Krugman: Attack of the Thought Police
- Daily Kos, Jan. 25, 2022. - Ed.
I read Paul Krugman’s NYT columns ... well, I would say “religiously” except I’m a secularist. This morning’s column is a particular insightful- and disturbing- one: 'Attack of the Right-Wing Thought Police':
--Now, however, freedom is under attack, on more fronts than many people realize. Everyone knows about the Big Lie, the refusal by a large majority of Republicans to accept the legitimacy of a lost election. But there are many other areas in which freedom is not just under assault but in retreat. Let’s talk, in particular about the attack on education, especially but not only in Florida, which has become one of America’s leading laboratories of democratic erosion.--
We here all know that “Critical Race Theory” is a concept taught only at the university level and that it’s a method for examining the history of American racism. No one teaches it, no one has suggested teaching it, at grade, middle, or high schools (though it might be a good idea). But the right- wing would-be autocrats have seized on it as yet one more tool to attack anyone they don’t like (on the flimsy excuse that critical race theory is being used to attack people its proponents don’t like). A number of states have banned it already using specious arguments about how it makes students (and more importantly, their parents, who vote, uncomfortable). Now Florida, the far right’s laboratory for testing new ways to control, is expanding on that ban.
--There’s a bill advancing in the Florida Senate declaring that an individual “should not be made to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.” That is, the criterion for what can be taught isn’t “Is it true? Is it supported by the scholarly consensus?” but rather “Does it make certain constituencies uncomfortable?"-- “Certain constituencies,” of course, means certain White constituencies. They don’t care about making Black constituencies uncomfortable; if anything, they want them to be uncomfortable, afraid even, so that they know their place is at the back of the bus and down on the farm.
Nor are Blacks the only target. --What’s really striking, however, is the idea that schools should be prohibited from teaching anything that causes “discomfort” among students and their parents. If you imagine that the effects of applying this principle would be limited to teaching about race relations, you’re being utterly naïve. For one thing, racism is far from being the only disturbing topic in American history. I’m sure that some students will find that the story of how we came to invade Iraq- or for that matter how we got involved in Vietnam- makes them uncomfortable. Ban those topics from the curriculum!--
Anyone who argues that the United States is or ever has been less than exceptional or successful will be told to shut up or the law will come after them. And what about science...
- Read More,
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/1/25/2076667/-Krugman-on-the-Thought-Police
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- NYT, 'Attack of the Right-Wing Thought Police,' Paul Krugman, Jan. 24, 2022,
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/24/opinion/florida-critical-race-theory-de-santis.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
- The Nation, “Critical Race Theory” Is White History. Conservatives are rebranding an inclusive, honest accounting of American history as inherently anti-white. Nov. 16, 2021. -Ed.
For more than a year now, conservatives have been waging war against the misdefined conception of critical race theory that they themselves created. The right-wing campaign against so-called CRT largely amounts to a round-robin chorus of hysterical voices asking, Won’t someone think of the poor white children?! “CRT tries to make kids feel bad because of the color of their skin,” Representative Ron Nate, cosponsor of Idaho’s anti-CRT law, stated just after the bill passed in May. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who successfully led the state school board to ban CRT from public school classrooms last summer, tweeted in June that “Critical Race Theory teaches kids to hate our country and to hate each other.” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill muzzling history educators over lessons that might make students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex.”
In pursuit of that goal, Republican senators in Texas recently drafted and approved yet another anti-CRT bill—after ditching language inserted by outnumbered and outvoted Democrats that would have required teaching “the history of white supremacy,” including slavery and the Ku Klux Klan, “and the ways in which it is morally wrong.” “We don’t want to teach those little white children that they should feel guilty because of what previous white people did generations ago,” Senator Bryan Hughes explained to a local news outlet about why he filed the bill. Eight states have passed laws and 20 more have proposed legislation to outlaw a version of critical race theory that’s wholly of conservatives’ own imagining. In reality, the 40-year-old graduate school framework provides a prism on racism as “a structured reality that’s embedded in institutions,” as law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw described it in an interview with this magazine.
But those behind the current anti-anti-racist movement in education have publicly admitted to repurposing CRT to “turn it toxic,” as conservative activist Christopher F. Rufo put it, branding it as anti-white propaganda. The legislative offspring of that misinformation movement is a slew of laws seeking to limit how history is taught. In Tennessee, just after the state legislature approved an anti-CRT measure, a teacher who assigned an article by Ta-Nehisi Coates on the intersection of racism and Trumpism was fired; in Texas, a Republican lawmaker is currently circulating a list of 850 books on race and other topics he says violate the new anti-CRT law. What’s become abundantly apparent in watching the CRT social panic unfold is how its adherents steadfastly believe and propagate the idea that a full accounting of history—one that includes long-ignored perspectives and experiences and, consequently, locates the contradictions between American delusions of exceptionalism and the country’s grievous reality of brutal exploitation—is somehow historically inauthentic or a kind of frivolous add-on to the textbook narratives of white benevolence and heroism.
In addition to pretending they’re saving white children, conservatives have also issued breathless accusations of national betrayal, variously casting CRT as “anti-American,” “a crusade against American history,” “racist pedagogy and anti-American revisionism,” and—wait for it—“Marxist.” The idea undergirding all this is that an inclusive American history is a specifically Black history. Listen to the throngs of angry white parents at school board meetings and it becomes clear that they believe history is a zero-sum game—that a history that documents Black American existence undermines and erases white American history. Like Blackness itself, these folks see Black history as somehow both insufficiently American and inherently anti-white. But the history of Black folks in America—through slavery, Black codes, lynchings, redlining, voter disenfranchisement, Jim Crow, racial pogroms, illegal medical experimentation, extrajudicial and state-led theft of Black land, anti-Black policing, racist mass incarceration—is white American history, too....
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/crt-race-history/
- Opponents of Critical Race Theory attend a School Board Meeting in Loudoun County, Va. June 22, 2021.
