Woke and CRT are gold for the Republicans. It allows Republicans now to charge Democrats with supporting neo-racism. Wokism is the ideology of the hate "squad." The problem of course is racism is real. Simply look at the standardized test scores, American black students consistently score way below American white students. So woke and CRT and all this baloney is really just a way to avoid the real problem: How do we encourage American black families to embrace education the way educated American white families do? This woke CRT Neo-racism will hold American black children back for at least another generation. Taking algebra and calculus out of public schools will only hurt the children whose parents cannot afford to pay for private math schooling. Though I am pleased that CRT will help Republicans politically, I am deeply sad by what it will do to my American black students. MLK was a Republican for good cause, he was an intellectual conservative.
Bill Cosby made the same point regarding American black families and embracing education. If we can leave aside all the other scandalous stuff, I think the point is still a good one.
Apologies, but I just read MLK’s “A Testament If Hope” and couldn’t help but to share a couple of quotes from it with the teacher who said MLK was a conservative Republican:
“Justice for black people will not flow into society merely from court decisions nor from fountains of political oratory. Nor will a few token changes quell all the tempestuous yearnings of millions of disadvantaged black people. White America must recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society. The comfortable, the entrenched, the privileged cannot continue to tremble at the prospect of change in the status quo.”
“ If we look honestly at the realities of our national life, it is clear that we are not marching forward; we are groping and stumbling; we are divided and confused. Our moral values and our spiritual confidence sink, even as our material wealth ascends. In these trying circumstances, the black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism and materialism. It is exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.”
Thank you so much Tim! I guess I need to clarify what I mean by Conservative Republican. To be a conservative simply means there are values you believe must be conserved. For me that would be unalienable human rights above all else. To be a Republican I mean one must believe the role of the state is to guarantee those rights for all of us, beyond utilitarian policies that sacrifice the few for the many. As a conservative myself, I believe that rights are real, not like Bentham claimed. Rights are not "nonsense on stilts." As a Conservative Republican of the sort that MLK was, I too hold that all people deserve those rights and that if our culture is one that systematically denies any those rights to any of our citizens then our culture must be transformed. These rights are not simply to rectify the superficial flaws of our society they are much more than the right not be forced to the back of the bus. Real rights are those essential human rights, naturally given to all of us by Nature's God. Good governments must protect those rights for all us. We each have the right not to be killed by those in our society who despise us; we each have the right to genuine liberty not just empty talk, but the liberty of freedom through education, training; we each have the right to use our Naturally given liberty to advance our own lives and the lives of our children. Yes, our society certainly has racist and neo-racist components, and as a Conservative Republican I agree with MLK: to the degree that eliminating the sort of racism that systematically denies any people their rights, to that very same degree must we reconstruct our society, I agree absolutely with that.
Seems to me, based off of this reading, that MLK believed that the rights granted by the United States Constitution were not enough, and his goal was to drastically transform the United States. Some more quotes:
“The Constitution assured the right to vote, but there is no such assertion to the right of adequate housing, or the right to an adequate income. And yet in a nation that has a Gross National Product of 750 billion dollars a year, it is morally right to insist that every person has a decent house, an adequate education, and enough money to provide basic necessities for one’s family.”
“In the future we will be called upon to organize the unemployed, to unionize the businesses within the ghetto, to bring tenets together into collective bargaining units, and establish cooperatives for purposes of building viable financial institutions within the ghetto so that they can be controlled by the negroes themselves.”
In talking about the “right-wing Midwestern Republicans” who would join the “rural-dominated Southern congress [who are] going to stand in the way of progress as long as they can,” he wrote:
“This really means making the movement powerful enough, dramatic enough, and morally appealing enough, so that people of goodwill, the churches, labor, liberals, intellectuals, students, poor people themselves begin to put pressure on congressman to the point where they can no longer elude our demands.”
I’m finding it really hard to believe that MLK wouldn’t object to your classification of him as a conservative Republican.
I am saying that the natural rights are present even in states that do not recognize them in the form of legal rights. This gap is the degree to which the state succeeds or fails its populace. There will never be 100 overlap. Neither possible or desirable.
He was not a paternalist. He was not a utilitarian. He opposed the notion of Black Power vehemently. He conserved God and Truth and Love, essential Judeo-Christian values. He was not a moral relativist. Good is good for all. He promoted fair, honest play. I would say he was more conservative than any current Republican.
“How do we encourage American black families to embrace education the way educated American white families do?”
If you spend time in schools that are in low-income primarily black neighborhoods, you will find no shortage of black families who value education. What you will find are public schools that are woefully underfunded, due to a system that doles out funding based on revenue raised from property taxes. You’ll also find families who have been unfairly targeted by the criminal justice system, which does nothing to help these communities and many things to ensure they have a longer, more difficult road to prosperity. You’ll find a lot of people doing everything they can to ensure their children can get a good education and life, but who have roadblocks in places where “educated American white families” have freshly paved asphalt.
The distinction you made between “American black families,” and “educated American white families” is an interesting one, because American white families who have not received a decent education face these same problems, but not many people are too concerned with them, just the black families.
Your comment has also provided a perfect example of how schools were always a place of indoctrination, it’s just moving the other way now which you don’t like: MLK was absolutely not a Republican or intellectual conservative, he was much closer to being a socialist. Whatever education system you went through may have failed you if you honestly interpret his writings as conservative Republican ones:
It’s also important to note that even if MLK was conservative, he was not the sole representative of black American thought. Some James Baldwin, Cornel West, or Malcolm X never hurt anyone. You say you’re a Republican so I imagine you admire William Buckley. I’d recommend watching his debate with James Baldwin. Spoiler alert: Baldwin makes the conservative intellectual hero look like a fool.
You are making a fatal error in attempting to claim class warfare and plutocracy as race war. If it were really race war, it would be over in a heart beat.
Not sure how I did that. I pointed out that whites families deal with the same issues as black families, and was responding to a comment that singled out black families.
You’ll find a lot of people doing everything they can to ensure their children can get a good education and life, but who have roadblocks in places where “educated American white families” have freshly paved asphalt.
“The distinction you made between “American black families,” and “educated American white families” is an interesting one, because American white families who have not received a decent education face these same problems, but not many people are too concerned with them, just the black families.”
I’m admittedly using “educated” as a stand in for well-off, but it’s a distinction I made purposefully.
CRT and BLM are really just cynical Gen Z politics at this point. As Bill Maher put it in Peggy Noonan's article today: “If you think that America is more racist now than ever, more sexist than before women could vote, you have progressophobia. In a country that’s 14% black, 18% of the incoming class at Harvard is black. And since 2017, white students are not even a majority in our public colleges. Employees of color make up 47% of Microsoft, 50% of Target, 55% of the Gap, as companies become desperate to look like their TV commercials. Saying white power and privilege is at an all-time high is just ridiculous. Higher than a century ago, the year of the Tulsa race massacre? Higher than when the KKK rode unchecked and Jim Crow unchallenged?”
Thats a quote from his show last week, it’s a direct response to something the comedian Kevin Hart said, it’s not a response to CRT and BLM. Not surprised to hear Peggy Noonan didn’t make that clear!
Second, Democratic, African American, Pittsburgh School Board Director Mark Brentley and I, Republican Mayoral candidate at the time, created "Take a Father to School Day" for the Pittsburgh Public Schools in in 1999. I wrote an editorial in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and brought the idea to him. Brentley made it a reality. The event continues still. The idea was based on Federal Department of Education research that demonstrates that when fathers go to two or more school events a year children have a 50% higher chance of getting straight A's. So what is it that makes a father figure so important? As McWhorter describes: Children who perform only for their teachers, which is the case for many American black children, do not take the same pride in their success or value school as children who do schoolwork for their parents. As a teacher, I would not lose a night of sleep if one of my students ended up failing out of school or went to jail. But if one of my own children did my life would be in complete disarray. Kids know this. Parents, more than anyone else, can give children the pride of hard work and academic success that will then become a part of their own desire to succeed at school. That is the wisdom of Martin Luther King and the Pittsburgh Public Schools as well.
Jim echoes what Saagar Enjeti believes about family as a key to solving inequality. I don't know John McWhorter's opinion on the matter, yet I'm willing to guess he wouldn't disagree. Say what you will about Ben Carson, but it seems to me he advocates for family as a starting point for opportunity.
Do we then need to go the next step of defining what "family" is? How many adults in the parental roles, how many males/females in those roles, biological vs. psychological gender identity, at least one stay-at-home parent, belief in God, annual net household income? What are the minimum requirements, and can they be mutually agreed upon across the socio-political spectrum?
In a secular republic, belief in god is off the table in terms defining family, to say nothing of cultivating mutual agreement.
By demographics, it is off a cliff in the US, with no end in sight, so if that is a requirement for a family, there will soon be no families in the US.
As for the traditional nuclear family, the problem appears to be one of liberty. If one promotes the most liberty on the most fronts for the most people, one seems to be promoting less nuclear family. People use their choice to choose other priorities.
Sounds like Sanzi is ready to do battle, along with a fair amount of reclaiming the native soil where the grassroots have been planted. While we're on the subject of roots...
In one of America's greatest unread books: Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community Martin Luther King writes:
"... the masters felt that they had to implant in the bondsman a consciousness of
personal inferiority. This sense of inferiority was deliberately extended to his past. The slave owners were convinced that in order to control the Negroes, the slaves “had to feel that African ancestry tainted them, that their color was a badge of degradation.” (p 40)
Further on he writes that "Black Power," which could just as easily be applied to BLM, contains within it "the seeds of its own destruction."
The point MLK is making is that grasping power without love of one's self and one's community, without earning power through the personal pride of genuine accomplishment, (which does really exist!) is no power at all. To gain one's own power, one must reject the degradation of the slave owner. CRT on the other hand, accepts the degradation of the slave owner and begins with the presumption that African American inability is irreparable as a consequence of in our racist exploitative capitalist world and proceeds from there to claim therefore there is nothing wrong with the abuse of power, destruction of education, without ability. CRT has become power with hate and vengeance and a continuation of African American self degradation. Had BLT been Black Lives Matter Too it would have succeeded. It would have been based on love of one's self within one's community. But the seeds of its destruction are contained in it by its presumption that only Black Lives Matter.
Still, Critical Race Theory has its good points too, it comes from Critical Theory which combined Freud and Marx: our culture does have pathological crippling racist attitudes to which many of us are blind. It is essentially the psycho-analysis of our culture, but CRT is also itself rooted in paranoia, based on the unshakable obsession that all whites are racist and all the ills of African American life are caused by White racism. "They are out to get me and they are everywhere!" That is the undercurrent of CRT. And That is a pathology of unmitigated suspicion, unhinged from reality.
I’d be curious to hear the author’s thoughts on what the terms “woke” and “CRT” actually mean, and if she could point to ways in which CRT is being used to indoctrinate public schools. And I’d be REALLY interested to hear the Persuasion editors and Yascha define these terms. I just read this piece and I really think everyone who works on this publication should read it, internalize it, and address the issues it raises:
The critical race theory (CRT) movement is a collection of activists and scholars engaged in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power.
The movement considers many of the same issues that conventional civil rights and ethnic studies discourses take up but places them in a broader perspective that includes economics, history, setting, group and self-interest, and emotions and the unconscious.
Unlike traditional civil rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.
Thanks for responding (I assume you work for Persuasion, although you didn’t make that clear). Here, you define CRT as the “CRT movement.” It might sound nit-picky but that’s a very important distinction. If you think the “CRT movement” is all of these things, then I think you should start using that terminology when you publish, because CRT itself is a legal theory that most people won’t encounter unless they get a graduate degree in a specific field, and I doubt most activists are familiar with its texts. Especially when publishing a piece like this one, that does nothing to push back against the idea that critical race theory is being thought in public schools, and mentions nothing of the vaguely worded bills being passed to ban it from schools across the country.
I see. You want me to be an employee of Persuasion in the attempt to make me responsible for everything written at Persuasion.
Where is CRT manifested as a legal theory? How can you demonstrate that it exists nowhere else even if it were? How do you account for the instances where it is being introduced elsewhere? By what authority do you seek (if in fact you do) to be the arbiter of CRT domain validity?
Did you read the comment you replied to? It was a direct call for someone at Persuasion to address these issues, and you responded by using “we,” in a different comment.
Meaning I wasn’t asking you lol. You’re free to comment but maybe you should have made it clear you weren’t one of the people who I aimed the comment at.
'woke” means having awakened to having a particular type of “critical consciousness,” as these are understood within Critical Social Justice.
To first approximation, being woke means viewing society through various critical lenses, as defined by various critical theories bent in service of an ideology most people currently call “Social Justice.”
That is, being woke means having taken on the worldview of Critical Social Justice, which sees the world only in terms of unjust power dynamics and the need to dismantle problematic systems.
That is, it means having adopted Theory and the worldview it conceptualizes.
The term is alleged to have gained its first contemporary connotation in 2008 with the Erykah Badu song “Master Teacher,” in which Badu envisions and dreams of a world of racial equality and then advises genuine activism with the admonishment that listeners should “stay woke.” The term developed from there, particularly via black activism on Twitter.
Overall, we rate In These Times far-Left Biased based on editorial positions that align with Democratic Socialism. We also rate them Mostly Factual in reporting, rather than High, due to a significant imbalance in story selection, as well as the use of frequent emotional language which can be misleading. (D. Van Zandt 5/13/2016) Updated (11/22/2019)
Fair enough, they don’t try to hide that, and I don’t think that invalidates the piece I linked to. I’m assuming you work for Persuasion again…have you all considered what you’d rate your publication? Personally, after a year of reading almost everything you’ve published, I’d say you have a very clear fixation on wokeness, cancel culture, and the renewed PC culture panic that is only matched by far-right outlets.
You responded to a comment asking persuasion editors or the author of this article to address these issues, and you used the word “we,” to start your comment, that is why I thought you worked for Persuasion.
Well you didn’t say that so I jumped to a conclusion based on the context. You’re free to comment on what I said, but it was directly aimed at the author and at Persuasion. I think that’s pretty clear.
Wow, so the lady who calls herself a grassroots activists and thinks children have just started being indoctrinated in schools because of DEI (it may shock you but that was happening before they made a concerted effort to get kids to stop chanting the N word at parties) is actually getting millions of dollars in funding from the Koch brothers and other billionaires? I knew the author was full of shit pretty much immediately, but not to this extent. Can someone from Persuasion address why they published this partisan fraud and parroted her “grassroots” lie?
Those sources I shared leave me skeptical, however I'm still willing to hear arguments that Erika Sanzi isn't completely a bad-faith actor. Maybe she cashed the checks without tracing where they came from, and if they didn't bounce then she assumed the money is clean. Maybe she's outsourcing the content of her own Substack solely on the basis of the contributor volunteering their services and abiding by whatever criteria she's set. Anyone who's on a mission will take all the support they can get upfront and ask questions later.
Time will tell what becomes of Sanzi's campaign. Hopefully it won't end up just another think tank.
Woke and CRT are gold for the Republicans. It allows Republicans now to charge Democrats with supporting neo-racism. Wokism is the ideology of the hate "squad." The problem of course is racism is real. Simply look at the standardized test scores, American black students consistently score way below American white students. So woke and CRT and all this baloney is really just a way to avoid the real problem: How do we encourage American black families to embrace education the way educated American white families do? This woke CRT Neo-racism will hold American black children back for at least another generation. Taking algebra and calculus out of public schools will only hurt the children whose parents cannot afford to pay for private math schooling. Though I am pleased that CRT will help Republicans politically, I am deeply sad by what it will do to my American black students. MLK was a Republican for good cause, he was an intellectual conservative.
Bill Cosby made the same point regarding American black families and embracing education. If we can leave aside all the other scandalous stuff, I think the point is still a good one.
Apologies, but I just read MLK’s “A Testament If Hope” and couldn’t help but to share a couple of quotes from it with the teacher who said MLK was a conservative Republican:
“Justice for black people will not flow into society merely from court decisions nor from fountains of political oratory. Nor will a few token changes quell all the tempestuous yearnings of millions of disadvantaged black people. White America must recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society. The comfortable, the entrenched, the privileged cannot continue to tremble at the prospect of change in the status quo.”
“ If we look honestly at the realities of our national life, it is clear that we are not marching forward; we are groping and stumbling; we are divided and confused. Our moral values and our spiritual confidence sink, even as our material wealth ascends. In these trying circumstances, the black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism and materialism. It is exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.”
It’s a good read.
Thank you so much Tim! I guess I need to clarify what I mean by Conservative Republican. To be a conservative simply means there are values you believe must be conserved. For me that would be unalienable human rights above all else. To be a Republican I mean one must believe the role of the state is to guarantee those rights for all of us, beyond utilitarian policies that sacrifice the few for the many. As a conservative myself, I believe that rights are real, not like Bentham claimed. Rights are not "nonsense on stilts." As a Conservative Republican of the sort that MLK was, I too hold that all people deserve those rights and that if our culture is one that systematically denies any those rights to any of our citizens then our culture must be transformed. These rights are not simply to rectify the superficial flaws of our society they are much more than the right not be forced to the back of the bus. Real rights are those essential human rights, naturally given to all of us by Nature's God. Good governments must protect those rights for all us. We each have the right not to be killed by those in our society who despise us; we each have the right to genuine liberty not just empty talk, but the liberty of freedom through education, training; we each have the right to use our Naturally given liberty to advance our own lives and the lives of our children. Yes, our society certainly has racist and neo-racist components, and as a Conservative Republican I agree with MLK: to the degree that eliminating the sort of racism that systematically denies any people their rights, to that very same degree must we reconstruct our society, I agree absolutely with that.
Seems to me, based off of this reading, that MLK believed that the rights granted by the United States Constitution were not enough, and his goal was to drastically transform the United States. Some more quotes:
“The Constitution assured the right to vote, but there is no such assertion to the right of adequate housing, or the right to an adequate income. And yet in a nation that has a Gross National Product of 750 billion dollars a year, it is morally right to insist that every person has a decent house, an adequate education, and enough money to provide basic necessities for one’s family.”
“In the future we will be called upon to organize the unemployed, to unionize the businesses within the ghetto, to bring tenets together into collective bargaining units, and establish cooperatives for purposes of building viable financial institutions within the ghetto so that they can be controlled by the negroes themselves.”
In talking about the “right-wing Midwestern Republicans” who would join the “rural-dominated Southern congress [who are] going to stand in the way of progress as long as they can,” he wrote:
“This really means making the movement powerful enough, dramatic enough, and morally appealing enough, so that people of goodwill, the churches, labor, liberals, intellectuals, students, poor people themselves begin to put pressure on congressman to the point where they can no longer elude our demands.”
I’m finding it really hard to believe that MLK wouldn’t object to your classification of him as a conservative Republican.
The constitution only confers legal rights. The natural rights are there regardless.
I don’t know what point you’re trying to make. Do you think MLK was arguing that the right to housing and the right to income are natural rights?
No. I think he is pretty much saying they aren't.
I am saying that the natural rights are present even in states that do not recognize them in the form of legal rights. This gap is the degree to which the state succeeds or fails its populace. There will never be 100 overlap. Neither possible or desirable.
Now That is my kind of conservative!
Or no kind, as it turns out.
He was not a paternalist. He was not a utilitarian. He opposed the notion of Black Power vehemently. He conserved God and Truth and Love, essential Judeo-Christian values. He was not a moral relativist. Good is good for all. He promoted fair, honest play. I would say he was more conservative than any current Republican.
“How do we encourage American black families to embrace education the way educated American white families do?”
If you spend time in schools that are in low-income primarily black neighborhoods, you will find no shortage of black families who value education. What you will find are public schools that are woefully underfunded, due to a system that doles out funding based on revenue raised from property taxes. You’ll also find families who have been unfairly targeted by the criminal justice system, which does nothing to help these communities and many things to ensure they have a longer, more difficult road to prosperity. You’ll find a lot of people doing everything they can to ensure their children can get a good education and life, but who have roadblocks in places where “educated American white families” have freshly paved asphalt.
The distinction you made between “American black families,” and “educated American white families” is an interesting one, because American white families who have not received a decent education face these same problems, but not many people are too concerned with them, just the black families.
Your comment has also provided a perfect example of how schools were always a place of indoctrination, it’s just moving the other way now which you don’t like: MLK was absolutely not a Republican or intellectual conservative, he was much closer to being a socialist. Whatever education system you went through may have failed you if you honestly interpret his writings as conservative Republican ones:
https://inthesetimes.com/article/martin-luther-king-jr-day-socialism-capitalism
https://www.google.com/amp/s/mlkglobal.org/2017/11/23/martin-luther-king-on-capitalism-in-his-own-words/amp/
It’s also important to note that even if MLK was conservative, he was not the sole representative of black American thought. Some James Baldwin, Cornel West, or Malcolm X never hurt anyone. You say you’re a Republican so I imagine you admire William Buckley. I’d recommend watching his debate with James Baldwin. Spoiler alert: Baldwin makes the conservative intellectual hero look like a fool.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5Tek9h3a5wQ
You are making a fatal error in attempting to claim class warfare and plutocracy as race war. If it were really race war, it would be over in a heart beat.
Not sure how I did that. I pointed out that whites families deal with the same issues as black families, and was responding to a comment that singled out black families.
You’ll find a lot of people doing everything they can to ensure their children can get a good education and life, but who have roadblocks in places where “educated American white families” have freshly paved asphalt.
“The distinction you made between “American black families,” and “educated American white families” is an interesting one, because American white families who have not received a decent education face these same problems, but not many people are too concerned with them, just the black families.”
I’m admittedly using “educated” as a stand in for well-off, but it’s a distinction I made purposefully.
Nevertheless. Asked and answered.
CRT and BLM are really just cynical Gen Z politics at this point. As Bill Maher put it in Peggy Noonan's article today: “If you think that America is more racist now than ever, more sexist than before women could vote, you have progressophobia. In a country that’s 14% black, 18% of the incoming class at Harvard is black. And since 2017, white students are not even a majority in our public colleges. Employees of color make up 47% of Microsoft, 50% of Target, 55% of the Gap, as companies become desperate to look like their TV commercials. Saying white power and privilege is at an all-time high is just ridiculous. Higher than a century ago, the year of the Tulsa race massacre? Higher than when the KKK rode unchecked and Jim Crow unchallenged?”
Thats a quote from his show last week, it’s a direct response to something the comedian Kevin Hart said, it’s not a response to CRT and BLM. Not surprised to hear Peggy Noonan didn’t make that clear!
What was it that Kevin Hart said?
Bill Maher = broken clock.
First I recommend you read John McWhorter's little article.
https://www.persuasion.community/p/john-mcwhorter-the-neoracists
Second, Democratic, African American, Pittsburgh School Board Director Mark Brentley and I, Republican Mayoral candidate at the time, created "Take a Father to School Day" for the Pittsburgh Public Schools in in 1999. I wrote an editorial in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and brought the idea to him. Brentley made it a reality. The event continues still. The idea was based on Federal Department of Education research that demonstrates that when fathers go to two or more school events a year children have a 50% higher chance of getting straight A's. So what is it that makes a father figure so important? As McWhorter describes: Children who perform only for their teachers, which is the case for many American black children, do not take the same pride in their success or value school as children who do schoolwork for their parents. As a teacher, I would not lose a night of sleep if one of my students ended up failing out of school or went to jail. But if one of my own children did my life would be in complete disarray. Kids know this. Parents, more than anyone else, can give children the pride of hard work and academic success that will then become a part of their own desire to succeed at school. That is the wisdom of Martin Luther King and the Pittsburgh Public Schools as well.
Jim echoes what Saagar Enjeti believes about family as a key to solving inequality. I don't know John McWhorter's opinion on the matter, yet I'm willing to guess he wouldn't disagree. Say what you will about Ben Carson, but it seems to me he advocates for family as a starting point for opportunity.
Do we then need to go the next step of defining what "family" is? How many adults in the parental roles, how many males/females in those roles, biological vs. psychological gender identity, at least one stay-at-home parent, belief in God, annual net household income? What are the minimum requirements, and can they be mutually agreed upon across the socio-political spectrum?
In a secular republic, belief in god is off the table in terms defining family, to say nothing of cultivating mutual agreement.
By demographics, it is off a cliff in the US, with no end in sight, so if that is a requirement for a family, there will soon be no families in the US.
As for the traditional nuclear family, the problem appears to be one of liberty. If one promotes the most liberty on the most fronts for the most people, one seems to be promoting less nuclear family. People use their choice to choose other priorities.
Sounds like Sanzi is ready to do battle, along with a fair amount of reclaiming the native soil where the grassroots have been planted. While we're on the subject of roots...
https://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2021/04/02/parents-defending-education-prefab-grassroots/
http://www.masspoliticsprofs.org/2021/04/12/koch-connections-and-sham-grassroots-of-parents-defending-education/
Just trying to provide some additional information in the same spirit of free inquiry as Persuasion. Make of it what you will.
In one of America's greatest unread books: Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community Martin Luther King writes:
"... the masters felt that they had to implant in the bondsman a consciousness of
personal inferiority. This sense of inferiority was deliberately extended to his past. The slave owners were convinced that in order to control the Negroes, the slaves “had to feel that African ancestry tainted them, that their color was a badge of degradation.” (p 40)
Further on he writes that "Black Power," which could just as easily be applied to BLM, contains within it "the seeds of its own destruction."
The point MLK is making is that grasping power without love of one's self and one's community, without earning power through the personal pride of genuine accomplishment, (which does really exist!) is no power at all. To gain one's own power, one must reject the degradation of the slave owner. CRT on the other hand, accepts the degradation of the slave owner and begins with the presumption that African American inability is irreparable as a consequence of in our racist exploitative capitalist world and proceeds from there to claim therefore there is nothing wrong with the abuse of power, destruction of education, without ability. CRT has become power with hate and vengeance and a continuation of African American self degradation. Had BLT been Black Lives Matter Too it would have succeeded. It would have been based on love of one's self within one's community. But the seeds of its destruction are contained in it by its presumption that only Black Lives Matter.
Still, Critical Race Theory has its good points too, it comes from Critical Theory which combined Freud and Marx: our culture does have pathological crippling racist attitudes to which many of us are blind. It is essentially the psycho-analysis of our culture, but CRT is also itself rooted in paranoia, based on the unshakable obsession that all whites are racist and all the ills of African American life are caused by White racism. "They are out to get me and they are everywhere!" That is the undercurrent of CRT. And That is a pathology of unmitigated suspicion, unhinged from reality.
I’d be curious to hear the author’s thoughts on what the terms “woke” and “CRT” actually mean, and if she could point to ways in which CRT is being used to indoctrinate public schools. And I’d be REALLY interested to hear the Persuasion editors and Yascha define these terms. I just read this piece and I really think everyone who works on this publication should read it, internalize it, and address the issues it raises:
https://inthesetimes.com/article/politics-woke-cancel-culture-socialism-critical-race-theory
The critical race theory (CRT) movement is a collection of activists and scholars engaged in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power.
The movement considers many of the same issues that conventional civil rights and ethnic studies discourses take up but places them in a broader perspective that includes economics, history, setting, group and self-interest, and emotions and the unconscious.
Unlike traditional civil rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.
Thanks for responding (I assume you work for Persuasion, although you didn’t make that clear). Here, you define CRT as the “CRT movement.” It might sound nit-picky but that’s a very important distinction. If you think the “CRT movement” is all of these things, then I think you should start using that terminology when you publish, because CRT itself is a legal theory that most people won’t encounter unless they get a graduate degree in a specific field, and I doubt most activists are familiar with its texts. Especially when publishing a piece like this one, that does nothing to push back against the idea that critical race theory is being thought in public schools, and mentions nothing of the vaguely worded bills being passed to ban it from schools across the country.
What would it matter where I worked, either way?
I see. You want me to be an employee of Persuasion in the attempt to make me responsible for everything written at Persuasion.
Where is CRT manifested as a legal theory? How can you demonstrate that it exists nowhere else even if it were? How do you account for the instances where it is being introduced elsewhere? By what authority do you seek (if in fact you do) to be the arbiter of CRT domain validity?
Did you read the comment you replied to? It was a direct call for someone at Persuasion to address these issues, and you responded by using “we,” in a different comment.
What of it?
Meaning I wasn’t asking you lol. You’re free to comment but maybe you should have made it clear you weren’t one of the people who I aimed the comment at.
'woke” means having awakened to having a particular type of “critical consciousness,” as these are understood within Critical Social Justice.
To first approximation, being woke means viewing society through various critical lenses, as defined by various critical theories bent in service of an ideology most people currently call “Social Justice.”
That is, being woke means having taken on the worldview of Critical Social Justice, which sees the world only in terms of unjust power dynamics and the need to dismantle problematic systems.
That is, it means having adopted Theory and the worldview it conceptualizes.
The term is alleged to have gained its first contemporary connotation in 2008 with the Erykah Badu song “Master Teacher,” in which Badu envisions and dreams of a world of racial equality and then advises genuine activism with the admonishment that listeners should “stay woke.” The term developed from there, particularly via black activism on Twitter.
Overall, we rate In These Times far-Left Biased based on editorial positions that align with Democratic Socialism. We also rate them Mostly Factual in reporting, rather than High, due to a significant imbalance in story selection, as well as the use of frequent emotional language which can be misleading. (D. Van Zandt 5/13/2016) Updated (11/22/2019)
Fair enough, they don’t try to hide that, and I don’t think that invalidates the piece I linked to. I’m assuming you work for Persuasion again…have you all considered what you’d rate your publication? Personally, after a year of reading almost everything you’ve published, I’d say you have a very clear fixation on wokeness, cancel culture, and the renewed PC culture panic that is only matched by far-right outlets.
Hide what? The external review of their bias and factuality? How could they hide it? They are not empowered to do so.
Until you establish my employment at Persuasion, you may consider all comments associated with that assumption as being dismissed.
You responded to a comment asking persuasion editors or the author of this article to address these issues, and you used the word “we,” to start your comment, that is why I thought you worked for Persuasion.
Incorrect. I posted a quote from Media Bias Check. They used the word "we".
Well you didn’t say that so I jumped to a conclusion based on the context. You’re free to comment on what I said, but it was directly aimed at the author and at Persuasion. I think that’s pretty clear.
I’d actually really like to know who the “we” you referred to is…bizarre way to start off your comment if you were just speaking for yourself.
Wow, so the lady who calls herself a grassroots activists and thinks children have just started being indoctrinated in schools because of DEI (it may shock you but that was happening before they made a concerted effort to get kids to stop chanting the N word at parties) is actually getting millions of dollars in funding from the Koch brothers and other billionaires? I knew the author was full of shit pretty much immediately, but not to this extent. Can someone from Persuasion address why they published this partisan fraud and parroted her “grassroots” lie?
http://www.masspoliticsprofs.org/2021/04/12/koch-connections-and-sham-grassroots-of-parents-defending-education/
Those sources I shared leave me skeptical, however I'm still willing to hear arguments that Erika Sanzi isn't completely a bad-faith actor. Maybe she cashed the checks without tracing where they came from, and if they didn't bounce then she assumed the money is clean. Maybe she's outsourcing the content of her own Substack solely on the basis of the contributor volunteering their services and abiding by whatever criteria she's set. Anyone who's on a mission will take all the support they can get upfront and ask questions later.
Time will tell what becomes of Sanzi's campaign. Hopefully it won't end up just another think tank.