Taught 8th grade for sixteen years and every year I would teach reconstruction and the civil rights movement. I wonder if some of these topics will be a thing of the past in some states.
You think that they will stop teaching what actually happened? That is nuts and hope that isn't true.
They've never taught what actually happened. That's the whole point of CRT.
What do you mean they’ve never taught what actually happened?
Whitewashed version. No discredit to you and your efforts to educate your students, but more than likely it was a whitewashed version.
How does one whitewash reconstruction?
Was Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B. Du Bois part of your assigned curriculum? Mine neither.
So we are cherry picking exact books that weren't taught now? C'mon. If it was taught right it doesn't matter a source that was left out.
It was an example. And our education was not taught right no matter how strongly you believe it was.
I'm sorry that your education wasn't like mine and you are apparently angry about it. My apologies...
The U.S., and all of its laws and institutions, were founded and created based on the myth of white supremacy—the assumption that lighter skin and European ancestry meant that white people were better and deserved a higher social and economic position than people of color. Because racism is embedded within our systems and institutions, codified in law, and woven into American public policy, this racial inequality is replicated and maintained over time. Thus, systemic racism shows up in nearly every facet of life for people of color.
It’s the all inclusive idea. The “all it’s laws and institutions.” Yes there have been designs in the system to help some and hurt others. Yes we have done terrible things to blacks and other minorities. But it’s not in every law, every institution and every facet of life. And it seems like to some, not teaching that means erasing our history and pretending it was all good. There’s still plenty of ugly left to teach.
Taught 8th grade for sixteen years and every year I would teach reconstruction and the civil rights movement. I wonder if some of these topics will be a thing of the past in some states.
You think that they will stop teaching what actually happened? That is nuts and hope that isn't true.
They've never taught what actually happened. That's the whole point of CRT.
What do you mean they’ve never taught what actually happened?
Whitewashed version. No discredit to you and your efforts to educate your students, but more than likely it was a whitewashed version.
How does one whitewash reconstruction?
Was Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B. Du Bois part of your assigned curriculum? Mine neither.
So we are cherry picking exact books that weren't taught now? C'mon. If it was taught right it doesn't matter a source that was left out.
It was an example. And our education was not taught right no matter how strongly you believe it was.
I'm sorry that your education wasn't like mine and you are apparently angry about it. My apologies...
You were taught CRT in school? Well versed with Du Bois, Fredrick Douglas, Sojourner Truth, and Antonio Gramsci? Derrick Bell and Kimberle Crenshaw? And I'm not angry in the way you may think. I am suggesting you/me/we be more critical of our education. You have claimed luck in receiving a more historically accurate education. I claim that even your education was whitewashed. As was mine. To purport otherwise is ignorant.
I'm ignorant then. Thanks. No point in arguing...
We are all ignorant. We have discussions to promote awareness and education. Not only on this forum but in our classrooms. Again, the whole point of introducing CRT as part of the curriculum. You started this thread for a reason, correct?
I did. Not so you can tell me that I wasn't taught anything pertaining to CRT. That is ignorant. I have said that I was fortunate enough to learn about the racism that existed throughout our history as a nation.
What I see is that I wasn't taught enough about it to your liking wheras people like Fredrick Douglas were taught to me. We have a boulevard here in NY named after him. Someone like Kimberle Crenshaw was not though. She became popular after my HS years.
Just because every name you mention wasn't taught to me doesn't mean that I wasn't taught about it. I'm learning that I was taught about it more than I thought initially.
It's impossible to make you happy is what I am seeing unless it's all and everything. That is for a college course and not a HS class and that is not white washing.
I see this back and forth between you and I as pointless...
Existed? There's the ignorance and the whitewashed version. CRT focuses not on the explicit racism found in most textbooks, but the social and institutional dynamics that still exist.
Taught 8th grade for sixteen years and every year I would teach reconstruction and the civil rights movement. I wonder if some of these topics will be a thing of the past in some states.
You think that they will stop teaching what actually happened? That is nuts and hope that isn't true.
They've never taught what actually happened. That's the whole point of CRT.
What do you mean they’ve never taught what actually happened?
Whitewashed version. No discredit to you and your efforts to educate your students, but more than likely it was a whitewashed version.
How does one whitewash reconstruction?
Was Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B. Du Bois part of your assigned curriculum? Mine neither.
So we are cherry picking exact books that weren't taught now? C'mon. If it was taught right it doesn't matter a source that was left out.
It was an example. And our education was not taught right no matter how strongly you believe it was.
I'm sorry that your education wasn't like mine and you are apparently angry about it. My apologies...
You were taught CRT in school? Well versed with Du Bois, Fredrick Douglas, Sojourner Truth, and Antonio Gramsci? Derrick Bell and Kimberle Crenshaw? And I'm not angry in the way you may think. I am suggesting you/me/we be more critical of our education. You have claimed luck in receiving a more historically accurate education. I claim that even your education was whitewashed. As was mine. To purport otherwise is ignorant.
I'm ignorant then. Thanks. No point in arguing...
We are all ignorant. We have discussions to promote awareness and education. Not only on this forum but in our classrooms. Again, the whole point of introducing CRT as part of the curriculum. You started this thread for a reason, correct?
I did. Not so you can tell me that I wasn't taught anything pertaining to CRT. That is ignorant. I have said that I was fortunate enough to learn about the racism that existed throughout our history as a nation.
What I see is that I wasn't taught enough about it to your liking wheras people like Fredrick Douglas were taught to me. We have a boulevard here in NY named after him. Someone like Kimberle Crenshaw was not though. She became popular after my HS years.
Just because every name you mention wasn't taught to me doesn't mean that I wasn't taught about it. I'm learning that I was taught about it more than I thought initially.
It's impossible to make you happy is what I am seeing unless it's all and everything. That is for a college course and not a HS class and that is not white washing.
I see this back and forth between you and I as pointless...
Existed? There's the ignorance and the whitewashed version. CRT focuses not on the explicit racism found in most textbooks, but the social and institutional dynamics that still exist.
Which from what I read, CRT is only taught in college, not k-12.
Taught 8th grade for sixteen years and every year I would teach reconstruction and the civil rights movement. I wonder if some of these topics will be a thing of the past in some states.
You think that they will stop teaching what actually happened? That is nuts and hope that isn't true.
They've never taught what actually happened. That's the whole point of CRT.
What do you mean they’ve never taught what actually happened?
Whitewashed version. No discredit to you and your efforts to educate your students, but more than likely it was a whitewashed version.
How does one whitewash reconstruction?
Was Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B. Du Bois part of your assigned curriculum? Mine neither.
So we are cherry picking exact books that weren't taught now? C'mon. If it was taught right it doesn't matter a source that was left out.
It was an example. And our education was not taught right no matter how strongly you believe it was.
I'm sorry that your education wasn't like mine and you are apparently angry about it. My apologies...
You were taught CRT in school? Well versed with Du Bois, Fredrick Douglas, Sojourner Truth, and Antonio Gramsci? Derrick Bell and Kimberle Crenshaw? And I'm not angry in the way you may think. I am suggesting you/me/we be more critical of our education. You have claimed luck in receiving a more historically accurate education. I claim that even your education was whitewashed. As was mine. To purport otherwise is ignorant.
I'm ignorant then. Thanks. No point in arguing...
We are all ignorant. We have discussions to promote awareness and education. Not only on this forum but in our classrooms. Again, the whole point of introducing CRT as part of the curriculum. You started this thread for a reason, correct?
I did. Not so you can tell me that I wasn't taught anything pertaining to CRT. That is ignorant. I have said that I was fortunate enough to learn about the racism that existed throughout our history as a nation.
What I see is that I wasn't taught enough about it to your liking wheras people like Fredrick Douglas were taught to me. We have a boulevard here in NY named after him. Someone like Kimberle Crenshaw was not though. She became popular after my HS years.
Just because every name you mention wasn't taught to me doesn't mean that I wasn't taught about it. I'm learning that I was taught about it more than I thought initially.
It's impossible to make you happy is what I am seeing unless it's all and everything. That is for a college course and not a HS class and that is not white washing.
I see this back and forth between you and I as pointless...
Existed? There's the ignorance and the whitewashed version. CRT focuses not on the explicit racism found in most textbooks, but the social and institutional dynamics that still exist.
Which from what I read, CRT is only taught in college, not k-12.
CRT, an umbrella term for anti-racist curriculum, has been embraced by the National Education Association who just recently voted in support of incorporating it as part of a K-12 pedagogy.
For some who may believe systemic racism doesn't exist or that its not baked into our laws and the white power structure, see below. Laws are open to interpretation and often times violations of same have to result in court challenges and/or lawsuits. Where do the people of color and poor turn to fight the injustice? How do you begin to change the mindset of some of "inferiority?" How do you right the wrongs of the immediate, like yesterday, past, and from long ago, particularly if you're (general you like Tejas Gubner Abbott & Costello, POOTWH, etc.) not even willing to discuss, never mind acknowledge that it exists and is well entrenched?
Nikole Hannah-Jones, and the epic failure of the University of North Carolina to recruit the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist to its faculty, just proved the correctness of critical race theory. The controversial legal doctrine has been vilified by conservatives but, as this episode illustrates, it also challenges those liberals who worship at the altar of “diversity.”
According to some leading critical race theorists, integration — the traditional progressive route to racial justice — does not actually work for minorities. In this view, white supremacy is so embedded in most American institutions that people of color will never be accepted as equals — even when they are formally granted entry.
UNC demonstrated that point after its journalism school offered Hannah-Jones, an investigative journalist for the New York Times, a prestigious professorship. The MacArthur “genius” learned that her initial appointment would be without tenure. She said she knew of no “legitimate reason” why “someone who has worked in the field as long as I have, who has the credentials, the awards, or the status that I have, should be treated different than every other white professor who came before me.” After a threatened lawsuit and huge public outcry, the university’s Board of Trustees voted 9 to 4 to extend tenure to Hannah-Jones.
But this week, Hannah-Jones announced that she was instead accepting a tenured position at Howard University, a historically Black school. This wasn’t just a “drop the mic” moment. Hannah-Jones’s rejection of a majority-White institution whose leaders clearly did not value her worth — and her embrace of a Black institution that did — embodied critical race theory’s foundational principles.
The doctrine was first articulated during the 1980s as a way of understanding why, decades after the civil rights movement, African Americans still experienced discrimination in virtually every aspect of their lives. Columbia University law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term “critical race theory,” has argued that the law can often be interpreted in a way that benefits the ruling class, no matter what the law actually says.
Or, as Hannah-Jones wrote this week, “We have all seen that you can do everything to make yourself undeniable, and those in power can change the rules and attempt to deny you anyway.”
Critical race theorists advanced concepts such as structural racism and intersectionality. Some were skeptical of civil rights strategies that relied on integration, notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that “separate but equal” schools were inherently unequal and, therefore, unconstitutional.
In a classic article published in 1976, Harvard professor Derrick Bell argued that during the Jim Crow era, Black students might have been better off if they had sought more resources for segregated schools rather than access to White schools. Bell’s premise was that actual integration would never happen, even if it were legally mandated, because of “massive white hostility.”
Critical race theorists described the heavy toll of desegregation efforts, including placing Blacks in hostile environments, in a way that resonates with Hannah-Jones’s explanation for her decision: “At some point when you have proven yourself and fought your way into institutions that were not built for you . . . you have to decide that you are done forcing yourself in.”
Most professors of color work at majority-White schools, which remain better resourced than historically Black universities. Hannah-Jones’s platform allowed her to quickly raise $15 million to fund her chair at Howard, as well as another for the journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates. Few scholars enjoy that level of access to capital.
People of color in majority-White spaces often find themselves having to do “diversity” work that is not part of their job description. This can be draining and frustrating, making it difficult to refute the wisdom of Hannah-Jones’s observation that “for too long, powerful people have expected the people they have mistreated and marginalized to sacrifice themselves to make things whole.”
Nevertheless, some of us persist, based on another lesson from critical race theory: that those Hannah-Jones described as the “powerful people who maintain” racial injustice are unlikely to seek change, because the status quo provides them with too many benefits. Unfair as it is, that work remains up to people of color and our allies.
I have no beef with Hannah-Jones for declining a job at a journalism school that is literally named after the White man who, as he so delicately put it, “expressed my concerns” about her hiring. But, for now, I am okay with working at a university that in its early years was financed by the sale of enslaved people. I love my students and respect my colleagues, and have been part of the community’s efforts, still incomplete, to make reparations for that travesty. Sometimes, helping majority-White spaces be less racist and more inclusive feels transformative. Other times, it feels like an intellectual version of my great-grandfather’s job; he cleaned outhouses — i.e., shoveling White people’s excrement.
Much respect to Hannah-Jones for providing another example. Much respect to critical race theorists for keeping us focused on the crucial question: whether any approach can achieve racial justice in our flawed and divided country.
Taught 8th grade for sixteen years and every year I would teach reconstruction and the civil rights movement. I wonder if some of these topics will be a thing of the past in some states.
You think that they will stop teaching what actually happened? That is nuts and hope that isn't true.
They've never taught what actually happened. That's the whole point of CRT.
What do you mean they’ve never taught what actually happened?
Whitewashed version. No discredit to you and your efforts to educate your students, but more than likely it was a whitewashed version.
How does one whitewash reconstruction?
Was Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B. Du Bois part of your assigned curriculum? Mine neither.
So we are cherry picking exact books that weren't taught now? C'mon. If it was taught right it doesn't matter a source that was left out.
It was an example. And our education was not taught right no matter how strongly you believe it was.
I'm sorry that your education wasn't like mine and you are apparently angry about it. My apologies...
You were taught CRT in school? Well versed with Du Bois, Fredrick Douglas, Sojourner Truth, and Antonio Gramsci? Derrick Bell and Kimberle Crenshaw? And I'm not angry in the way you may think. I am suggesting you/me/we be more critical of our education. You have claimed luck in receiving a more historically accurate education. I claim that even your education was whitewashed. As was mine. To purport otherwise is ignorant.
I'm ignorant then. Thanks. No point in arguing...
We are all ignorant. We have discussions to promote awareness and education. Not only on this forum but in our classrooms. Again, the whole point of introducing CRT as part of the curriculum. You started this thread for a reason, correct?
I did. Not so you can tell me that I wasn't taught anything pertaining to CRT. That is ignorant. I have said that I was fortunate enough to learn about the racism that existed throughout our history as a nation.
What I see is that I wasn't taught enough about it to your liking wheras people like Fredrick Douglas were taught to me. We have a boulevard here in NY named after him. Someone like Kimberle Crenshaw was not though. She became popular after my HS years.
Just because every name you mention wasn't taught to me doesn't mean that I wasn't taught about it. I'm learning that I was taught about it more than I thought initially.
It's impossible to make you happy is what I am seeing unless it's all and everything. That is for a college course and not a HS class and that is not white washing.
I see this back and forth between you and I as pointless...
Existed? There's the ignorance and the whitewashed version. CRT focuses not on the explicit racism found in most textbooks, but the social and institutional dynamics that still exist.
Which from what I read, CRT is only taught in college, not k-12.
CRT, an umbrella term for anti-racist curriculum, has been embraced by the National Education Association who just recently voted in support of incorporating it as part of a K-12 pedagogy.
Taught 8th grade for sixteen years and every year I would teach reconstruction and the civil rights movement. I wonder if some of these topics will be a thing of the past in some states.
You think that they will stop teaching what actually happened? That is nuts and hope that isn't true.
They've never taught what actually happened. That's the whole point of CRT.
What do you mean they’ve never taught what actually happened?
Whitewashed version. No discredit to you and your efforts to educate your students, but more than likely it was a whitewashed version.
How does one whitewash reconstruction?
Was Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B. Du Bois part of your assigned curriculum? Mine neither.
So we are cherry picking exact books that weren't taught now? C'mon. If it was taught right it doesn't matter a source that was left out.
It was an example. And our education was not taught right no matter how strongly you believe it was.
I'm sorry that your education wasn't like mine and you are apparently angry about it. My apologies...
You were taught CRT in school? Well versed with Du Bois, Fredrick Douglas, Sojourner Truth, and Antonio Gramsci? Derrick Bell and Kimberle Crenshaw? And I'm not angry in the way you may think. I am suggesting you/me/we be more critical of our education. You have claimed luck in receiving a more historically accurate education. I claim that even your education was whitewashed. As was mine. To purport otherwise is ignorant.
I'm ignorant then. Thanks. No point in arguing...
We are all ignorant. We have discussions to promote awareness and education. Not only on this forum but in our classrooms. Again, the whole point of introducing CRT as part of the curriculum. You started this thread for a reason, correct?
I did. Not so you can tell me that I wasn't taught anything pertaining to CRT. That is ignorant. I have said that I was fortunate enough to learn about the racism that existed throughout our history as a nation.
What I see is that I wasn't taught enough about it to your liking wheras people like Fredrick Douglas were taught to me. We have a boulevard here in NY named after him. Someone like Kimberle Crenshaw was not though. She became popular after my HS years.
Just because every name you mention wasn't taught to me doesn't mean that I wasn't taught about it. I'm learning that I was taught about it more than I thought initially.
It's impossible to make you happy is what I am seeing unless it's all and everything. That is for a college course and not a HS class and that is not white washing.
I see this back and forth between you and I as pointless...
Existed? There's the ignorance and the whitewashed version. CRT focuses not on the explicit racism found in most textbooks, but the social and institutional dynamics that still exist.
Which from what I read, CRT is only taught in college, not k-12.
CRT, an umbrella term for anti-racist curriculum, has been embraced by the National Education Association who just recently voted in support of incorporating it as part of a K-12 pedagogy.
So it hasn’t even been taught yet.
Proving my point that our education has been whitewashed.
Taught 8th grade for sixteen years and every year I would teach reconstruction and the civil rights movement. I wonder if some of these topics will be a thing of the past in some states.
You think that they will stop teaching what actually happened? That is nuts and hope that isn't true.
They've never taught what actually happened. That's the whole point of CRT.
What do you mean they’ve never taught what actually happened?
Whitewashed version. No discredit to you and your efforts to educate your students, but more than likely it was a whitewashed version.
How does one whitewash reconstruction?
Was Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B. Du Bois part of your assigned curriculum? Mine neither.
So we are cherry picking exact books that weren't taught now? C'mon. If it was taught right it doesn't matter a source that was left out.
It was an example. And our education was not taught right no matter how strongly you believe it was.
I'm sorry that your education wasn't like mine and you are apparently angry about it. My apologies...
You were taught CRT in school? Well versed with Du Bois, Fredrick Douglas, Sojourner Truth, and Antonio Gramsci? Derrick Bell and Kimberle Crenshaw? And I'm not angry in the way you may think. I am suggesting you/me/we be more critical of our education. You have claimed luck in receiving a more historically accurate education. I claim that even your education was whitewashed. As was mine. To purport otherwise is ignorant.
I'm ignorant then. Thanks. No point in arguing...
We are all ignorant. We have discussions to promote awareness and education. Not only on this forum but in our classrooms. Again, the whole point of introducing CRT as part of the curriculum. You started this thread for a reason, correct?
I did. Not so you can tell me that I wasn't taught anything pertaining to CRT. That is ignorant. I have said that I was fortunate enough to learn about the racism that existed throughout our history as a nation.
What I see is that I wasn't taught enough about it to your liking wheras people like Fredrick Douglas were taught to me. We have a boulevard here in NY named after him. Someone like Kimberle Crenshaw was not though. She became popular after my HS years.
Just because every name you mention wasn't taught to me doesn't mean that I wasn't taught about it. I'm learning that I was taught about it more than I thought initially.
It's impossible to make you happy is what I am seeing unless it's all and everything. That is for a college course and not a HS class and that is not white washing.
I see this back and forth between you and I as pointless...
Existed? There's the ignorance and the whitewashed version. CRT focuses not on the explicit racism found in most textbooks, but the social and institutional dynamics that still exist.
Which from what I read, CRT is only taught in college, not k-12.
CRT, an umbrella term for anti-racist curriculum, has been embraced by the National Education Association who just recently voted in support of incorporating it as part of a K-12 pedagogy.
So it hasn’t even been taught yet.
Proving my point that our education has been whitewashed.
I disagree with that. Where would you teach it?
And what other topics do you want history teachers to teach? Remember there is only 180 school days a year so you can’t spend too much time on one topic because you have a huge curriculum to get through. Plus if you spend too much time on a topic kids get bored and tune out.
Taught 8th grade for sixteen years and every year I would teach reconstruction and the civil rights movement. I wonder if some of these topics will be a thing of the past in some states.
You think that they will stop teaching what actually happened? That is nuts and hope that isn't true.
They've never taught what actually happened. That's the whole point of CRT.
What do you mean they’ve never taught what actually happened?
Whitewashed version. No discredit to you and your efforts to educate your students, but more than likely it was a whitewashed version.
How does one whitewash reconstruction?
Was Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B. Du Bois part of your assigned curriculum? Mine neither.
So we are cherry picking exact books that weren't taught now? C'mon. If it was taught right it doesn't matter a source that was left out.
It was an example. And our education was not taught right no matter how strongly you believe it was.
I'm sorry that your education wasn't like mine and you are apparently angry about it. My apologies...
You were taught CRT in school? Well versed with Du Bois, Fredrick Douglas, Sojourner Truth, and Antonio Gramsci? Derrick Bell and Kimberle Crenshaw? And I'm not angry in the way you may think. I am suggesting you/me/we be more critical of our education. You have claimed luck in receiving a more historically accurate education. I claim that even your education was whitewashed. As was mine. To purport otherwise is ignorant.
I'm ignorant then. Thanks. No point in arguing...
We are all ignorant. We have discussions to promote awareness and education. Not only on this forum but in our classrooms. Again, the whole point of introducing CRT as part of the curriculum. You started this thread for a reason, correct?
I did. Not so you can tell me that I wasn't taught anything pertaining to CRT. That is ignorant. I have said that I was fortunate enough to learn about the racism that existed throughout our history as a nation.
What I see is that I wasn't taught enough about it to your liking wheras people like Fredrick Douglas were taught to me. We have a boulevard here in NY named after him. Someone like Kimberle Crenshaw was not though. She became popular after my HS years.
Just because every name you mention wasn't taught to me doesn't mean that I wasn't taught about it. I'm learning that I was taught about it more than I thought initially.
It's impossible to make you happy is what I am seeing unless it's all and everything. That is for a college course and not a HS class and that is not white washing.
I see this back and forth between you and I as pointless...
Existed? There's the ignorance and the whitewashed version. CRT focuses not on the explicit racism found in most textbooks, but the social and institutional dynamics that still exist.
Which from what I read, CRT is only taught in college, not k-12.
CRT, an umbrella term for anti-racist curriculum, has been embraced by the National Education Association who just recently voted in support of incorporating it as part of a K-12 pedagogy.
So it hasn’t even been taught yet.
Proving my point that our education has been whitewashed.
I disagree with that. Where would you teach it?
And what other topics do you want history teachers to teach? Remember there is only 180 school days a year so you can’t spend too much time on one topic because you have a huge curriculum to get through. Plus if you spend too much time on a topic kids get bored and tune out.
CRT is not a topic, it is an anti-racist pedagogy. Content and delivery change to become more historically, culturally, and socially appropriate and accurate. An anti-racist pedagogy would be apparent in every facet of the educational system.
Taught 8th grade for sixteen years and every year I would teach reconstruction and the civil rights movement. I wonder if some of these topics will be a thing of the past in some states.
You think that they will stop teaching what actually happened? That is nuts and hope that isn't true.
They've never taught what actually happened. That's the whole point of CRT.
What do you mean they’ve never taught what actually happened?
Whitewashed version. No discredit to you and your efforts to educate your students, but more than likely it was a whitewashed version.
How does one whitewash reconstruction?
Was Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B. Du Bois part of your assigned curriculum? Mine neither.
So we are cherry picking exact books that weren't taught now? C'mon. If it was taught right it doesn't matter a source that was left out.
It was an example. And our education was not taught right no matter how strongly you believe it was.
I'm sorry that your education wasn't like mine and you are apparently angry about it. My apologies...
You were taught CRT in school? Well versed with Du Bois, Fredrick Douglas, Sojourner Truth, and Antonio Gramsci? Derrick Bell and Kimberle Crenshaw? And I'm not angry in the way you may think. I am suggesting you/me/we be more critical of our education. You have claimed luck in receiving a more historically accurate education. I claim that even your education was whitewashed. As was mine. To purport otherwise is ignorant.
I'm ignorant then. Thanks. No point in arguing...
We are all ignorant. We have discussions to promote awareness and education. Not only on this forum but in our classrooms. Again, the whole point of introducing CRT as part of the curriculum. You started this thread for a reason, correct?
I did. Not so you can tell me that I wasn't taught anything pertaining to CRT. That is ignorant. I have said that I was fortunate enough to learn about the racism that existed throughout our history as a nation.
What I see is that I wasn't taught enough about it to your liking wheras people like Fredrick Douglas were taught to me. We have a boulevard here in NY named after him. Someone like Kimberle Crenshaw was not though. She became popular after my HS years.
Just because every name you mention wasn't taught to me doesn't mean that I wasn't taught about it. I'm learning that I was taught about it more than I thought initially.
It's impossible to make you happy is what I am seeing unless it's all and everything. That is for a college course and not a HS class and that is not white washing.
I see this back and forth between you and I as pointless...
Existed? There's the ignorance and the whitewashed version. CRT focuses not on the explicit racism found in most textbooks, but the social and institutional dynamics that still exist.
Which from what I read, CRT is only taught in college, not k-12.
CRT, an umbrella term for anti-racist curriculum, has been embraced by the National Education Association who just recently voted in support of incorporating it as part of a K-12 pedagogy.
So it hasn’t even been taught yet.
Proving my point that our education has been whitewashed.
I disagree with that. Where would you teach it?
And what other topics do you want history teachers to teach? Remember there is only 180 school days a year so you can’t spend too much time on one topic because you have a huge curriculum to get through. Plus if you spend too much time on a topic kids get bored and tune out.
CRT is not a topic, it is an anti-racist pedagogy. Content and delivery change to become more historically, culturally, and socially appropriate and accurate. An anti-racist pedagogy would be apparent in every facet of the educational system.
So where do you teach it? Seems pretty high level to me, perfect for a college level class.
Taught 8th grade for sixteen years and every year I would teach reconstruction and the civil rights movement. I wonder if some of these topics will be a thing of the past in some states.
You think that they will stop teaching what actually happened? That is nuts and hope that isn't true.
They've never taught what actually happened. That's the whole point of CRT.
What do you mean they’ve never taught what actually happened?
Whitewashed version. No discredit to you and your efforts to educate your students, but more than likely it was a whitewashed version.
How does one whitewash reconstruction?
Was Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B. Du Bois part of your assigned curriculum? Mine neither.
So we are cherry picking exact books that weren't taught now? C'mon. If it was taught right it doesn't matter a source that was left out.
It was an example. And our education was not taught right no matter how strongly you believe it was.
I'm sorry that your education wasn't like mine and you are apparently angry about it. My apologies...
You were taught CRT in school? Well versed with Du Bois, Fredrick Douglas, Sojourner Truth, and Antonio Gramsci? Derrick Bell and Kimberle Crenshaw? And I'm not angry in the way you may think. I am suggesting you/me/we be more critical of our education. You have claimed luck in receiving a more historically accurate education. I claim that even your education was whitewashed. As was mine. To purport otherwise is ignorant.
I'm ignorant then. Thanks. No point in arguing...
We are all ignorant. We have discussions to promote awareness and education. Not only on this forum but in our classrooms. Again, the whole point of introducing CRT as part of the curriculum. You started this thread for a reason, correct?
I did. Not so you can tell me that I wasn't taught anything pertaining to CRT. That is ignorant. I have said that I was fortunate enough to learn about the racism that existed throughout our history as a nation.
What I see is that I wasn't taught enough about it to your liking wheras people like Fredrick Douglas were taught to me. We have a boulevard here in NY named after him. Someone like Kimberle Crenshaw was not though. She became popular after my HS years.
Just because every name you mention wasn't taught to me doesn't mean that I wasn't taught about it. I'm learning that I was taught about it more than I thought initially.
It's impossible to make you happy is what I am seeing unless it's all and everything. That is for a college course and not a HS class and that is not white washing.
I see this back and forth between you and I as pointless...
Existed? There's the ignorance and the whitewashed version. CRT focuses not on the explicit racism found in most textbooks, but the social and institutional dynamics that still exist.
Which from what I read, CRT is only taught in college, not k-12.
CRT, an umbrella term for anti-racist curriculum, has been embraced by the National Education Association who just recently voted in support of incorporating it as part of a K-12 pedagogy.
So it hasn’t even been taught yet.
Proving my point that our education has been whitewashed.
I disagree with that. Where would you teach it?
And what other topics do you want history teachers to teach? Remember there is only 180 school days a year so you can’t spend too much time on one topic because you have a huge curriculum to get through. Plus if you spend too much time on a topic kids get bored and tune out.
CRT is not a topic, it is an anti-racist pedagogy. Content and delivery change to become more historically, culturally, and socially appropriate and accurate. An anti-racist pedagogy would be apparent in every facet of the educational system.
So where do you teach it? Seems pretty high level to me, perfect for a college level class.
The point is, it isn’t an “it”. It’s an approach, and one that needs to start from the youngest grades.
my small self... like a book amongst the many on a shelf
I wouldn't even know how or where to teach this, maybe some sort of elective? Even though we didn't get taught this I don't think our history classes were whitewashed. This to me is just the popular buzzword of the day.
Just what is critical race theory anyway?
Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.
The basic tenets of critical race theory, or CRT, emerged out of a framework for legal analysis in the late 1970s and early 1980s created by legal scholars Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado, among others.
A good example is when, in the 1930s, government officials literally drew lines around areas deemed poor financial risks, often explicitly due to the racial composition of inhabitants. Banks subsequently refused to offer mortgages to Black people in those areas.
Today, those same patterns of discrimination live on through facially race-blind policies, like single-family zoning that prevents the building of affordable housing in advantaged, majority-white neighborhoods and, thus, stymies racial desegregation efforts.
CRT also has ties to other intellectual currents, including the work of sociologists and literary theorists who studied links between political power, social organization, and language. And its ideas have since informed other fields, like the humanities, the social sciences, and teacher education.
This academic understanding of critical race theory differs from representation in recent popular books and, especially, from its portrayal by critics—often, though not exclusively, conservative Republicans. Critics charge that the theory leads to negative dynamics, such as a focus on group identity over universal, shared traits; divides people into “oppressed” and “oppressor” groups; and urges intolerance.
Thus, there is a good deal of confusion over what CRT means, as well as its relationship to other terms, like “anti-racism” and “social justice,” with which it is often conflated.
To an extent, the term “critical race theory” is now cited as the basis of all diversity and inclusion efforts regardless of how much it’s actually informed those programs.
One conservative organization, the Heritage Foundation, recently attributed a whole host of issues to CRT, including the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, LGBTQ clubs in schools, diversity training in federal agencies and organizations, California’s recent ethnic studies model curriculum, the free-speech debate on college campuses, and alternatives to exclusionary discipline—such as the Promise program in Broward County, Fla., that some parents blame for the Parkland school shootings. “When followed to its logical conclusion, CRT is destructive and rejects the fundamental ideas on which our constitutional republic is based,” the organization claimed.
(A good parallel here is how popular ideas of the common core learning standards grew to encompass far more than what those standards said on paper.)
Taught 8th grade for sixteen years and every year I would teach reconstruction and the civil rights movement. I wonder if some of these topics will be a thing of the past in some states.
You think that they will stop teaching what actually happened? That is nuts and hope that isn't true.
They've never taught what actually happened. That's the whole point of CRT.
What do you mean they’ve never taught what actually happened?
Whitewashed version. No discredit to you and your efforts to educate your students, but more than likely it was a whitewashed version.
How does one whitewash reconstruction?
Was Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B. Du Bois part of your assigned curriculum? Mine neither.
So we are cherry picking exact books that weren't taught now? C'mon. If it was taught right it doesn't matter a source that was left out.
It was an example. And our education was not taught right no matter how strongly you believe it was.
I'm sorry that your education wasn't like mine and you are apparently angry about it. My apologies...
You were taught CRT in school? Well versed with Du Bois, Fredrick Douglas, Sojourner Truth, and Antonio Gramsci? Derrick Bell and Kimberle Crenshaw? And I'm not angry in the way you may think. I am suggesting you/me/we be more critical of our education. You have claimed luck in receiving a more historically accurate education. I claim that even your education was whitewashed. As was mine. To purport otherwise is ignorant.
I'm ignorant then. Thanks. No point in arguing...
We are all ignorant. We have discussions to promote awareness and education. Not only on this forum but in our classrooms. Again, the whole point of introducing CRT as part of the curriculum. You started this thread for a reason, correct?
I did. Not so you can tell me that I wasn't taught anything pertaining to CRT. That is ignorant. I have said that I was fortunate enough to learn about the racism that existed throughout our history as a nation.
What I see is that I wasn't taught enough about it to your liking wheras people like Fredrick Douglas were taught to me. We have a boulevard here in NY named after him. Someone like Kimberle Crenshaw was not though. She became popular after my HS years.
Just because every name you mention wasn't taught to me doesn't mean that I wasn't taught about it. I'm learning that I was taught about it more than I thought initially.
It's impossible to make you happy is what I am seeing unless it's all and everything. That is for a college course and not a HS class and that is not white washing.
I see this back and forth between you and I as pointless...
Existed? There's the ignorance and the whitewashed version. CRT focuses not on the explicit racism found in most textbooks, but the social and institutional dynamics that still exist.
Which from what I read, CRT is only taught in college, not k-12.
CRT, an umbrella term for anti-racist curriculum, has been embraced by the National Education Association who just recently voted in support of incorporating it as part of a K-12 pedagogy.
So it hasn’t even been taught yet.
Proving my point that our education has been whitewashed.
I disagree with that. Where would you teach it?
And what other topics do you want history teachers to teach? Remember there is only 180 school days a year so you can’t spend too much time on one topic because you have a huge curriculum to get through. Plus if you spend too much time on a topic kids get bored and tune out.
CRT is not a topic, it is an anti-racist pedagogy. Content and delivery change to become more historically, culturally, and socially appropriate and accurate. An anti-racist pedagogy would be apparent in every facet of the educational system.
So where do you teach it? Seems pretty high level to me, perfect for a college level class.
Anti-racist pedagogy is appropriate for K-12. Racism is learned and recognized as early as age two. Certainly anti-racism can be taught to primary grade students. This lays foundation for when students are taught and view history, social studies, even literature, through a more critical lens.
For some who may believe systemic racism doesn't exist or that its not baked into our laws and the white power structure, see below. Laws are open to interpretation and often times violations of same have to result in court challenges and/or lawsuits. Where do the people of color and poor turn to fight the injustice? How do you begin to change the mindset of some of "inferiority?" How do you right the wrongs of the immediate, like yesterday, past, and from long ago, particularly if you're (general you like Tejas Gubner Abbott & Costello, POOTWH, etc.) not even willing to discuss, never mind acknowledge that it exists and is well entrenched?
Nikole Hannah-Jones, and the epic failure of the University of North Carolina to recruit the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist to its faculty, just proved the correctness of critical race theory. The controversial legal doctrine has been vilified by conservatives but, as this episode illustrates, it also challenges those liberals who worship at the altar of “diversity.”
According to some leading critical race theorists, integration — the traditional progressive route to racial justice — does not actually work for minorities. In this view, white supremacy is so embedded in most American institutions that people of color will never be accepted as equals — even when they are formally granted entry.
UNC demonstrated that point after its journalism school offered Hannah-Jones, an investigative journalist for the New York Times, a prestigious professorship. The MacArthur “genius” learned that her initial appointment would be without tenure. She said she knew of no “legitimate reason” why “someone who has worked in the field as long as I have, who has the credentials, the awards, or the status that I have, should be treated different than every other white professor who came before me.” After a threatened lawsuit and huge public outcry, the university’s Board of Trustees voted 9 to 4 to extend tenure to Hannah-Jones.
But this week, Hannah-Jones announced that she was instead accepting a tenured position at Howard University, a historically Black school. This wasn’t just a “drop the mic” moment. Hannah-Jones’s rejection of a majority-White institution whose leaders clearly did not value her worth — and her embrace of a Black institution that did — embodied critical race theory’s foundational principles.
The doctrine was first articulated during the 1980s as a way of understanding why, decades after the civil rights movement, African Americans still experienced discrimination in virtually every aspect of their lives. Columbia University law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term “critical race theory,” has argued that the law can often be interpreted in a way that benefits the ruling class, no matter what the law actually says.
Or, as Hannah-Jones wrote this week, “We have all seen that you can do everything to make yourself undeniable, and those in power can change the rules and attempt to deny you anyway.”
Critical race theorists advanced concepts such as structural racism and intersectionality. Some were skeptical of civil rights strategies that relied on integration, notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that “separate but equal” schools were inherently unequal and, therefore, unconstitutional.
In a classic article published in 1976, Harvard professor Derrick Bell argued that during the Jim Crow era, Black students might have been better off if they had sought more resources for segregated schools rather than access to White schools. Bell’s premise was that actual integration would never happen, even if it were legally mandated, because of “massive white hostility.”
Critical race theorists described the heavy toll of desegregation efforts, including placing Blacks in hostile environments, in a way that resonates with Hannah-Jones’s explanation for her decision: “At some point when you have proven yourself and fought your way into institutions that were not built for you . . . you have to decide that you are done forcing yourself in.”
Most professors of color work at majority-White schools, which remain better resourced than historically Black universities. Hannah-Jones’s platform allowed her to quickly raise $15 million to fund her chair at Howard, as well as another for the journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates. Few scholars enjoy that level of access to capital.
People of color in majority-White spaces often find themselves having to do “diversity” work that is not part of their job description. This can be draining and frustrating, making it difficult to refute the wisdom of Hannah-Jones’s observation that “for too long, powerful people have expected the people they have mistreated and marginalized to sacrifice themselves to make things whole.”
Nevertheless, some of us persist, based on another lesson from critical race theory: that those Hannah-Jones described as the “powerful people who maintain” racial injustice are unlikely to seek change, because the status quo provides them with too many benefits. Unfair as it is, that work remains up to people of color and our allies.
I have no beef with Hannah-Jones for declining a job at a journalism school that is literally named after the White man who, as he so delicately put it, “expressed my concerns” about her hiring. But, for now, I am okay with working at a university that in its early years was financed by the sale of enslaved people. I love my students and respect my colleagues, and have been part of the community’s efforts, still incomplete, to make reparations for that travesty. Sometimes, helping majority-White spaces be less racist and more inclusive feels transformative. Other times, it feels like an intellectual version of my great-grandfather’s job; he cleaned outhouses — i.e., shoveling White people’s excrement.
Much respect to Hannah-Jones for providing another example. Much respect to critical race theorists for keeping us focused on the crucial question: whether any approach can achieve racial justice in our flawed and divided country.
Good article. This touches on why republicans are pushing the “see they want segregation back” theory. I read many an article that mentions generational wealth. That brings power and for far too long the African American community hasn’t had it.
This article touches on why it can be better for them to stick together.
People like Lebron James and Tyler Perry are doing this and helping their people. I get it. It’s definitely different but it makes sense.
I’d like to add if the other professors before Hannah-Jones were offered tenure where she was not is some bullshit.
Taught 8th grade for sixteen years and every year I would teach reconstruction and the civil rights movement. I wonder if some of these topics will be a thing of the past in some states.
You think that they will stop teaching what actually happened? That is nuts and hope that isn't true.
They've never taught what actually happened. That's the whole point of CRT.
What do you mean they’ve never taught what actually happened?
Whitewashed version. No discredit to you and your efforts to educate your students, but more than likely it was a whitewashed version.
How does one whitewash reconstruction?
Was Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B. Du Bois part of your assigned curriculum? Mine neither.
So we are cherry picking exact books that weren't taught now? C'mon. If it was taught right it doesn't matter a source that was left out.
It was an example. And our education was not taught right no matter how strongly you believe it was.
I'm sorry that your education wasn't like mine and you are apparently angry about it. My apologies...
You were taught CRT in school? Well versed with Du Bois, Fredrick Douglas, Sojourner Truth, and Antonio Gramsci? Derrick Bell and Kimberle Crenshaw? And I'm not angry in the way you may think. I am suggesting you/me/we be more critical of our education. You have claimed luck in receiving a more historically accurate education. I claim that even your education was whitewashed. As was mine. To purport otherwise is ignorant.
I'm ignorant then. Thanks. No point in arguing...
We are all ignorant. We have discussions to promote awareness and education. Not only on this forum but in our classrooms. Again, the whole point of introducing CRT as part of the curriculum. You started this thread for a reason, correct?
I did. Not so you can tell me that I wasn't taught anything pertaining to CRT. That is ignorant. I have said that I was fortunate enough to learn about the racism that existed throughout our history as a nation.
What I see is that I wasn't taught enough about it to your liking wheras people like Fredrick Douglas were taught to me. We have a boulevard here in NY named after him. Someone like Kimberle Crenshaw was not though. She became popular after my HS years.
Just because every name you mention wasn't taught to me doesn't mean that I wasn't taught about it. I'm learning that I was taught about it more than I thought initially.
It's impossible to make you happy is what I am seeing unless it's all and everything. That is for a college course and not a HS class and that is not white washing.
I see this back and forth between you and I as pointless...
Existed? There's the ignorance and the whitewashed version. CRT focuses not on the explicit racism found in most textbooks, but the social and institutional dynamics that still exist.
Which from what I read, CRT is only taught in college, not k-12.
CRT, an umbrella term for anti-racist curriculum, has been embraced by the National Education Association who just recently voted in support of incorporating it as part of a K-12 pedagogy.
So it hasn’t even been taught yet.
Proving my point that our education has been whitewashed.
I disagree with that. Where would you teach it?
And what other topics do you want history teachers to teach? Remember there is only 180 school days a year so you can’t spend too much time on one topic because you have a huge curriculum to get through. Plus if you spend too much time on a topic kids get bored and tune out.
CRT is not a topic, it is an anti-racist pedagogy. Content and delivery change to become more historically, culturally, and socially appropriate and accurate. An anti-racist pedagogy would be apparent in every facet of the educational system.
So where do you teach it? Seems pretty high level to me, perfect for a college level class.
Anti-racist pedagogy is appropriate for K-12. Racism is learned and recognized as early as age two. Certainly anti-racism can be taught to primary grade students. This lays foundation for when students are taught and view history, social studies, even literature, through a more critical lens.
Thanks, Hobbes.
I learned more about CRT in five sentences from you than five articles elsewhere.
I was starting to think it was pro-racism.
The worst of times..they don't phase me, even if I look and act really crazy.
I think you could begin teaching concepts and elements of CRT beginning in 5th grade and going right up to 12th. Like most things, its a complicated subject with lots of nuance. Sure, you can focus on the big ticket items like slavery, the civil war, Jim Crow, civil rights movement, BLM, etc. but you also need to teach the how and why those things happened and the what and how the insidious nature of institutional racism was/is created, occurs and what the effects were/are. You can draw direct lines from government policy, law and impacts on minorities and the poor. But it is bigger than just that, its societal (business owner being racist in their hiring practices), education (access/quality, desegregation), corporate America (too many to list), housing/zoning (redlining, development, warehousing, tree canopy/parks), social programs (pro-family versus forced separation) and law enforcement (crime & punishment), among others. Its wide and its deeply rooted. However, you could begin teaching the concept and effects of racism in pre-K, K and grades 1-4, along with more Crispus Attucks and less the rah, rah, rah, USA, USA, USA, history of George Washington and the Cherry Tree, Honest Abe, etc.
Have you ever wondered why the following happen and are true?:
Average life expectancy 2020: White 78; Black 72 Family Net Worth (2016): White $171,000; Black $17,150 Loan denial Rates (2015):White, 10.9%; Black, 27.4% Refinance denial rate: Industry average, 17.07%; Blacks, 30.22% Homeownership (2020): White 64.6%; Black 42.1% Education Attainment, College Graduate or Higher 2020: White 35%, Black 25% Black Percent of Population: 1980, 11.7%; 2020, 13.4% Federal Bureau of Prisons Population % (July 2021): White, 57.8%; Black, 38.3% Death Rate per 100K (2019): White, 736.8; Black, 870.7
These are the effects of institutional racism that US history doesn't speak to or teach about. Tough pill to swallow.
For example, from the 1930s to the 1960s and even the 1970s, a practice of discriminatory lending now known as “redlining” was carried out in cities across the country, from Los Angeles to Baltimore. Color-coded maps dissuaded not only mortgage but also health care and infrastructure investments based on where people lived. The red lines that were drawn around neighborhoods — predominantly Black as well as Catholic, Jewish and immigrant — now often line up very closely with maps showing a lack of tree canopy today.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
I have my doubts about America. As a Catholic, my first loyalty is to a faith that predates and promises to outlast our Republic, that was disfavored for much of our history and may be headed into disfavor once again. American anti-Catholicism is far from the worst evil in this nation’s history, but it still instills a special obligation to take critiques of our Anglo-liberal-Protestant inheritance seriously, whether they come from radicals or traditionalists or both.
But when it comes to introducing American history to my own American children, none yet older than 10, I’ve realized that we’re giving them a pretty patriotic education: trips to the battlefield at Concord; books like “Johnny Tremain” and the d’Aulaires’ biographies of Lincoln and Franklin and Pocahontas; incantatory readings of “Paul Revere’s Ride.”
One of my son’s favorite books is an account of Lewis and Clark’s mission that pairs extracts from diaries with vivid illustrations. Laura Ingalls Wilder may have been canceled a few years ago, but she’s a dominant literary figure for our daughters. Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” plays in our minivan, and when my eldest daughter tries to win arguments by declaring “I’m a free American!” I let the claim stand, rather than answering her with Catholic critiques of liberal individualism.
I should say that we also deliver doses of realism about slavery and segregation and the importance of seeing history from the perspective of the defeated, from the Tories to the Sioux. (Though many older texts contain those perspectives, however un-P.C. their form; tragic realism is not the exclusive province of the early 21st century.) And we are not home-schoolers; our patriotic education interacts with what our kids learn in school and pick up through osmosis in our progressive state and city.
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But having written recently about the race-and-history wars, I think it’s worth talking about what makes patriotic education valuable, even if you ultimately want kids to have critical distance from the nation’s sins.
Here I want to disagree mildly with David French, the famous conservative critic of conservatism, who wrote for Time magazine recently chiding parents who are “afraid children will not love their country unless they are taught that their country is good.” The love for country we instill, he argued, shouldn’t rest on American innocence or greatness; rather we should love our country the way we love our family, which means “telling our full story, the good, the bad, and the ugly.”
To which I would say, yes, but … you probably want to feel a certain security in your children’s family bonds before you start telling them about every sin and scandal.
Admittedly there are families where that isn’t possible, as there are political contexts where young kids need to know dark truths upfront. But we aren’t living in Nazi-occupied France, and there is easily enough good in America, past and present, to lay a patriotic foundation, so that more adult forms of knowledge are shaped by a primary sense of loyalty and love.
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Moreover, with families the people you’re supposed to love are usually there with you, and to some extent you can’t help loving them even in their sins. Whereas the nation’s past is more distant, words and names and complicated legacies, not flesh and blood. So if historical education doesn’t begin with what’s inspiring, a sense of real affection may never take root — risking not just patriotism but a basic interest in the past.
I encounter the latter problem a lot, talking to progressive-minded young people — a sense that history isn’t just unlovable but actually pretty boring, a grim slog through imperialism and cisheteropatriarchy.
Whereas if you teach kids first that the past is filled with people who did remarkable, admirable, courageous things — acts of endurance and creation that seem beyond our own capacity — then you can build the awareness of French’s bad-and-ugly organically, filling out the picture through middle and high school, leaving both a love of country and a fascination with the past intact.
And starting with heroism doesn’t just mean starting with white people: From Harriet Tubman to Martin Luther King Jr., the story of the African-American experience is the most straightforwardly heroic American narrative, the natural core of liberal patriotism — something liberalism understood at the time of Barack Obama’s election, but in its revolutionary and pessimistic mood seems in danger of forgetting.
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This idea of a patriotic foundation hardly eliminates controversy. You still have to figure out at what age and in what way you introduce more detail and more darkness. This is as true for Catholic doubts as for radical critiques: I’m not sure exactly how to frame Roe v. Wade and abortion for my older kids.
In this sense French and others to his left are correct — there is no escape from hard historical truths, no simple way to raise educated Americans.
But still I feel no great difficulty letting my children begin, wherever their education takes them, with the old familiar poetry: Here once the embattled farmers stood / And fired the shot heard round the world.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is the author of several books, most recently, “The Decadent Society.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook
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Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
I think you could begin teaching concepts and elements of CRT beginning in 5th grade and going right up to 12th. Like most things, its a complicated subject with lots of nuance. Sure, you can focus on the big ticket items like slavery, the civil war, Jim Crow, civil rights movement, BLM, etc. but you also need to teach the how and why those things happened and the what and how the insidious nature of institutional racism was/is created, occurs and what the effects were/are. You can draw direct lines from government policy, law and impacts on minorities and the poor. But it is bigger than just that, its societal (business owner being racist in their hiring practices), education (access/quality, desegregation), corporate America (too many to list), housing/zoning (redlining, development, warehousing, tree canopy/parks), social programs (pro-family versus forced separation) and law enforcement (crime & punishment), among others. Its wide and its deeply rooted. However, you could begin teaching the concept and effects of racism in pre-K, K and grades 1-4, along with more Crispus Attucks and less the rah, rah, rah, USA, USA, USA, history of George Washington and the Cherry Tree, Honest Abe, etc.
Have you ever wondered why the following happen and are true?:
Average life expectancy 2020: White 78; Black 72 Family Net Worth (2016): White $171,000; Black $17,150 Loan denial Rates (2015):White, 10.9%; Black, 27.4% Refinance denial rate: Industry average, 17.07%; Blacks, 30.22% Homeownership (2020): White 64.6%; Black 42.1% Education Attainment, College Graduate or Higher 2020: White 35%, Black 25% Black Percent of Population: 1980, 11.7%; 2020, 13.4% Federal Bureau of Prisons Population % (July 2021): White, 57.8%; Black, 38.3% Death Rate per 100K (2019): White, 736.8; Black, 870.7
These are the effects of institutional racism that US history doesn't speak to or teach about. Tough pill to swallow.
I was thinking about this and 5th grade was the same thing I came up with. I've had experience teaching K through second year college with most of my experience in a 5th/6th grade combo, middle school, and early college. I'm thinking most kids before 5th grade would simply be lost trying to grasp CRT concepts and that the best thing at those younger ages would be to provide as much in the way of multi-cultural experience and having kids play and mix in multicultural environments (easy if they live in S.F. or N.Y, very difficult in many small towns). I was lucky to grow up in a more mixed environment and by the time I was in high school had friends of color who described in detail why it was harder for them and their families to have equal opportunities. A lot of kids don't get that kind of exposure in America. But of course you can't simply create that experience everywhere, so bringing it into a learning environment is the next best thing.
“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man [or woman] who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
I'm also kind of thinking I would avoid using the term Critical Race Theory. Or any other term for that matter. Instead I would came to class and say, "OK, today we are going to talk about some of the reasons inequality in America exists and how that relates to racism." I'm not big on buzz words.
“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man [or woman] who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
Taught 8th grade for sixteen years and every year I would teach reconstruction and the civil rights movement. I wonder if some of these topics will be a thing of the past in some states.
You think that they will stop teaching what actually happened? That is nuts and hope that isn't true.
They've never taught what actually happened. That's the whole point of CRT.
What do you mean they’ve never taught what actually happened?
Whitewashed version. No discredit to you and your efforts to educate your students, but more than likely it was a whitewashed version.
How does one whitewash reconstruction?
Was Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B. Du Bois part of your assigned curriculum? Mine neither.
So we are cherry picking exact books that weren't taught now? C'mon. If it was taught right it doesn't matter a source that was left out.
It was an example. And our education was not taught right no matter how strongly you believe it was.
I'm sorry that your education wasn't like mine and you are apparently angry about it. My apologies...
You were taught CRT in school? Well versed with Du Bois, Fredrick Douglas, Sojourner Truth, and Antonio Gramsci? Derrick Bell and Kimberle Crenshaw? And I'm not angry in the way you may think. I am suggesting you/me/we be more critical of our education. You have claimed luck in receiving a more historically accurate education. I claim that even your education was whitewashed. As was mine. To purport otherwise is ignorant.
I'm ignorant then. Thanks. No point in arguing...
We are all ignorant. We have discussions to promote awareness and education. Not only on this forum but in our classrooms. Again, the whole point of introducing CRT as part of the curriculum. You started this thread for a reason, correct?
I did. Not so you can tell me that I wasn't taught anything pertaining to CRT. That is ignorant. I have said that I was fortunate enough to learn about the racism that existed throughout our history as a nation.
What I see is that I wasn't taught enough about it to your liking wheras people like Fredrick Douglas were taught to me. We have a boulevard here in NY named after him. Someone like Kimberle Crenshaw was not though. She became popular after my HS years.
Just because every name you mention wasn't taught to me doesn't mean that I wasn't taught about it. I'm learning that I was taught about it more than I thought initially.
It's impossible to make you happy is what I am seeing unless it's all and everything. That is for a college course and not a HS class and that is not white washing.
I see this back and forth between you and I as pointless...
Existed? There's the ignorance and the whitewashed version. CRT focuses not on the explicit racism found in most textbooks, but the social and institutional dynamics that still exist.
Which from what I read, CRT is only taught in college, not k-12.
CRT, an umbrella term for anti-racist curriculum, has been embraced by the National Education Association who just recently voted in support of incorporating it as part of a K-12 pedagogy.
So it hasn’t even been taught yet.
Proving my point that our education has been whitewashed.
I disagree with that. Where would you teach it?
And what other topics do you want history teachers to teach? Remember there is only 180 school days a year so you can’t spend too much time on one topic because you have a huge curriculum to get through. Plus if you spend too much time on a topic kids get bored and tune out.
CRT is not a topic, it is an anti-racist pedagogy. Content and delivery change to become more historically, culturally, and socially appropriate and accurate. An anti-racist pedagogy would be apparent in every facet of the educational system.
So where do you teach it? Seems pretty high level to me, perfect for a college level class.
Maybe carve a few days out of the incessantly detailed war histories that are taught? Bunker Hill, Gettysburg, and the Battle of the Bulge are all very interesting topics, but learning about them to the depth I was taught was not necessary or productive...
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Taught 8th grade for sixteen years and every year I would teach reconstruction and the civil rights movement. I wonder if some of these topics will be a thing of the past in some states. A teacher this year received a complaint because a parent thought he spent too much time on lynchings. Like what in the actual fuck. It happened here in the USA, own it.
"STOP MAKING MY LITTLE TIMMY FEEL GUILTY FOR SOMETHING HE DIDN'T DO"
Taught 8th grade for sixteen years and every year I would teach reconstruction and the civil rights movement. I wonder if some of these topics will be a thing of the past in some states. A teacher this year received a complaint because a parent thought he spent too much time on lynchings. Like what in the actual fuck. It happened here in the USA, own it.
"STOP MAKING MY LITTLE TIMMY FEEL GUILTY FOR SOMETHING HE DIDN'T DO"
which they really mean, stop making ME uncomfortable when Timmy asks question like how I perpetuate this.... how come we have no black or brown friends or neighbors....
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Comments
this article sums up what I often hear associated with teaching CRT.
https://educationpost.org/explained-the-truth-about-critical-race-theory-and-how-it-shows-up-in-your-childs-classroom/
Particularly this paragraph
Nikole Hannah-Jones, and the epic failure of the University of North Carolina to recruit the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist to its faculty, just proved the correctness of critical race theory. The controversial legal doctrine has been vilified by conservatives but, as this episode illustrates, it also challenges those liberals who worship at the altar of “diversity.”
According to some leading critical race theorists, integration — the traditional progressive route to racial justice — does not actually work for minorities. In this view, white supremacy is so embedded in most American institutions that people of color will never be accepted as equals — even when they are formally granted entry.
UNC demonstrated that point after its journalism school offered Hannah-Jones, an investigative journalist for the New York Times, a prestigious professorship. The MacArthur “genius” learned that her initial appointment would be without tenure. She said she knew of no “legitimate reason” why “someone who has worked in the field as long as I have, who has the credentials, the awards, or the status that I have, should be treated different than every other white professor who came before me.” After a threatened lawsuit and huge public outcry, the university’s Board of Trustees voted 9 to 4 to extend tenure to Hannah-Jones.
But this week, Hannah-Jones announced that she was instead accepting a tenured position at Howard University, a historically Black school. This wasn’t just a “drop the mic” moment. Hannah-Jones’s rejection of a majority-White institution whose leaders clearly did not value her worth — and her embrace of a Black institution that did — embodied critical race theory’s foundational principles.
The doctrine was first articulated during the 1980s as a way of understanding why, decades after the civil rights movement, African Americans still experienced discrimination in virtually every aspect of their lives. Columbia University law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term “critical race theory,” has argued that the law can often be interpreted in a way that benefits the ruling class, no matter what the law actually says.
Or, as Hannah-Jones wrote this week, “We have all seen that you can do everything to make yourself undeniable, and those in power can change the rules and attempt to deny you anyway.”
Critical race theorists advanced concepts such as structural racism and intersectionality. Some were skeptical of civil rights strategies that relied on integration, notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that “separate but equal” schools were inherently unequal and, therefore, unconstitutional.
In a classic article published in 1976, Harvard professor Derrick Bell argued that during the Jim Crow era, Black students might have been better off if they had sought more resources for segregated schools rather than access to White schools. Bell’s premise was that actual integration would never happen, even if it were legally mandated, because of “massive white hostility.”
Critical race theorists described the heavy toll of desegregation efforts, including placing Blacks in hostile environments, in a way that resonates with Hannah-Jones’s explanation for her decision: “At some point when you have proven yourself and fought your way into institutions that were not built for you . . . you have to decide that you are done forcing yourself in.”
Most professors of color work at majority-White schools, which remain better resourced than historically Black universities. Hannah-Jones’s platform allowed her to quickly raise $15 million to fund her chair at Howard, as well as another for the journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates. Few scholars enjoy that level of access to capital.
People of color in majority-White spaces often find themselves having to do “diversity” work that is not part of their job description. This can be draining and frustrating, making it difficult to refute the wisdom of Hannah-Jones’s observation that “for too long, powerful people have expected the people they have mistreated and marginalized to sacrifice themselves to make things whole.”
Nevertheless, some of us persist, based on another lesson from critical race theory: that those Hannah-Jones described as the “powerful people who maintain” racial injustice are unlikely to seek change, because the status quo provides them with too many benefits. Unfair as it is, that work remains up to people of color and our allies.
I have no beef with Hannah-Jones for declining a job at a journalism school that is literally named after the White man who, as he so delicately put it, “expressed my concerns” about her hiring. But, for now, I am okay with working at a university that in its early years was financed by the sale of enslaved people. I love my students and respect my colleagues, and have been part of the community’s efforts, still incomplete, to make reparations for that travesty. Sometimes, helping majority-White spaces be less racist and more inclusive feels transformative. Other times, it feels like an intellectual version of my great-grandfather’s job; he cleaned outhouses — i.e., shoveling White people’s excrement.
Much respect to Hannah-Jones for providing another example. Much respect to critical race theorists for keeping us focused on the crucial question: whether any approach can achieve racial justice in our flawed and divided country.
Opinion | Nikole Hannah-Jones just proved the correctness of critical race theory - The Washington Post
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much time on a topic kids get bored and tune out.
Just what is critical race theory anyway?
Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.
The basic tenets of critical race theory, or CRT, emerged out of a framework for legal analysis in the late 1970s and early 1980s created by legal scholars Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado, among others.
A good example is when, in the 1930s, government officials literally drew lines around areas deemed poor financial risks, often explicitly due to the racial composition of inhabitants. Banks subsequently refused to offer mortgages to Black people in those areas.
Today, those same patterns of discrimination live on through facially race-blind policies, like single-family zoning that prevents the building of affordable housing in advantaged, majority-white neighborhoods and, thus, stymies racial desegregation efforts.
CRT also has ties to other intellectual currents, including the work of sociologists and literary theorists who studied links between political power, social organization, and language. And its ideas have since informed other fields, like the humanities, the social sciences, and teacher education.
This academic understanding of critical race theory differs from representation in recent popular books and, especially, from its portrayal by critics—often, though not exclusively, conservative Republicans. Critics charge that the theory leads to negative dynamics, such as a focus on group identity over universal, shared traits; divides people into “oppressed” and “oppressor” groups; and urges intolerance.
Thus, there is a good deal of confusion over what CRT means, as well as its relationship to other terms, like “anti-racism” and “social justice,” with which it is often conflated.
To an extent, the term “critical race theory” is now cited as the basis of all diversity and inclusion efforts regardless of how much it’s actually informed those programs.
One conservative organization, the Heritage Foundation, recently attributed a whole host of issues to CRT, including the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, LGBTQ clubs in schools, diversity training in federal agencies and organizations, California’s recent ethnic studies model curriculum, the free-speech debate on college campuses, and alternatives to exclusionary discipline—such as the Promise program in Broward County, Fla., that some parents blame for the Parkland school shootings. “When followed to its logical conclusion, CRT is destructive and rejects the fundamental ideas on which our constitutional republic is based,” the organization claimed.
(A good parallel here is how popular ideas of the common core learning standards grew to encompass far more than what those standards said on paper.)
https://www.edweek.org/leadership/what-is-critical-race-theory-and-why-is-it-under-attack/2021/05
This article touches on why it can be better for them to stick together.
People like Lebron James and Tyler Perry are doing this and helping their people. I get it. It’s definitely different but it makes sense.
I’d like to add if the other professors before Hannah-Jones were offered tenure where she was not is some bullshit.
No matter what I say you’ll have a problem with it anyway…
even if I look and act really crazy.
Have you ever wondered why the following happen and are true?:
Average life expectancy 2020: White 78; Black 72
Family Net Worth (2016): White $171,000; Black $17,150
Loan denial Rates (2015): White, 10.9%; Black, 27.4%
Refinance denial rate: Industry average, 17.07%; Blacks, 30.22%
Homeownership (2020): White 64.6%; Black 42.1%
Education Attainment, College Graduate or Higher 2020: White 35%, Black 25%
Black Percent of Population: 1980, 11.7%; 2020, 13.4%
Federal Bureau of Prisons Population % (July 2021): White, 57.8%; Black, 38.3%
Death Rate per 100K (2019): White, 736.8; Black, 870.7
These are the effects of institutional racism that US history doesn't speak to or teach about. Tough pill to swallow.
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For example, from the 1930s to the 1960s and even the 1970s, a practice of discriminatory lending now known as “redlining” was carried out in cities across the country, from Los Angeles to Baltimore. Color-coded maps dissuaded not only mortgage but also health care and infrastructure investments based on where people lived. The red lines that were drawn around neighborhoods — predominantly Black as well as Catholic, Jewish and immigrant — now often line up very closely with maps showing a lack of tree canopy today.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/06/30/opinion/environmental-inequity-trees-critical-infrastructure.html
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Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
ROSS DOUTHAT
Why a Patriotic Education Can Be Valuable
By Ross Douthat
Opinion Columnist
I have my doubts about America. As a Catholic, my first loyalty is to a faith that predates and promises to outlast our Republic, that was disfavored for much of our history and may be headed into disfavor once again. American anti-Catholicism is far from the worst evil in this nation’s history, but it still instills a special obligation to take critiques of our Anglo-liberal-Protestant inheritance seriously, whether they come from radicals or traditionalists or both.
But when it comes to introducing American history to my own American children, none yet older than 10, I’ve realized that we’re giving them a pretty patriotic education: trips to the battlefield at Concord; books like “Johnny Tremain” and the d’Aulaires’ biographies of Lincoln and Franklin and Pocahontas; incantatory readings of “Paul Revere’s Ride.”
One of my son’s favorite books is an account of Lewis and Clark’s mission that pairs extracts from diaries with vivid illustrations. Laura Ingalls Wilder may have been canceled a few years ago, but she’s a dominant literary figure for our daughters. Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” plays in our minivan, and when my eldest daughter tries to win arguments by declaring “I’m a free American!” I let the claim stand, rather than answering her with Catholic critiques of liberal individualism.
I should say that we also deliver doses of realism about slavery and segregation and the importance of seeing history from the perspective of the defeated, from the Tories to the Sioux. (Though many older texts contain those perspectives, however un-P.C. their form; tragic realism is not the exclusive province of the early 21st century.) And we are not home-schoolers; our patriotic education interacts with what our kids learn in school and pick up through osmosis in our progressive state and city.
But having written recently about the race-and-history wars, I think it’s worth talking about what makes patriotic education valuable, even if you ultimately want kids to have critical distance from the nation’s sins.
Here I want to disagree mildly with David French, the famous conservative critic of conservatism, who wrote for Time magazine recently chiding parents who are “afraid children will not love their country unless they are taught that their country is good.” The love for country we instill, he argued, shouldn’t rest on American innocence or greatness; rather we should love our country the way we love our family, which means “telling our full story, the good, the bad, and the ugly.”
To which I would say, yes, but … you probably want to feel a certain security in your children’s family bonds before you start telling them about every sin and scandal.
Admittedly there are families where that isn’t possible, as there are political contexts where young kids need to know dark truths upfront. But we aren’t living in Nazi-occupied France, and there is easily enough good in America, past and present, to lay a patriotic foundation, so that more adult forms of knowledge are shaped by a primary sense of loyalty and love.
Moreover, with families the people you’re supposed to love are usually there with you, and to some extent you can’t help loving them even in their sins. Whereas the nation’s past is more distant, words and names and complicated legacies, not flesh and blood. So if historical education doesn’t begin with what’s inspiring, a sense of real affection may never take root — risking not just patriotism but a basic interest in the past.
I encounter the latter problem a lot, talking to progressive-minded young people — a sense that history isn’t just unlovable but actually pretty boring, a grim slog through imperialism and cisheteropatriarchy.
Whereas if you teach kids first that the past is filled with people who did remarkable, admirable, courageous things — acts of endurance and creation that seem beyond our own capacity — then you can build the awareness of French’s bad-and-ugly organically, filling out the picture through middle and high school, leaving both a love of country and a fascination with the past intact.
And starting with heroism doesn’t just mean starting with white people: From Harriet Tubman to Martin Luther King Jr., the story of the African-American experience is the most straightforwardly heroic American narrative, the natural core of liberal patriotism — something liberalism understood at the time of Barack Obama’s election, but in its revolutionary and pessimistic mood seems in danger of forgetting.
This idea of a patriotic foundation hardly eliminates controversy. You still have to figure out at what age and in what way you introduce more detail and more darkness. This is as true for Catholic doubts as for radical critiques: I’m not sure exactly how to frame Roe v. Wade and abortion for my older kids.
In this sense French and others to his left are correct — there is no escape from hard historical truths, no simple way to raise educated Americans.
But still I feel no great difficulty letting my children begin, wherever their education takes them, with the old familiar poetry: Here once the embattled farmers stood / And fired the shot heard round the world.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
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Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is the author of several books, most recently, “The Decadent Society.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook
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July 9, 2021Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
I was thinking about this and 5th grade was the same thing I came up with. I've had experience teaching K through second year college with most of my experience in a 5th/6th grade combo, middle school, and early college. I'm thinking most kids before 5th grade would simply be lost trying to grasp CRT concepts and that the best thing at those younger ages would be to provide as much in the way of multi-cultural experience and having kids play and mix in multicultural environments (easy if they live in S.F. or N.Y, very difficult in many small towns). I was lucky to grow up in a more mixed environment and by the time I was in high school had friends of color who described in detail why it was harder for them and their families to have equal opportunities. A lot of kids don't get that kind of exposure in America. But of course you can't simply create that experience everywhere, so bringing it into a learning environment is the next best thing.
https://abolitionistteachingnetwork.org/
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
www.headstonesband.com
which they really mean, stop making ME uncomfortable when Timmy asks question like how I perpetuate this.... how come we have no black or brown friends or neighbors....
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14