Thursday, July 1, 2021

Hi, It's Stupid: Critical Race Pedagogy

 

Pledging the flag to conceal their wicked aims. It's what they always do, the swine, especially the first graders. Via Learning for Justice, and some great big explication of what "CRT" in the classroom is actually like (it works extremely hard to not make anybody feel bad, white kids in particular).

Hi, it's Stupid to say critical race theory is being taught in school classrooms all across the USA. Do you want to get good teachers in trouble? Anyway it's not really critical race theory, and it's certainly not being taught. 

But then I ran into somebody smart saying something similar, my tweep Nathan Newman, professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, in a post at his substack ("Critical Race Theory IS In Our Schools—And It Needs to Be Defended):

The rightwing legislators seeking to ban “Critical Race Theory” from our classrooms are lying about what CRT teaches about race in our society – but they are not lying that CRT has been influencing how children are being educated.

Some progressives want to pretend that Derrick Bell is some kind of Gnostic learning, taught only to the select in the cloisters of elite law schools, but that does a disservice to the profound impact, Bell, Richard Delgado, Kimberlé Crenshaw and other CRT scholars have had on our culture, including in the field of education and teacher training in particular.

Because it indeed is not the case that there are any grade school teachers imparting this gnarly body of theory to their charges, but there are some who are applying it, or what Newman suggests calling a "critical race pedagogy" (at the moment I like "CRT-informed pedagogy"), in the classroom, and it's a really good thing. Kids don't have to learn CRT, but teachers should learn about it and bring it to the way they do their practical everyday work, as an aid to the way they handle the difficult feelings about race they may encounter in the kindest and most productive possible way:

No, Derrick Bell is not being taught to first graders, but his focus on “storytelling” – on how which stories are told and what questions are asked of the stories we do tell profoundly influences debates on which books are taught to children and how discussion of those books is approached. Pretending otherwise is not just disingenuous but will be politically ineffective in fighting the Right-- and could damage anti-racism activism by acting like there might be something shameful about CRT influencing pedagogy.

The problem of McCarthyism was not those blameless liberals were falsely accused of being Communists; it was that labor leaders, Hollywood writers and teachers were accurately identified as having been active socialists and communists and thereby had their lives and careers destroyed.

Precisely. And McCarthyism is exactly what we are dealing with here, in the abuse directed against CRT for being "Marxist" (on the grounds of its being influenced by the "critical theory" of the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt, as I was saying earlier, which was influenced by Marx, though I think not as deeply as the British Labour Party or the German SPD). Antiracist classroom teaching is definitely "critical", and that's a good thing, even if it's only as modestly critical as the position the Southern Baptist Convention ended up with in the controversy that began

in 2019 where the governing body of the denomination, rather than passing a blanket condemnation of Critical Race Theory, passed a relatively nuanced resolution that criticized only the “misuse” of critical race theory when not “subordinate to Scripture” while agreeing CRT “can aid in evaluating a variety of human experiences” related to explain “how race has and continues to function in society.”

The fury at this relatively balanced approach to the debate on racism within the Southern Baptist Conference and in society itself would spill over into the efforts we have seen to ban CRT in education across the country and led anti-CRT Southern Baptists to seek a blanket condemnation of CRT and control of the SPC Presidency at the 2021 Convention.  They failed in both these efforts as 15,680 Southern Baptist delegates largely sidestepped the issue and defeated the candidate promoted by the anti-CRT ultraconservatives.

Anyway you should read Nathan's whole post for a clearer idea, with links, of what a CRT-informed pedagogy looks like, so I don't have to struggle to write it up myself.

Speaking of McCarthyism, I laid out a big Twitter polemic in response to a stupid smirking National Review piece by editor Rich Lowry:

plust a debate with some lesser characters...

Heh. I think that ended it.

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