> Christopher Rufo reported[2] that 30 public school districts in 15 states are teaching a book, Not My Idea, that tells readers that “whiteness” leads white people to make deals with the devil for “stolen land, stolen riches, and special favors.” White people get to “mess endlessly with the lives of your friends, neighbors, loved ones, and all fellow humans of color for the purpose of profit,” the book adds.
> There are plenty of other examples that prove racial essentialism and collective guilt are being taught to young students. In Cupertino, California, an elementary school required[3] third graders to rank themselves according to the “power and privilege” associated with their ethnicities. Schools in Buffalo, New York, taught students[4] that “all white people” perpetuate “systemic racism” and had kindergarteners watch a video of dead black children, warning them about “racist police and state-sanctioned violence.” And in Arizona, the state’s education department sent out[5] an “equity toolkit” to schools that claimed infants as young as 3 months old can start to show signs of racism and “remain strongly biased in favor of whiteness” by age 5.
[1] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/yes-critical-race...
[2] https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1413292881264005126
[3] https://www.city-journal.org/identity-politics-in-cupertino-...
[4] https://www.city-journal.org/buffalo-public-schools-critical...
[5] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/arizona-education-ba...
30 school districts (out of how many?) use a book Rufo doesn't like.
Any reason why anyone, aside from Rufo, should care?
Half of the nation doesn't teach sex ed because skyperson doesn't like when people bang without signing an exclusive banging agreement in public first. Half the nation teaches kids that the Confederacy was formed to protect "states' rights", carefully omitting that the right in question was to own black people as livestock[1]. But hey, 30 districts use a white-people-bad, and that's the real problem.
And what does the last part of your comment (about AZ) have to do with anything? Telling educators that 5-year-olds can absorb shitty beliefs is now a cOnTrOvErSiAl tHeOrY?
I don't even know where to start here, let's set this one aside.
So, let's focus on this question first: assuming the book you mentioned is bad, which percentage of pubic schools use it, and in which way?
[1] TX is my go-to example. They were teaching that slavery was a "side issue" in the Civil War when I was living there in 2010-2017.
I'm not even going to bother dissecting the bullshit they peddle these days. Feel free to dig in.
Texas oversees 1,247 school districts. Tell me more about the problem of CRT in schools though.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/texas-will-finally...
> this is happening and it's good
From here[1]:
> Christopher Rufo, a prominent opponent of critical race theory, in March acknowledged intentionally using the term to describe a range of race-related topics and conjure a negative association.
> “We have successfully frozen their brand — ‘critical race theory’ — into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions,” wrote Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. “We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category. The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’”
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/05/29/critical...
When it comes to teaching children Not My Idea, definitely seems to be more to the concern than just shadows:
The fallacy of ‘whiteness’ https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/08/08/opinion/fallacy-white...
> According to recent reports, public and private elementary schools across the United States have used, as part of racial equity education, an illustrated children’s book called “Not My Idea,” in which a devil with a pointy tail offers the young reader a “contract binding you to whiteness.” The contract promises “stolen land,” “stolen riches,” and “special favors”; in exchange, whiteness gets “your soul” and power over “the lives of your friends, neighbors, loved ones, and all fellow humans of COLOR.”
I looked at some of the illustrations of "Not My Idea"... it's a bit wired and cringe worthy sometimes. Still compare that to the indoctrination that is in some of the schoolbooks:
Slavery was just "black immigration" https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/aug/12/right-wing...
The kkk was not morally wrong ... ?? https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/texas-senate-...
Banning of Black and Latino Authors https://www.mcall.com/news/pennsylvania/mc-nws-pa-banned-boo...
Teaching creationism: https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2021/apr/08/house-advanc...
Are you as outraged about that as you are about a fringe law theory?
Can you name numbers comparing how many books with problematic woke content are used versus the books mentioned from the guardian?
Not quite. Rufo knows what CRT is, and importantly, what shares the same problems CRT does. That is to say, different branches of the same general ideology that operate on different topics. The CRT model is kinda like ideological lego, you can just plug in a topic). The demon is legion and has many names. Rufo's stuff is mostly about calling woke thought in general CRT, since the name stuck. I haven't yet seen Rufo label things that aren't wokeness or influenced by wokeness CRT.
It's the same kind of thing as when we call Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy and all the Protestant sects "Christianity" even though they are not the same, or how we still call Zen "Buddhism" even though it lacks the supernatural component of its older cousins. None of those things is the same, but they share a family resemblance, they have a character to them that makes them unique among the sea of ideologies, religions and philosophies. Rufo's nailing "CRT" to that family resemblance, because the family is there, the demon is real, and it needs a name to be talked about usefully, not a legion of them.
I'm also always surprised how little US citizens know about their own history. Ask somebody about "Birth of a Nation" and see what they can tell you about it.
Ask them if they know about the "Pro American Rally" in 1939 and see what they say.
These things are not taught in school and it's a shame. I know what I'm talking about I'm German and I hated our history education in school as we were discussing the 3rd Reich nearly every year. Yet, reflecting on it and seeing that the same stupid ideas get a hold today again, it was not nearly enough. We should have taught more. The same holds for the German colonial history (that was not covered and is changing slowly).
If you don't know your past, you are condemned to repeat it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/150-years-lat...
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/aug/12/right-wing...
These stories are lenses through which you can describe the world. They’re like software for the mind. And like software, they aren’t objectively right or objectively wrong. Each of these stories (dubiously) explain and obsesses over some aspects of the world, and ignores other aspects completely.
No, its not.
Though there is a mythic anti-”Critical Race Theory” story created by the American Right, and the thing within it called “Critical Race Theory” is a (particularly incoherent, because a number of unrelated and opposing things from the real world that share only that they concern race, and they are disliked by the American Right, and they are not actually Critical Race Theory, are jammed into it) mythic story.
> These stories are lenses through which you can describe the world. They’re like software for the mind. And like software, they aren’t objectively right or objectively wrong.
Actual critical race theory (like critical legal studies, from which it stems) holds the existence of objective features of social structures, with tangible, material, effects.
Like many hypothesized social phenomenon, the complexity of the systems involved may make falsification difficult on a practical level, but the claims it makes are fact claims which are objectively true or false.
Rufo is trying to create the world's biggest molehill.
[1] https://ballotpedia.org/Public_school_district_(United_State...
This is not even remotely the same as the Taliban banning music or China cracking down on LGBTQ stuff.