called “interest convergence” or material determinism, adds a further dimension. Because racism advances the interests of both white elites (materially) and working-class people (psychically), large segments of so- ciety have little incentive to eradicate it. Consider, for exam- ple, Derrick Bell’s shocking proposal (discussed in a later chapter) that Brown v. Board of Education—considered a great triumph of civil rights litigation—may have resulted more from the self-interest of elite whites than a desire to help blacks.
A third theme of critical race theory, the “social construc- tion” thesis, holds that race and races are products of social thought and relations. Not objective, inherent, or fixed, they correspond to no biological or genetic reality; rather, races are categories that society invents, manipulates, or retires when convenient. People with common origins share certain physical traits, of course, such as skin color, physique, and hair texture. But these constitute only an extremely small portion of their genetic endowment, are dwarfed by that which we have in common, and have little or nothing to do with distinctly human, higher-order traits, such as personal- ity, intelligence, and moral behavior. That society frequently chooses to ignore these scientific facts, creates races, and en- dows them with pseudo-permanent characteristics is of great interest to critical race theory.
Another, somewhat more recent, development concerns differential racialization and its many consequences. Critical writers in law, as well as social science, have drawn attention to the ways the dominant society racializes different minor- ity groups at different times, in response to shifting needs such as the labor market. At one period, for example, soci- ety may have had little use for blacks, but much need for Mexican or Japanese agricultural workers. At another time, the Japanese, including citizens of long standing, may have been in intense disfavor and removed to war relocation camps, while society cultivated other groups of color for jobs in war industry or as cannon fodder on the front. Popular images and stereotypes of various minority groups shift over time, as well. In one era, a group of color may be depicted as happy-go-lucky, simpleminded, and content to serve white folks. A little later, when conditions change, that very same group may appear in cartoons, movies, and other cultural scripts as menacing, brutish, and out of control, requiring close monitoring and repression.
Closely related to differential racialization—the idea that each race has its own origins and ever evolving history—is

the notion of intersectionality and anti-essentialism. No per- son has a single, easily stated, unitary identity. A white fem- inist may be Jewish, or working-class, or a single mother. An African American activist may be gay or lesbian. A Latino may be a Democrat, a Republican, or even a black—perhaps because that person’s family hails from the Caribbean. An Asian may be a recently arrived Hmong of rural background and unfamiliar with mercantile life, or a fourth-generation Chinese with a father who is a university professor and a mother who operates a business. Everyone has potentially conflicting, overlapping identities, loyalties, and allegiances.
A final element concerns the notion of a unique voice of color. Coexisting in somewhat uneasy tension with anti-es- sentialism, the voice-of-color thesis holds that because of their different histories and experiences with oppression, black, Indian, Asian, and Latino/a writers and thinkers may be able to communicate to their white counterparts matters that the whites are unlikely to know. Minority status, in other words, brings with it a presumed competence to speak about race and racism. The “legal storytelling” movement urges black and brown writers to recount their experiences with racism and the legal system and to apply their own unique perspectives to assess law’s master narratives. This topic, too, is taken up later in this book.

[drumdude]

Another horrifically out of context quote:

Black-white or any other kind of binary thinking can
also cause a minority group to go along with a recurring
ploy in which whites select a particular group—usually a
small, nonthreatening one—to serve as tokens and overseers of the others. Minorities who fall into this trap hope
to gain status, while whites can tell themselves that they
are not racists because they have employed a certain number of suitably grateful minorities as supervisors, assistant
deans, and directors of human relations.

Note the wording used here. It's not that the minority group goes along with the ploy from the majority group. That would be the language I would expect from a college textbook discussion of a valid social theory.

It's that the minority group goes along with the ploy of the whites. Oppression isn't caused by a majority, it isn't caused by a ruling class, it isn't caused by powerful people. It is caused by white people.

[Bought Yahoo]

I posted the entire textbook here. I posted a link to the website I pulled curriculum examples from. This is a discussion board, I can't post thousands of pages of text into a single post.

I think you guys need to get past your kneejerk reaction that anyone who disagrees with critical race theory is an Atlantic Mike.

You post like a drunk.

Are there examples of critical race theory being actually taught in a school? Cite sources to me from the school district, not from FOX News or some other right wing idiocy.

[drumdude]

I don't care whether you view critical race theory as a helpful analytical tool or not. It's like any other tool for understanding society and how it works -- some parts may work well, some may not. I do care whether people understand it before making sweeping judgments about it.

It matters when people minimize the legitimate problems with it. Mein Kampf is a tool for understanding society as well. Instead of blaming whites, it blamed the Jews.

My position is that it is never correct to blame a race of people, based on their skin color, for anything. The correct attribution is class, power, majority, etc. There is nothing inherently evil in white people, there is nothing inherently evil or noble in any skin color.