Morning Belz, June 22
What do you mean by CRT?
Robust educator opposition to standardized testing — NYT
Supreme Court strikes blow to NCAA business model — SCOTUS
Social media, collective behavior should be “crisis discipline” — TechPolicy
New York built more housing in the 1930s than the 2010s — NYC
A few nights at a TikTok influencer mansion — Harper’s
UEFA says no to pride flag lights on German stadium — Metro UK
An evangelical pastor’s take on CRT — Randy Nabors
A lay person’s take on CRT — Instagram*
*This lady seems like a representative example of the well-meaning progressive when it comes to CRT. She just wants the past to be taught, and that’s why her video was shared by D.L. Hughley. She’s not talking about throwing out liberalism or shutting down all conversation. I doubt Hughley is either. They believe the teaching of critical race theory is simply the teaching of accurate history. The only even slightly debatable part of what she said is that “this country was created and prospered under the ideals of white supremacy.” We can lawyer that to death but from a 10,000 foot view it’s hard to dispute. Now, technically, critical race theory is a lot more than “systemic racism exists” and “actual history must be taught.” I tried to explore that Friday. Andrew Sullivan, in his piece I linked to yesterday, argues that critical race theory is “illiberal.” It doesn’t present itself as one interpretation, he says, but as the only interpretation of history and society, and punishes anyone and any publicly-expressed idea that isn’t in line with its tenets. This is at least partly true, and seems to be the view of Ibram X. Kendi and a few other prominent voices. But how true is it for everyone? So we must come back to this question: “What do you mean by critical race theory?” D.L. Hughley has one thing in mind, Ibram Kendi has another. And by the way, does Kendi even want to overthrow liberalism? Really? And if he does, how many people are willing to go along with that? I suspect most people, Black and white and Latino and Asian, don’t want that. And so I’m optimistic that if elementary school teachers start trying to get kids to think of themselves primarily in terms of racial identity, parents and schools will correct that, and we’ll just keep moving, hopefully with a better collective sense of the history of the country and how it affects us today. No more CRT for a few days now, I promise.
Quote
”The pretext for indecisiveness is commonly mature deliberation; but in reality indecisive men occupy themselves less in deliberation than others; for to him who fears to decide, deliberation (which has a foretaste of that fear) soon becomes intolerably irksome, and the mind escapes from the anxiety of it into alien themes.” — Sir Henry Taylor, The Statesman, 1836
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