CSotD: Good intentions, and accidents
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Mike Lester (AMC) continues to press the rightwing fantasy that Critical Race Theory is taught in elementary schools, when, as a formal inquiry, it is generally confined to collegiate graduate courses.
However, he hits on an element that I agree with, not about the real CRT as practiced by serious historians, but in how it’s being presented in popular media, which is this:
My problem with both the 1619 Project that launched all this kerfuffle, and much of the anti-racist dialogue that has followed, is in implications that the racism in our history was universally intentional.
Some of it clearly is: The emergence of the Klan in the wake of Reconstruction, as well as its re-emergence in the 1920s, was intentional racism, as was the Chinese Exclusion Act in the late 19th Century and further restrictions on immigration in 1924.
And Charles Lindbergh did not just innocently and naively flirt with Germany’s form of government: He was an avowed anti-Semite and openly admired Hitler even with the war in progress, though he shut up once we entered the fray.
And, certainly, the hateful cretins who assaulted protesters who sat in at segregated lunch counters or screamed at black children going into previously all-white schools are just as intentionally racist, if not as sociopathic, as those who murdered civil rights workers.
And, by the way, these pigs lived in South Boston as well as in Selma.
But another issue is the broad, social construct in which racism was simply part of how things worked, and that’s more insidious, because that’s why all but the most vicious, open, intentional racism went unchallenged.
I remember, for instance, knowing at a very early age that it was more polite to say “catch a tiger by the toe,” but most of my friends used the other term because that was how the counting-out game went.
They didn’t mean any harm. And yet the harm was there.
On a more ghastly scale, the horrific death toll among native people here was overwhelmingly a result of exposure to unfamiliar diseases. It’s not true, and deeply unfair, to suggest that Europeans did any of that intentionally (the smallpox blanket story is a myth).
However, from Columbus on, there is plenty of overt, intentional racism, including genocide, that should be part of the story.
The trick is documenting and dividing the elements, and explaining how the unintentional stuff enabled and reinforced the intentional stuff.
CRT itself is a rightwing whipping boy, and few of the people screaming about it even begin to understand it, but this much is true: Drawing that line between intentional and cultural racism, and explaining how their interaction has shaped our nation, is way above the pay grade of most high school teachers.
And elementary school kids are far too young to understand, though eliminating the construction paper feathers at Thanksgiving would help.
As noted here before, the solution is not to hide our heads in the sand but to completely rewrite our curricula to include all people, which would keep everyone busy for awhile, assuming they worked intentionally.
As long as I’m agreeing with cartoonists I rarely agree with, Tom Stiglich (Creators) picks up on the criticism of Stephen A. Smith, who gets a reported $12 million a year from ESPN basically to be an argumentative blowhard.
ESPN has several of these commentators, apparently to cement their standing among a young male audience that also listens to shock jocks on music radio.
It’s not clear what point Smith thought he was making, and his cohosts on the show tried to steer him back from the brink, but the fact is he said foreign people with limited language skills are bad for sports.
His timing couldn’t have been worse, given that ESPN is in the middle of a racism issue after a white correspondent was inadvertently recorded complaining that a black correspondent was given preference because the network is trying to overcompensate for its historic lack of diversity.
Smith later made an effort to cram the toothpaste back into the tube, but whether it was the result of a sudden understanding or a trip to the woodshed is unclear.
In any case, hiring blowhards is intentional.
Having them get out of hand may not be unintentional but it’s surely inevitable.
As for electing blowhards, that’s another case where you can’t pretend you didn’t expect them to cheerfully exceed the standards of decent behavior, and Ann Telnaes notes the appalling spectacle of anti-vaxxers dancing on the graves of dead Americans.
As noted here yesterday, Loren Boebert got up at the CPAC convention and laughed about those who have died from Covid, using their deaths to attack Anthony Fauci and the vaccination program that seeks to save lives.
But she’s hardly alone in a bizarro world where the vaccines don’t work but Trump deserves praise for developing them.
And where apparently 600,000 people could die on Fifth Avenue and he wouldn’t lose a single vote.
While, as John Branch (KFS) puts it, the state of Texas is intentionally making sure that, if anyone were tempted to vote against Trumpism, they’ll have to jump through some significant hoops to do it.
Branch is specifically targeting Harris County (Houston), but “If it ain’t broke, restrict it” is becoming a national byword, as GOP legislators move to ensure that we are protected from the mythical threat of voter fraud — disproven in every investigation so far — with measures that will inevitably lower voting rates by the young, the elderly and minorities.
Democratic legislators have temporarily blocked voter suppression laws in Texas, but it’s obviously a stopgap if the feds don’t clamp down on this stuff.
Can’t we talk about something more pleasant?
I apparently enjoyed the Euro 2020 final more than Matt did, but, then, I didn’t care who won.
It ended in a shootout and, as one of the commentators remarked, a shoot-out is no more meaningful than a coin flip. As the father of two ‘keepers, I love a good shootout, but it’s got nothing to do with identifying the better team.
Which is probably a metaphor for something or other in today’s post.
If so, an unintentional one.
Like that matters.
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