CRT and the sad state of educational politics

Why do I give a shit about this, then? To put it bluntly, I’m struck by the utter fucking inartfulness of CRT’s proponents. At no point has any advocate of CRT presented a case for their approach to education that was at all concerned with persuading people who aren’t already 100% in their camp. There’s been no demonstration of positive impacts, or even an explanation of how the impacts could hypothetically be positive. In fact, so much as asking for such a rationale is considered proof of racism. Advocates posit an image of existing educational policies that is absolutely fantastical, suggesting that kids never learn about slavery or racism or civil rights. But then… then they don’t even stick with the kayfabe. They’ll say “kids never learn about racism.” In response, people–mostly well-meaning–say “wait, umm, I’m pretty sure they do learn about racism.” The response is “we never said they don’t learn about racism.” You’ll see this shift from one paragraph to the next. It’s insane. Absolutely insane.

Or take this talk from a pro-CRT workshop in Oregon. The speaker freely admits that proto-CRT leanings like anti-bias education, multiculturalism, and centering race in historical discussions have been the norm since the late 1980s. The speaker admits that these practices have been commonplace for 30+ years, as anyone my age or younger will attest. Then, seconds later, the speaker discusses the results of this shift: it failed. Unequivocally:

We had this huge, huge, huge focus on culturally relevant teaching and research. [ … ] So you would think that with 40+ years of research and really focusing and a lot of lip service and a lot of policies and, you know, a lot of rhetoric about cultural relevancy and about equity and about anti-bias that we would see trends that are significantly different, [but] that’s not what we’re finding. What we’re finding that you see [is] that some cases, particularly black and brown [students] the results, the academic achievement has either stayed the same and gotten worse.

Translation: here’s this approach to teaching. It’s new and vital but also we’ve been doing it for 40 years. It doesn’t work. But we need to keep doing it. Anyone who is in any way confused by this is a dangerous racist.

Even in the darkest days of the Bush-era culture war, I never saw such a complete and open disregard for honesty. This isn’t to say that Bush-era conservatives weren’t shit-eating liars. They were. But they had enough savvy to realize that self-righteousness alone is not an effective way of doing politics. You need to at least pretend to be engaging with issues in good faith.

This is what happens when a movement has its head so far up its own ass that it cannot comprehend the notion of good-faith criticism. These people do not believe that there can exist anyone who shares their basic goals but has concerns that their methods might not work. Their self-certainty is so absolute and unshakeable that they can proffer data demonstrating the complete ineffectiveness of their methods as proof of the necessity of their methods.