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Tag: white privilege
Everybody Gets ‘Critical Race Theory’ Wrong — Except Most Americans

Everybody Gets ‘Critical Race Theory’ Wrong — Except Most Americans

In 2020, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., included so-called whiteness traits in its "Talking About Race" online portal. The museum advised that traits like "hard work" and "objective thinking" were vestiges of "whiteness." When this created a stir, the museum (which is fantastic, by the way) removed the online post and apologized.

That isn't the way things normally roll here in 21st-century America. No, our more typical response is spittle-flecked outrage, misleading accounts and imprecations.

There are problems with the critical race theory, or CRT, approach favored by some progressives. And yes, it is also the case that some Republicans and conservatives are making bad-faith arguments and blowing on the embers of racism. So, let's attempt a little tidying up.

The laws some Republican-dominated states are passing to curtail CRT and its progeny are bad ideas for many reasons. But the depictions of those laws in big outlets like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post are frequently wrong or incomplete. A recent CNN report about Florida's new law that would prohibit teaching methods that make people "feel discomfort, guilt, anguish" mangles the facts. CNN described critical race theory as "a concept that seeks to understand and address inequality and racism in the US."

Not quite, though CNN is hardly alone. It is common to see anti-CRT bills described as "efforts to restrict what teachers can say about race, racism and American history in the classroom." It's much more than that.

In their book Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic state forthrightly that "Critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law." Robin DiAngelo, author of "White Fragility," declares that "White identity is inherently racist."

CRT adherents favor teaching techniques that most Americans believe violate our commitment to colorblindness, such as "affinity groups" wherein people are segregated by race to discuss certain issues. In Massachusetts, the Wellesley public schools hosted a "Healing Space for Asian and Asian-American students and others in the BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) community." An official email explained that, "This is a safe space for our Asian/Asian American and Students of Color, not for students who identify only as White."

In Virginia's Loudoun County, teacher training materials encouraged educators to reject "color blindness" and to "address their whiteness (e.g., white privilege)." Each teacher was exhorted to become a "culturally competent professional who acknowledges and is aware of his or her own racist, sexist, heterosexist, or other detrimental attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and feelings."

Democrats often object that CRT is "not taught in K-12 schools," which is evasive. It's true that third graders are not being assigned the works of Kimberle Crenshaw or Ibram X. Kendi, but CRT-adjacent ideas are making their way into classrooms. New York City has spent millions on training materials that disdain "worship of the written word," "individualism" and "objectivity" as aspects of "white-supremacy culture."

Some Republicans have made things even worse. A conservative group is suing a school district in Tennessee because its second grade curriculum included a "Civil Rights Heroes" module that included a picture book about Ruby Bridges. Other bad-faith actors like Christopher Rufo are attempting to taint many views they disagree with as CRT, which Rufo describes as "the perfect villain."

In fact, large majorities of both Republicans and Democrats favor teaching about slavery, racism and other sins of American history. Eighty-eight percent of Democrats and 64 percent of Republicans favor teaching that slavery was the cause of the Civil War. Ninety percent of Democrats and 83 percent of Republicans believe textbooks should say that many Founding Fathers owned slaves. That is not the picture of a nation (or even one party) that is refusing to grapple with the history of racism. Where you do find partisan divergence is on whether schools should teach the concept of "white privilege." Seventy-one percent of Democrats say yes, but only 22 percent of Republicans agree.

The Republicans are right on this. This is not to say that white privilege doesn't exist, but teaching it in schools may have the opposite effect of what proponents hope and opponents fear. What's the likely result of telling white students, with their varying incomes and backgrounds, that they are the bearers of "white privilege"? I don't think most of them are going to feel guilty. They're going to get angry. They're going to feel alienated from their Black classmates. Teaching like that sets up an inter-group victim sweepstakes in which everyone loses.

The goal of teaching about slavery, racism and other sins is to tell the truth. For the same reason, schools should teach about the admirable progress we've made in moving toward a more just multiethnic society. If we're hoping to elicit the right feelings from students — and we should — then the feelings we're after are sympathy, understanding, and solidarity, not guilt.

Mona Charen is policy editor of The Bulwark and host of the "Beg to Differ" podcast. Her most recent book is Sex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Common Sense. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

Overly Privileged Tucker Carlson Says Homeless Should 'Get Jobs Or Leave'

Overly Privileged Tucker Carlson Says Homeless Should 'Get Jobs Or Leave'

When it comes to the face of smug and punchable white privilege, no bigger one comes to mind than that of Fox News' white nationalist propagandist Tucker Carlson. The far-right rabble-rouser was born into vast privilege and wealth, with a father who served as a United States ambassador and a mother who was a wealthy heiress. Carlson also attended elite private schools and most likely never worked an honest, middle-class job in his entire life. But that certainly hasn't stopped the fake news host from smearing the working poor and homeless so as to manipulate his audience into ignoring the larger (and REAL) problem: billionaires, unchecked corporations, and professionlai liars like Carlson.

During a recent segment on his Fox News program, the pompous twit whined about the homeless issue in America.

“Everywhere, at every intersection, there are beggars. This is what we used to imagine India was like. But this is not Calcutta. This is New York, San Francisco and Austin, Texas. So the question is, what happened? And the short answer is our leaders did this," said Carlson. Adding, "Politicians are making it much easier to be a homeless drug addict in the United States, and much harder to be a law-abiding member of the middle class. What’s the effect? Well, let’s see. The middle class is dying, and we now have record numbers of drug-addicted vagrants.”

And since he simply can't stop being a dick, as former Daily Show host Jon Stewart famously said to his face, Carlson said that the homeless should have their "tents hauled to landfills and told to get a job or leave."

Carlson might want to heed his own words and get an actual job.

Watch the segment below:

In The Twilight Of Obama’s Presidency, Hope Remains

In The Twilight Of Obama’s Presidency, Hope Remains

Seven years ago, months before he won the Democratic presidential nomination, Barack Obama delivered a speech about race.

Celebrated by many and derided by some, it addressed head-on the role of race in his campaign. At the time, I was most struck by his willingness to acknowledge those white Americans who objected to the very notion that the color of their skin affords them privileges denied to people of color.

“Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they’ve been particularly privileged by their race,” Obama said. “Their experience is the immigrant experience. As far as they’re concerned, no one handed them anything. They built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pensions dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and they feel their dreams slipping away. And in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero-sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense.

“So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town, when they hear an African-American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed, when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudice, resentment builds over time.”

In that moment, candidate Obama was describing many of the people I come from. I know from long experience that I am not alone. Many of us white Americans, particularly those of us with working-class voters in our own families, greeted Obama’s election as a sign of hope that his presidency would chip away at that boulder on the shoulder. Launched by this historic moment of his election, surely we would find our way to a better place in race relations for our nation.

In the most recent issue of New York magazine, Jennifer Senior writes what, to some extent, we already know: Our dream of a more unified America was just that, an illusion. Her story addresses the disappointments of some black Americans.

“In a country whose basic genetic blueprint includes the same crooked mutations that made slavery and Jim Crow possible, it is not possible to have a black president surrounded by black aides on Marine One without paying a price. And the price that Obama has had to pay — and, more important, that African-Americans have had to pay — is one of caution, moderation, and at times compromised policies: The first black president could do only so much, and say only so much, on behalf of other African-Americans. That is the bittersweet irony of the first black presidency.”

Only a white columnist with out-of-control hubris would suggest she or he could speak to the disappointment some black Americans may feel in the presidency of Barack Obama.

I can, however, admit to heartbreak over how it’s played out in the hearts and minds of white Americans. Too many of us continue to see issues of race to be a problem for only the so-called black community. As if they — we love to refer to black people as “they” and “them” — were a country-within-a-country, in a land far, far away.

As for white privilege? There’s still no faster way to start a fight than to say those two words that represent a fact in America.

I moderate a lot of discussions about race on my Facebook page, which is public. Every time, I’m reminded that the unwillingness of some white Americans to acknowledge the inherent privilege of their race is as strong and stubborn as it was when Obama gave that speech in 2008.

The most vocal objections, via email and social media posts, come from a certain group of white men. They hear “privilege” and think of the wealth and power that have eluded them for all of their lives. They cannot see an advantage in the color of their skin because of their certainty of all that they have lost or will never have.

Around and around we go.

Earlier this year, I sat in the audience in Selma, Alabama, as Obama took the stage to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the bloody march for civil rights across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

The visual of the bridge behind him was striking, and his speech was something only our first black president could have delivered:

“Our march is not yet finished. But we’re getting closer. Two hundred and thirty-nine years after this nation’s founding, our union is not yet perfect. But we are getting closer. Our job’s easier because somebody already got us through that first mile. Somebody already got us over that bridge. When it feels the road’s too hard, when the torch we’ve been passed feels too heavy, we will remember these early travelers and draw strength from their example.”

Ultimately, we can speak only to the contents of our own hearts. On that day in Selma, I could not hear Barack Obama’s words and feel disappointment.

On that day, I could not see him standing in front of that bridge and feel anything but hope. And that sustains me.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist. She is the author of two books, including …and His Lovely Wife, which chronicled the successful race of her husband, Sherrod Brown, for the U.S. Senate. To find out more about Connie Schultz (con.schultz@yahoo.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

President Obama speaks at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., on Saturday, March 7, 2015. (Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times/TNS)

Guns, Racism, And White Privilege — Clinton Discusses Charleston

Guns, Racism, And White Privilege — Clinton Discusses Charleston

GOP candidates, conservative pundits, and congressional Republicans have blamed the shooting at a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina last Wednesday on just about everything — including opioid abuse, Caitlyn Jenner, and anti-Christian sentiment — everything, that is, except the proliferation of guns and the persistence of racism in America.

After days of misdirection, euphemism, and evasion, Republicans are slowly coming around to the idea that the massacre was, in fact, a racially motivated act of domestic terrorism.

They’re even beginning to tentatively acknowledge, one by one, that the Confederate flag, currently flying on the lawn in front of the state Capitol, is worth reconsidering, as it is a symbol in line with the white supremacist ideologies espoused by the confessed shooter.

Hillary Clinton has had no such problems, speaking forcefully of the roles that racism, unchecked guns, and unacknowledged white privilege play in American culture, and how they contribute to violence and tragedy.

Speaking at an annual conference of mayors in San Francisco Saturday, the Democratic candidate was more upfront, saying that “race remains a deep fault line in America.”

“For a lot of well-meaning, open-minded white people,” she said, “the sight of a young black man in a hoodie still evokes a twinge of fear.” She cautioned that while media coverage of discrimination can “evoke sympathy, even empathy” from white viewers, it will rarely spur them to action, or to admit their own privilege. “We can’t hide from any of these hard truths about race and justice in America,” Clinton said. “We have to name them, and own them, and then change them.”

She also called for “common-sense gun reforms that keep weapons out of the hands of criminals and the violently unstable while respecting responsible gun owners.” She expressed her wish that the gun debate would be more “informed by evidence,” not “inflamed by ideologies.”

Photo: A note on the sidewalk memorial on Friday, June 19, 2015, includes photos of the 9 who were killed at the “Mother” Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, SC. (Curtis Compton/Atlanta Journal-Constitution/TNS)