© Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images
At a rally against CRT being taught in schools in Leesburg, Virginia
There's a liberal way to fight illiberalism. And it's beginning to work.
The stories in the mainstream media this past week about the broadening campaign to ban critical race theory in public schools have been fascinating — and particularly in how they describe what CRT is. Here's the
Atlantic's benign summary of CRT: "recent reexaminations of the role that slavery and segregation have played in American history and the attempts to redress those historical offenses."
NBC News calls it the "academic study of racism's pervasive impact."
NPR calls CRT: "teaching about the effects of racism."
The New York Times calls it, with a straight face, "classroom discussion of race, racism" and goes on to describe it as a "framework used to look at how racism is woven into seemingly neutral laws and institutions."
How on earth could merely teaching students about the history of racism and its pervasiveness in the United States provoke such a fuss? No wonder Charles Blow is
mystified. But don't worry.
The MSM have a ready explanation: the GOP needs an inflammatory issue to rile their racist base, and so this entire foofaraw is really just an astro-turfed, ginned-up partisan gambit about nothing. The MSM get particular pleasure in ridiculing parents who use the term "critical race theory" as shorthand for things that just, well, make them uncomfortable —
when the parents obviously have no idea what CRT really is.
When pushed to describe it themselves, elite journalists refer to the legal theories Derrick Bell came up with, in the 1970s — obscure, esoteric and nothing really to do with high-school teaching. "If your kid is learning CRT, your kid is in law/grad school,"
snarked one. Marc Lamont Hill even tried to pull off some strained
references to Gramsci to prove his Marxian intellectual cred, and to condescend to his opponents.
This rubric achieves several things at once. It denies that there is anything really radical or new about CRT; it flatters the half-educated; it blames the controversy entirely on Republican opportunism; and it urges all fair-minded people to defend intellectual freedom and racial sensitivity against these ugly white supremacists.
What could be more convenient?
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