Kids just saying no to “critical race theory.” Photo: ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images Last summer, when the conservative activist Christopher Rufo started using the term “critical race theory” as a cudgel to help Republicans, he knew he was launching a classic spin campaign, not an honest attempt to understand today’s political culture and its discontents.
These beliefs — which vary in their merit, but deal mostly with how whiteness and power are entwined — have become the focus of workplace trainings and classroom lessons that use race as an interpretive lens, he says. But they aren’t limited to these spheres or even this particular subject, which is by design. Rufo has been clear about wanting to keep his definition of CRT fluid and imprecise to ensure it stays useful.
The idea that the right’s embrace of CRT was inspired by a recent surge of liberal overreach is suspicious for reasons even beyond the self-interested political motivations outlined by the man who came up with it. A more familiar explanation for why Americans should panic was offered in the last week by two of conservatism’s leading lights, both of whom described CRT as a kind of revenge.
A fixation on Black revenge has been a feature of the American popular imagination for centuries. In years past, it has been invoked by white authorities and their proxies to suppress violence both real, like slave revolts, and imagined, like the election of Black officials during Reconstruction, which, for more than 100 years after, many schools were still characterizing as an unmitigated disaster for American democracy, as New York’s Ed Kilgore has noted.
What that “something” was, precisely, got articulated with a renewed urgency in the rhetoric of Donald Trump, who had already spent years casting Obama’s rise as an illegitimate usurpation. He ran a presidential campaign premised on the claim that the U.S. had been uniquely tainted, undermined, and set back by the previous administration. This supposed degradation was evident in the epidemic of rape and murder brought to the U.S.
zakcheneyrice Let’s stop calling it “white panic”, that’s not a thing anymore than the fabled “gay panic” from the 80s. This is one thing and one thing only, hate.
zakcheneyrice For certain white people, seems like it should be called “The Nat Turner Day, Evening and Nightmare Nightmare.”
zakcheneyrice It's extremely important for the PMC to do the work of their capitalist masters by making white supremacy the 'master key' for all social relations, reinforcing wage labor, billionaire owners, and the PMC's role in servicing the latter, good job
zakcheneyrice If a theory has real merit there would be no need to attack the motives of its critics.
zakcheneyrice The picture… I mean, obviously the CHILDREN aren’t oppressors; their parents are.
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