“the conspiracy theory of systemic racism”

November 5, 2021 10:32 AM

The day after Election Day, the African American Policy Forum hosted Educators Ungagged: Teaching Truth in the Era of Racial Backlash. The panel featured educators who've been forced out of schools (PDF on the educators), including principal Dr. James Whitfield, suspended Aug 2021 in "A win for white power at a school board" (archived WaPo). The event also showed Virginia governor-elect's campaign ad of a parent complaining about her child having to read "some of the most explicit material you could imagine".... She didn't name the offensive text. Readers, it was Toni Morrison's depictions of the violence of slavery in the novel Beloved.

The video begins with one minute of Janelle Monae's Say Her Name (Hell You Talmabout).

Sociologist Phillip Gorski summed up the gubernatorial result in Virginia with a tweet:
The Southern Strategy: A Brief History.
1. "N******"
2. "Welfare Queen"
3. "CRT"

posted by spamandkimchi (19 comments total)

a parent complaining about her child having to read "some of the most explicit material you could imagine"

As opposed to what black and brown kids have to hear every day? Your child only has to learn about it, as a HIGH SCHOOL SENIOR, and is asked to empathize.

Check your fucking privilege, Karen.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 11:00 AM on November 5, 2021 [14 favorites]

The extremists have scored a major victory with this propaganda putsch. Crazies are organised and on the march, and civilised society is only beginning to consider forming a response.

God help us.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 11:14 AM on November 5, 2021 [9 favorites]

McAuliffe handled this so wrong. He'd be Governor-elect now if he'd simply said "Of course parents must have strong input into school governance and I believe that the vast majority of Virginian parents will use that input, among other things, to support teaching that makes an honest account of the history of race in American and making schools both safe and welcoming."

The greatest condemnation of the Republican Party in Virginia is that they are so discredited that strong majorities of educated professional parents voted for McAuliffe despite his complete disconnect on these issues.
posted by MattD at 11:22 AM on November 5, 2021 [5 favorites]

Your Childhood Pet Rock: ""some of the most explicit material you could imagine""

"I don't know, I can imagine quite a bit." --Han Solo, Star Wars
posted by chavenet at 11:26 AM on November 5, 2021 [8 favorites]

Not to bring TOO much politics into this, but I've been wondering if the entire GOP response to problems is "out of sight, out of mind".

GOP's response to COVID (mainly by Trump, but perpetuated by Abbott and DeSantos) is "there is no problem, and we FORBID anyone from dealing with it! FREEDOM!!!!!" (see vaccine and mask anti-mandates)

And now, with all the brouhaha over CRT and the anti-woke-ness can be described as "there is no problem, we forbid you to even talk about the problem by banning language that describes the problem!"
posted by kschang at 12:07 PM on November 5, 2021 [7 favorites]

Ignoring a problem makes it worse, increasing pressure on public institutions. "the government". to deal with the issue. This reduces the public trust in government, leading to less funding, leading to reduced trust, and so on. Capital benefits from this arrangement. It's not a conspiracy if it's out in the open.

edit: when people say this is about white supremacy, I really believe they are missing the forest for the trees, the white supremacy angle is just a way to get the foot in the door.
posted by kzin602 at 12:20 PM on November 5, 2021 [2 favorites]

Your child only has to learn about it, as a HIGH SCHOOL SENIOR

Not only that, it was assigned in a college-level class.
posted by thedamnbees at 3:46 PM on November 5, 2021 [1 favorite]

CRT is just the Republican outrage of the moment for votes. They used to be able to do it with gay marriage but that's not as effective anymore. They've been trying to use trans people in bathrooms but that hasn't been as effective as they had hoped. Now they're doing the CRT thing and it's working for now but eventually that will die as an issue too and they'll move on to the next one. And so on and so forth. They have nothing but outrage to fall back on so they'll keep looking for the next one to rile up votes.
posted by downtohisturtles at 4:05 PM on November 5, 2021 [18 favorites]

The CRT outrage seems to be working, and they're doubling down.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 4:42 PM on November 5, 2021 [4 favorites]

CRT is a hard lesson on how NOT to use a vague or pretentious label which needs to be looked up or explained, where the opposition is very happy and comfortable to define the mysterious cause in the media. Likewise, the slogan "defund the police" suffered from the same effect, which explicitly leaves a public safety void to fill and raises more concerns than it addresses among swing voters, and the opposition is happy to help out with that messaging too. In fact, the opposition only needed to repeat it over and over for the desired effect, that's how terrible it was as a slogan.
posted by Brian B. at 9:05 AM on November 6, 2021 [1 favorite]

"Critical race theory" might have its origin as an academic term, but it's not an example of bad messaging from anti-racist educators. No high school was teaching critical race theory, just history. It became an issue because the right pushed it as a scare tactic. They were able to do this because there's a wealthy right wing propaganda machine that operates virtually unopposed.

"Defund the police" is a necessary slogan because that is what needs to happen. The vague call to "reform the police" only gets you reforms that give more money to cops that they might spend a bit of on sensitivity training, and then a whole lot of on shock collars for kids they arrest in schools and robot dogs they tape bombs to. There wasn't a "public safety void" in the actual policy being proposed, but again the imbalance in the size of the propaganda influence between the retributive law-and-order psychos that hold the power in both parties and abolitionists is massive.

If your politics is only ever triangulating to be as safe as possible, you'll find yourself swept up and capsized by the wake of the much more powerful interests you're following to the right.
posted by jy4m at 10:28 AM on November 6, 2021 [7 favorites]

It became an issue because the right pushed it as a scare tactic.

The first rule of politics is to NOT allow them to motivate the indifferent middle to oppose your side. What will happen next is that 2022 candidates will spend precious time walking back those slogans, wasted time that could be spent on pumping up a winning strategy. Messaging is complicated.
posted by Brian B. at 11:52 AM on November 6, 2021 [1 favorite]

So the "winning strategy" was agreeing to ban Toni Morrison from schools? Giving more cops more weapons and more leeway? What exactly do we want to win?
posted by jy4m at 11:58 AM on November 6, 2021 [5 favorites]

What exactly do we want to win?

Elections, to prevent the other side from leading. And winning strategies doesn't imply the same message for both parties (a fact proven by their policy opposition). Here is another angle by an astute observer before the last election loss, using the same examples I did.
posted by Brian B. at 12:15 PM on November 6, 2021 [1 favorite]

It's not really fair at all to equivocate CRT and defund the police (DTP?). DTP like BLM was popularized because a succinct phrase was needed that would fit into a Twitter hashtag. As others said, CRT is a strictly academic approach which has been completely taken out of context and demonized in order to incite white supremacists.

I suspect that DTP arose mainly due to the perceived popularity of BLM, except BLM is now broadly popular even in the skewed American "center" and it was never really opposed by Democrats or leftists at all. DTP on the other hand remains very controversial even among Democrats. It seems to me that much of the issue originates with the drug war, although police brutality and systemic racism are obviously pervasive issues even without the issues of drug prohibition.

To label the approach of DTP as "abolition" is misleading because it implies that criminal law is fundamentally based on enslavement, however that is not the case in terms of actual basis of criminal law. It is a reductive and divisive slogan which achieved popularity almost entirely via Twitter, which is precisely what caused it be reductive and divisive. There are much more positive ways to frame these issues that can be conveyed when we are not limited to such a reductive medium.
posted by viborg at 5:12 PM on November 6, 2021

I associate defunding cops with abolition because I seek abolition of the retributive criminal legal system which metes out suffering to the lower classes under the guise of justice, and I consider defunding them a sensible reform to that end. It is not just a slogan to me. I am aware that openly questioning this system which Democrats helped build and legitimate might make it harder for Democrats to get elected, as it weakens their value proposal of a kinder, gentler machine gun hand, but I'm actually okay with that.
posted by jy4m at 7:15 PM on November 6, 2021 [3 favorites]

For folks reacting negatively to "defund the police" -- whether as a concept or as messaging or as political tactic -- think of this as an Overton window for the left. You don't have to like it, but perhaps recognize that organizers are fundamentally redefining what public safety means (who gets to be safe?) and how it should be funded and that is essential work. A 2015 report showed that more than half the $100 million the city of Los Angeles spends each year on homelessness goes to police.

I've heard so much about the Overton window as being wildly successful for conservative politics, but not enough on how it can work for progressive politics. P.S. I'm with jy4m -- I want to defund the police. I want us to be able to call for help without having to call a person with a badge and a gun. I want to be safe. And thus I want us to be able to call for help without having to call an institution that kills Black and brown and disabled people.
posted by spamandkimchi at 9:06 PM on November 6, 2021 [3 favorites]

Yes and much of the reason that conservatives are so successful at manipulating the Overton window (aside from the corporate status quo bias) is because they are generally very careful about what sort of language they use to promote their ideology. You may note that I specifically took issue with the framing of this issue, which is entirely due to the limitations of Twitter discourse imo. Respectfully none of what you said addressed that part of the issue.

It seems like framing in general is something you might be interested in, if so I'd recommend basically anything that George Lakoff has done (if you aren't already familiar with his work). Here's a decent interview as introduction.

As for "fundamentally redefining what public safety means", it seems that much of that heavy lifting has been accomplished by BLM, and the actual resonance you ascribe to DTP doesn't seem to have much real effect beyond Twitter and adjacent communities. LA is a special kind of fucked up tho tbh.
posted by viborg at 9:52 AM on November 7, 2021

BLM is actually only a recent (and important!) addition to the work that prison abolitionists have been doing. I'm going to embrace my inner librarian and put a bunch of suggestions below!

Defund the police as a meaningful goal comes from decades of abolitionist organizing and research:
Critical Resistance (their first conference was held in 1998).
Ruth Wilson Gilmore's Golden Gulag was published in 2007.

Some other folks who have been doing the heavy lifting on genuine safety aren't BLM folks (though of course very much aligned):
Dean Spade and Reina Gossett's 2014 series for Barnard "what about the dangerous people" is really great.
Project Nia has been doing flat-out amazing work on youth violence and domestic violence and policing and their founder Mariame Kaba is incredible.
Oh! And Victoria Law's new book "Prisons Make Us Safer" and 20 Other Myths About Mass Incarceration (book talk and essay)

I'm not sure that the right have been careful with the sort of language they use, but I don't pay enough attention to really know. I'm down to review Lakoff, it's been a while and I'm sure I have forgotten important aspects of how framing works. I like Lori Dorfman's work, which, in my recollection is very much out of Lakoff's work.
posted by spamandkimchi at 1:10 PM on November 7, 2021 [2 favorites]