Monthly Archives: May 2021

Shortly after signing House Bill 1775, Governor Kevin Stitt released this video on Twitter explaining why he signed the bill into law. Oklahoman

Rejecting Martin Luther King Jr.'s ideas, advocates of this way of looking at the world stoke divisiveness and discrimination.

There was a rare moment of bipartisan agreement recentlyconcerning race in America. In the Republican response to President Joe Bidensaddress to Congress, Sen. Tim Scott, a Republican Black man from South Carolina, avowed that America is not a racist country.Within two days Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris affirmed, I dont think America is a racist country. All three acknowledged the history of racism in our country and that racism still exists.

They differ on critical race theory, also called CRT, and its benefit or harm. An examination of CRT's ideas shows its counterproductive effects.

In our lifetimes, there has been a sea change in race relations.

At the time of my birth, the U.S. Army was integrated by President Harry Truman. In 1954 the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional, and President Dwight Eisenhower enforced it in Little Rock in 1957.Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his I Have a Dream speech in 1963 at the March on Washington; in 1965, civil rights icon John Lewis, as a young Black man, helped lead the Selma-to-Montgomery marches over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 endedvoting discrimination and Jim Crow laws.

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In 1966, Five Smooth Stones, an interracial love story, became a best-seller, and in 1967, the movie of an interracial marriage engagementGuess Whos Coming to Dinner won an Academy Award. In 1976 the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated all race-based restrictions on marriage.A Gallup survey showed acceptance of interracial marriage went from 4% in 1959 to 87% in 2013. In 2017,39% even said interracial marriage was not just acceptable but was good for society, up from 24%in 2010.Today, a number of politicians of both parties are in biracial marriages, including Harris.

In 2008 a Black man, Barack Obama, was elected president of the United States and then re-elected.

Protesters gather in Springfield, Missouri, to protest critical race theory being taught in Springfield schools on Tuesday, May 18, 2021.(Photo: Nathan Papes/Springfield News-Leader)

Can anyone deny that our country has made very significant progress in racial fairness and equality in the past 70 years?

Are there still racists in our country?Absolutely, but they are fewer in number than ever,and people of color have more opportunity in our country than ever.A growing Black middle and professional class is testament to that. America is still consideredthe land of opportunity, which is why so many people around the world want to live here.

So why does it feel like we are going backwardin race relations?

It is not my intent to get into the issue of how one defines systemic racism.However, much is written about critical race theory, and its tenets are now being taught in schools.Many people really don't understand what CRT is, but it is the opinion of many jurists that it will actually set back civil rights and be harmful to race relations.

For in-depth analysis, read a 1999article in the Boston College of Law Review by Jeffrey Pyle, Race Equality and the Rule of Law: Critical Race Theorys Attack on the Promises of Liberalism. For many years CRTwas the province of university, law school and academic journals.Now it's being promoted for public institutions, public schools, teacher training programs, corporate human resource training sessions, and diversity workshops for every type of group.

There is no exact creed for CRT. Terms like equity (not to be confused with equality), social justice, diversity and inclusion, and culturally responsive teaching don't really convey itsscope or meaning.It first bubbled up about half a century agofromMarxist intellectuals with echoes ofthe Black power demands from that era.Rather than accepting a class-based dialectic of Marxists, CRT substitutes race for class in order to create a revolutionary coalition based on racial and ethnic categories.Ibram X. Kendi, who directs the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, says, In order to be truly antiracist, you have to be anti-capitalist.

ANOTHER VIEW: The real danger is in the right to ban ideas

Advocates of such ideas lost out in the 1960sto the nonviolent civil rights movement led byKing and the NAACP,which sought freedom and equality under the law.CRT actually disparages Kings dream of a country where one is judged by the content of one's character, not the color of one's skin.

CRT has two common themes: first, that white supremacy maintains power through the law, and, second, that the relationship between law and racial power must be transformed. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic write in "Critical Race Theory: An Introduction" that CRT's writings would reject our founding liberal principles of rationality, legal equity, constitutional neutrality, and incremental civil rights. The substitute: a race conscious approach to social change targeting mainstays "of liberal jurisprudence such as affirmative action, neutrality, color blindness, role modeling, or the merit principle."

CRT would substitute "naming one's own reality" for rationalanalysis. It teaches that civil rights legislation was passed more for Cold War propaganda purposes than to alleviate racial discrimination, that only members of a minority have the authority and ability to speak about racism, that the racial neutrality of law is false, and that our system can't redress certain types of racial wrongs.It tears down without providing answers.

CRT writings advocate the view that separation and reparations should be a form of foreign aid for black nationalists.Some CRT writerseven say that being white is a form of property that whites alone possess, that the white skin of some Americans is like owning a piece of property making achieving the American Dream more likely than white.

CRTs call for equity doesnt sound threatening because it sounds like equality, but there is a huge difference.Equality of opportunity is very different from "equity." Equality of opportunity means that all have a chance to succeed.CRT equity means that everyone gets equal rewards.Note the Marxist tones.Equality to CRT theorists is mere nondiscrimination and provides cover for white supremacy, patriarchy and oppression. UCLA law professor and CRT theorist Cheryl Harris proposes suspending private property rights, seizing land and wealth and redistributing them along racial lines.

In a speech in Dallas in 1966, King said that separate was never equal and called for integration:Segregation is a cancer in the body politic which must be removed before our moral and democratic health can be realized. CRT theorists advocate a new segregation. At Rice University, students demand designated spaces just for Black groups, white peoplenot appreciated. According to the National Association of Scholars, scoresof colleges and universities allow similar segregated centers, spaces and programs. And forget free speech: if you disagree with the CRT program, it is proof of white fragility, unconscious bias, or internalized white supremacy. If you dissent, you must remain silent and accept your complicity in white supremacy.

King thought that liberalisms goal that race should not matter was the ultimate goal of society.Kendi says in his bookHow to Be an Antiracist: The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to prevent discrimination is future discrimination.

On occasion I would sit on the floor of Congress with John Lewis during votes and he would tell me what it was like to walk withKing.King was Lewis'hero.However, to CRT advocates, Kings color-blind constitutionalism is not just nave but "racist."King saw affirmative action as a means to a more inclusive, integrated nation.CRT criticizes even affirmative action as simply transitional assistance that gets in the way of permanent reparations and is thus racist, too.

CRT advocates ridicule equal opportunity that inspires much liberal political and economic thought.They say that there is no such thing and that merit is a racist construct to keep white peoplein control.Thus, students shouldnt see their academic grades penalized for disrupting class or turning in tardy work or not at all. Traditional measures of merit such as grades or test scores are racist, too, because they dont produce equitable outcomes.

Ultimately, CRT reinforces group stereotypes, shames meaningful dialogue, and worsens race relations.Judge Richard Posner of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals argues CRT turns its back on the Western tradition of rational inquiry, forswearing analysis for narrative and that by repudiating reasoned argumentation it reinforces stereotypes. Jeffrey Pyle in the Boston Law Review summarizes, Critical race theorists attack the very foundations of the liberal legal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.

CRT has the opposite effect of achieving racial harmony. It leads us to worse race relations, not better.

Dr. Greg Ganske is a retired surgeon and was a member of Congress from Iowa from 1995 to 2002.

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Opinion: Understanding critical race theory reveals how it's harmful to race relations - Des Moines Register

A raging Covid-19 outbreak in India has not hampered the promotion of some questionable science by the government, drawing the ire of some of the countrys scientists.

One example is the Indian science ministrys funding of an Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) trial on whether reciting an ancient Hindu prayer, Gayatri Mantra, along with a set of deep breathing exercises in yoga could improve treatment of Covid-19 patients.

The chanting of the prayer is being evaluated along with pranayama breathing exercises from yoga as a pilot study to assess inflammatory markers in hospitalised Covid-19 patients at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Rishikesh, under the ICMR.

Patients will be given instructions on chanting and breathing exercises through video-conferencing for an hour in the morning and evening in the hospital room or at home after discharge, for up to 14 days. The criticism is mostly aimed at the design of the trial, small sample size and pre-conceived bias.

Breathing exercises are expected to benefit Covid-19 patients, says Partha Majumdar, founding director of National Institute of Biomedical Genomics, Kolkata. But when they are mixed with chanting of the prayer, it will be impossible to separate the effects of the two on Covid-19 patients, he says. Even if the prayer has no effect, which is the most plausible expectation, the beneficial effect of pranayama will show up as the confounded effect of both, he says.

Scientists have also criticised the small sample size just 20 volunteers. It is too small a number for arriving at any inference, especially because we are still unclear about the rather large variability of Covid-19 symptoms during the disease and during recovery, says Subhash Lakhotia, a cytogeneticist at the Banaras Hindu University. The details available at the clinical trials registry also do not make it clear if the analysis would follow a blind protocol. I am surprised that such an irrationally planned research project, even if claiming to be a pilot study, is approved for funding.

A greater worry [with] such directed research is the pre-existing bias, says Lakhotia. Previous studies undertaken to validate the claimed benefits of chanting Gayatri Mantra too suffered from a similar absence of rational planning. Such improperly planned studies are indeed typical of pseudoscience, he says.

On 7 May, Indias Ayush ministry that deals with alternate systems of medicines, ayurveda, yoga, unani, siddha and homeopathy, announced a nationwide campaign to promote polyherbal drugs for Covid-19 patients undergoing treatment at home. It states that the efficacy of these drugs has been proved through robust multi-centre clinical trials, but does not link to any peer-reviewed evidence for this claim.

In February 2021, Indias science and health minister Harsh Vardhan, himself a doctor and surgeon, was present at the launch of a Coronil kit, containing three herbal medicines, which is claimed to boost immunity. It was formulated by self-styled godman Baba Ramdevs company Patanjali. Ramdev initially claimed Coronil was certified by Indias drug regulator and the World Health Organization (WHO). The WHO quickly clarified on Twitter that it has not reviewed or certified any traditional medicine for the treatment [of] #Covid-19.

The Indian Medical Association described the claims that Coronil could be used in prevention, treatment and post-Covid care as a false and fabricated projection of an unscientific medicine.

In recent times we are witnessing a trend where governmental agencies offer funding to scientifically validate personal beliefs, says Soumitro Banerjee, a professor of physics at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Kolkata, and general secretary of Breakthrough Science Society (BSS) that promotes scientific rationalism. The BSS condemns financial support for ill-conceived research projects when mainstream science is suffering due to the lack of funding, he adds.

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Promotion of Covid-19 pseudoscience by Indian government criticised as pandemic rages - Chemistry World

Is critical race theory a way of understanding how American racism has shaped public policy, or a divisive discourse that pits people of color against white people? Liberals and conservatives are in sharp disagreement.

The topic has exploded in the public arena this springespecially in K-12, where numerous state legislatures are debating bills seeking to ban its use in the classroom.

In truth, the divides are not nearly as neat as they may seem. The events of the last decade have increased public awareness about things like housing segregation, the impacts of criminal justice policy in the 1990s, and the legacy of enslavement on Black Americans. But there is much less consensus on what the governments role should be in righting these past wrongs. Add children and schooling into the mix and the debate becomes especially volatile.

School boards, superintendents, even principals and teachers are already facing questions about critical race theory, and there are significant disagreements even among experts about its precise definition as well as how its tenets should inform K-12 policy and practice. This explainer is meant only as a starting point to help educators grasp core aspects of the current debate.

Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that racism is a social construct, and that it is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.

The basic tenets of critical race theory, or CRT, emerged out of a framework for legal analysis in the late 1970s and early 1980s created by legal scholars Derrick Bell, Kimberl Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado, among others.

A good example is when, in the 1930s, government officials literally drew lines around areas deemed poor financial risks, often explicitly due to the racial composition of inhabitants. Banks subsequently refused to offer mortgages to Black people in those areas.

Today, those same patterns of discrimination live on through facially race-blind policies, like single-family zoning that prevents the building of affordable housing in advantaged, majority-white neighborhoods and, thus, stymies racial desegregation efforts.

CRT also has ties to other intellectual currents, including the work of sociologists and literary theorists who studied links between political power, social organization, and language. And its ideas have since informed other fields, like the humanities, the social sciences, and teacher education.

This academic understanding of critical race theory differs from representation in recent popular books and, especially, from its portrayal by criticsoften, though not exclusively, conservative Republicans. Critics charge that the theory leads to negative dynamics, such as a focus on group identity over universal, shared traits; divides people into oppressed and oppressor groups; and urges intolerance.

Thus, there is a good deal of confusion over what CRT means, as well as its relationship to other terms, like anti-racism and social justice, with which it is often conflated.

To an extent, the term critical race theory is now cited as the basis of all diversity and inclusion efforts regardless of how much its actually informed those programs.

One conservative organization, the Heritage Foundation, recently attributed a whole host of issues to CRT, including the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, LGBTQ clubs in schools, diversity training in federal agencies and organizations, Californias recent ethnic studies model curriculum, the free-speech debate on college campuses, and alternatives to exclusionary disciplinesuch as the Promise program in Broward County, Fla., that some parents blame for the Parkland school shootings. When followed to its logical conclusion, CRT is destructive and rejects the fundamental ideas on which our constitutional republic is based, the organization claimed.

(A good parallel here is how popular ideas of the common core learning standards grew to encompass far more than what those standards said on paper.)

The theory says that racism is part of everyday life, so peoplewhite or nonwhitewho dont intend to be racist can nevertheless make choices that fuel racism.

Some critics claim that the theory advocates discriminating against white people in order to achieve equity. They mainly aim those accusations at theorists who advocate for policies that explicitly take race into account. (The writer Ibram X. Kendi, whose recent popular book How to Be An Antiracist suggests that discrimination that creates equity can be considered anti-racist, is often cited in this context.)

Fundamentally, though, the disagreement springs from different conceptions of racism. CRT thus puts an emphasis on outcomes, not merely on individuals own beliefs, and it calls on these outcomes to be examined and rectified. Among lawyers, teachers, policymakers, and the general public, there are many disagreements about how precisely to do those things, and to what extent race should be explicitly appealed to or referred to in the process.

Heres a helpful illustration to keep in mind in understanding this complex idea. In a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court school-assignment case on whether race could be a factor in maintaining diversity in K-12 schools, Chief Justice John Roberts opinion famously concluded: The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. But during oral arguments, then-justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg said: Its very hard for me to see how you can have a racial objective but a nonracial means to get there.

All these different ideas grow out of longstanding, tenacious intellectual debates. Critical race theory emerged out of postmodernist thought, which tends to be skeptical of the idea of universal values, objective knowledge, individual merit, Enlightenment rationalism, and liberalismtenets that conservatives tend to hold dear.

Scholars who study critical race theory in education look at how policies and practices in K-12 education contribute to persistent racial inequalities in education, and advocate for ways to change them. Among the topics theyve studied: racially segregated schools, the underfunding of majority-Black and Latino school districts, disproportionate disciplining of Black students, barriers to gifted programs and selective-admission high schools, and curricula that reinforce racist ideas.

Critical race theory is not a synonym for culturally relevant teaching, which emerged in the 1990s. This teaching approach seeks to affirm students ethnic and racial backgrounds and is intellectually rigorous. But its related in that one of its aims is to help students identify and critique the causes of social inequality in their own lives.

Many educators support, to one degree or another, culturally relevant teaching and other strategies to make schools feel safe and supportive for Black students and other underserved populations. (Students of color make up the majority of school-aged children.) But they dont necessarily identify these activities as CRT-related.

As one teacher-educator put it: The way we usually see any of this in a classroom is: Have I thought about how my Black kids feel? And made a space for them, so that they can be successful? That is the level I think it stays at, for most teachers. Like others interviewed for this explainer, the teacher-educator did not want to be named out of fear of online harassment.

An emerging subtext among some critics is that curricular excellence cant coexist alongside culturally responsive teaching or anti-racist work. Their argument goes that efforts to change grading practices or make the curriculum less Eurocentric will ultimately harm Black students, or hold them to a less high standard.

As with CRT in general, its popular representation in schools has been far less nuanced. A recent poll by the advocacy group Parents Defending Education claimed some schools were teaching that white people are inherently privileged, while Black and other people of color are inherently oppressed and victimized; that achieving racial justice and equality between racial groups requires discriminating against people based on their whiteness; and that the United States was founded on racism.

Thus much of the current debate appears to spring not from the academic texts, but from fear among critics that studentsespecially white studentswill be exposed to supposedly damaging or self-demoralizing ideas.

While some district officials have issued mission statements, resolutions, or spoken about changes in their policies using some of the discourse of CRT, its not clear to what degree educators are explicitly teaching the concepts, or even using curriculum materials or other methods that implicitly draw on them. For one thing, scholars say, much scholarship on CRT is written in academic language or published in journals not easily accessible to K-12 teachers.

As of mid-May, legislation purporting to outlaw CRT in schools has passed in Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Tennessee and have been proposed in various other statehouses.

The bills are so vaguely written that its unclear what they will affirmatively cover.

Could a teacher who wants to talk about a factual instance of state-sponsored racismlike the establishment of Jim Crow, the series of laws that prevented Black Americans from voting or holding office and separated them from white people in public spacesbe considered in violation of these laws?

Its also unclear whether these new bills are constitutional, or whether they impermissibly restrict free speech.

It would be extremely difficult, in any case, to police what goes on inside hundreds of thousands of classrooms. But social studies educators fear that such laws could have a chilling effect on teachers who might self-censor their own lessons out of concern for parent or administrator complaints.

As English teacher Mike Stein told Chalkbeat Tennessee about the new law: History teachers can not adequately teach about the Trail of Tears, the Civil War, and the civil rights movement. English teachers will have to avoid teaching almost any text by an African American author because many of them mention racism to various extents.

The laws could also become a tool to attack other pieces of the curriculum, including ethnic studies and action civicsan approach to civics education that asks students to research local civic problems and propose solutions.

The charge that schools are indoctrinating students in a harmful theory or political mindset is a longstanding one, historians note. CRT appears to be the latest salvo in this ongoing debate.

In the early and mid-20th century, the concern was about socialism or Marxism. The conservative American Legion, beginning in the 1930s, sought to rid schools of progressive-minded textbooks that encouraged students to consider economic inequality; two decades later the John Birch Society raised similar criticisms about school materials. As with CRT criticisms, the fear was that students would be somehow harmed by exposure to these ideas.

As the school-aged population became more diverse, these debates have been inflected through the lens of race and ethnic representation, including disagreements over multiculturalism and ethnic studies, the ongoing canon wars over which texts should make up the English curriculum, and the so-called ebonics debates over the status of Black vernacular English in schools.

In history, the debates have focused on the balance among patriotism and American exceptionalism, on one hand, and the countrys history of exclusion and violence towards Indigenous people and the enslavement of African Americans on the otherbetween its ideals and its practices. Those tensions led to the implosion of a 1994 attempt to set national history standards.

A current example that has fueled much of the recent round of CRT criticism is the New York Times 1619 Project, which sought to put the history and effects of enslavementas well as Black Americans contributions to democratic reformsat the center of American history.

The culture wars are always, at some level, battled out within schools, historians say.

Its because theyre nervous about broad social things, but theyre talking in the language of school and school curriculum, said one historian of education. Thats the vocabulary, but the actual grammar is anxiety about shifting social power relations.

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What Is Critical Race Theory, and Why Is It Under Attack? - Education Week