Banning Critical Race Theory

WakeBored said:

No, they didn't.

It is true that approximately 930 former slave owners and Union loyalists in the District of Columbia received compensation from the United States government for their approximately 3,000 freed slaves under a federal law passed in 1862. As a Louisiana resident and Confederate loyalist, however, Kate Stone would not have qualified.

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deactherunner said:

Would she have received anything from the state of Louisiana? (Honestly don't know).

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WFFaithful said:

Once reconstruction was ended by southern conservatives, many former slaveowners regained control of their former plantations and "employed" former slaves as sharecroppers, keeping their income and power.

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WFFaithful said:

Once reconstruction was ended by southern conservatives, many former slaveowners regained control of their former plantations and "employed" former slaves as sharecroppers, keeping their income and power.

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deactherunner said:

Would she have received anything from the state of Louisiana? (Honestly don't know).

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WakeBored said:

In 1825, France charged Haiti 150 million francs to recognize it as an independent country, and the money went to former slaveholders (and their ancestors (ahem)). The debt was paid off in 1947.

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Highland Deac said:

Reporter asks sponsor of AL bill banning CRT to explain what CRT is. Not surprisingly he doesn't seem to know, and just responds with right-wing cliches and attempts to end the conversation.

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So what does his bill say?

“It’s pretty simple,” Pringle said. “All it says is you can’t teach critical race theory in K-12 or higher education in the state of Alabama.”

That is a short bill, if not a simple one. But it didn’t answer my question: What is this critical race theory educators would be forbidden to teach? Pringle has seen enough legislation to understand the law requires specificity. Many bills begin by laying out their legal definitions. How would his bill define critical race theory?

“It basically teaches that certain children are inherently bad people because of the color of their skin, period,” Pringle said.

That sounded very serious, indeed. Nazi-like, even. So I asked Pringle if there were any critical race theorists he could point to who have been spreading such toxic garbage?

“Yeah, uh, well — I can assure you — I’ll have to read a lot more,” he said.

I began to get the feeling that Pringle didn’t know as much about critical race theory as I had hoped. Were there other examples he could give me where critical race theory was being put into practice?

“These people, when they were doing the training programs — and the government — if you didn’t buy into what they taught you a hundred percent, they sent you away to a reeducation camp,” Pringle said.

Pringle was a little difficult to follow but this sounded serious. These people — whoever they were— sounded terrifying, and if there were reeducation camps operating in America, that would be big news someone like me should get to the bottom of. I asked Pringle, who were these people?

Pringle is a Realtor, a homebuilder and general contractor and he dug through what he called his “executive suite” (the cab of his pickup truck) looking for an article he’d read. After a few moments of silence, he began to speak again, this time a bit haltingly.

“Here’s an — it doesn’t say who it was, it just says a government that held these — these training sessions …”

Pringle trailed off and I told him that, if he liked, he could send me a link to the article, but then he began to speak again.

“The white male executives are sent to a three-day re-education camp, where they were told that their white male culture wasn’t their —” he trailed off again.

I was worried that we’d lost our connection. These sorts of conversations sometimes end abruptly, but Pringle was still on the line and after a little more hemming and hawing he retreated to a common safe-space of politicians who’ve crawled too far out on a limb: He just wanted to start a conversation, he said.

“I introduced a very brief version of the bill to start the conversation, but it’s very difficult in this cancel society to have a frank discussion about racism in this country and this country’s history,” he said. “I mean, history is being rewritten and I’m not exactly sure of the accuracy of what’s there now and what they’re trying to change it into.”

This was news to me, as I’d seen lots of lawmakers try to talk about race and history in the Alabama State House, but for whatever reason, they were always the Black lawmakers. It was the white lawmakers who usually tried to change the subject. I wanted to ask Pringle about this, but suddenly he was no longer at a loss for words and I didn’t want to interrupt.

“This is still the greatest country that’s ever, ever been in the history of the world,” he said. “And the radical left is trying to destroy that and tear us apart and divide this country based on race and class, which is exactly what they do in communist countries.”

After bragging to me how he had BS-ed his way through his college political science classes by parroting the liberal bilge his professors wanted to hear, Pringle then said he had to get back to his day job and that he had employees waiting on him at a job site. So I let him go.

(I texted Pringle later to ask if he could share it with me. “Sorry but I can’t find it again,” he said. “Must have deleted the link.”)

I had been on the phone for about 15 minutes with someone who should know what they’re talking about before making laws against things, but I was still confused about this supposed radical leftist plot. When I couldn’t get an answer from a middle-aged white man, I took the logical next step. I asked a middle-aged Black man, Alabama Democratic Party chairman and state Rep. Chris England.

England was cordial enough, but I got the impression I was interrupting what had been, until then, a nice vacation at the beach.

According to England, he hadn’t been familiar with critical race theory, either, until his colleagues across the aisle began making so much noise about it. That’s when he began to research it.

“Critical race theory has been around since the ’70s and it’s never been taught in K-12,” England said. “It’s post-secondary education theory that is only discussed in masters level classes.”

If that’s so, I asked, what’s really going on here?

“It’s just politicians trying to manipulate people to garner campaign contributions and votes, whipping them up with something that has no basis in merit or fact,” he said.

But England wasn’t just talking about critical race theory. He was talking about all the political straw men that get dragged out every election cycle. (Remember Common Core?) And there always seems to be a new one.

“All anybody really wants to be taught in their schools is the accurate and true representation of American and world history, and that includes America’s sordid history with race,” England said.

That sounded reasonable, if altogether different from what Pringle seemed so agitated about. It was almost as if they were talking about two different things. Perhaps there had been some sort of mix-up.

Pringle had said he wanted to have a conversation. Would England be OK with sitting down to talk about it with Pringle and his party?

England said he would, but he sounded more eager to get back to his beach vacation.

“These conversations should start where people are, rather than where you want them to be,” he said. “And the last place educational policy should be made — where you decide what teachers should be teaching in the classroom — is in the Legislature.”

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The group recently proposed placing body cameras on teachers to ensure they aren't teaching critical race theory. During the most recent [school board] meeting, which lasted 11 hours, speakers railed at school board members, calling them Marxists, racists, Nazis, and child abusers, among other epithets."

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ConnorEl said:

Yep

Just fear mongering with (m/d)isinformation.

Otherwise known as Republican strategy.

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As school districts continue to infuse critical race theory into their curricula, they might confront another obstacle: the law. One charter school, Democracy Prep in Las Vegas, Nevada, is learning that the hard way. In December, William Clark, a senior at Democracy Prep, sued the school, alleging that it gave him a failing grade in his “Sociology of Change” course and threatened to prevent him from graduating because he refused to confess his privilege openly as demanded by the school, the course curriculum, and the teacher....

Clark began taking the course in fall 2020 and almost immediately protested the mandate to publicly announce and label his identities. Clark is biracial: his mother is Black and his father, now deceased, was white. He has “green eyes and blondish hair,” and, according to his complaint, “is generally regarded as white by his peers.” When he and his mother objected to the forced confessions of privilege and asked for an alternative accommodation to meet the course requirement, the school told him that if he did not complete the course, he would not graduate. Because he would not complete his required assignments, the teacher gave him a D-, a failing grade based on the school’s standards, prompting him to file suit.

According to Clark’s attorneys, Democracy Prep violated Clark’s constitutional and statutory rights. Pointing to West Virginia v. Barnette (1943), their complaint argues that forcing the student to publicly confess his identities as a white, male Christian and then attach “official, derogatory labels” to them violates the First Amendment’s prohibition on compelled speech...

Clark’s lawyers also allege that the school’s behavior created a “hostile educational environment” in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which says that “No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” ...

For good measure, Clark’s complaint contends that the school’s treatment of him also violates Title IX, which forbids sex discrimination. Designating him as an “oppressor” based on his sex and gender and “categoriz[ing] and stereotyp[ing]” those identities in a “deliberately pejorative and offensive manner” constitutes sexual harassment under today’s interpretation of Title IX....

Despite the defendants’ claims that the class and Clark’s punishment were legally unobjectionable, the school relented in early April, offering to expunge his grade and let him opt out of the course. Undoubtedly, this retreat was encouraged by a federal judge’s declaration at a February hearing that Clark was “likely to succeed on the merits” since the “speech is likely compelled.” The defendants, the judge said, would therefore have to “justify the curriculum under a strict scrutiny test,” the court’s most exacting level of review, which he said the class exercises probably could not survive.

Going forward, one might evaluate whether lawsuits like Clark’s are apt to succeed by asking what a court would say if the identities were reversed. That is, what if a teacher forced students to affirm a theory that held that being minority or female should inherently be associated with negative traits? (This is, of course, different from requiring students to acknowledge historical facts like the exclusion of women from the franchise or the existence of slavery and Jim Crow laws.) It’s hard to imagine a court saying that doing so would not violate the Constitution and civil-rights statutes. Of course, as William Clark learned, the nostrums of critical race theory and intersectionality forbid reversing those categories. But the nostrums of critical race theory and intersectionality are not the law.

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WakeBored said:

Speaking of dumb, it is patently unconstitutional to force students to "confess their privilege"



https://www.educationnext.org/critical-race-theory-collides-with-law/

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They contend that Clark was not, in fact, compelled to speak at all, because the assignments did not require him to affirm his identities publicly, and that he did not have to support any particular belief. “Courts,” the school asserts, “routinely reject students’ claims that coursework violates the First Amendment when it requires them to profess no particular belief.”

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