QOTD -- Youngkin And Critical Race Theory

 

 

"In fact, the entire hue and cry against CRT is not about ending division; it is about preserving it. It is not about racial reconciliation; it is about inspiring racial panic, of the kind that swept the South in the 1830s, the 1890s, and the 1950s. That this phony scare is active in states outside the South is a sign of the success the conservative movement has achieved in exporting the religious, political, and racial values of the South to states in the heartland. It is no longer only in the old Confederacy that questioning of the racial order is seen as next to treason.

"Glenn Youngkin is simply the latest in a line of mountebanks willing to stir race hatred and fear to gain power.

"He knows how it is done; like me, he learned it in school." -- Garrett Epps in Washington Monthly, concluding a must- read article for anyone wishing to know how Trump Republican "mountebanks" like Glenn Youngkin are using critical race theory as a racist wedge issue.  Epps draws on his own background, raised in Virginia at a similar time as Youngkin, in demonstrating how the education system was fraught with "state- imposed racial racial ideology" full of myths bolstering white supremacy.  Good read.

Virginians, please get out and vote for Terry McAuliffe and the entire Democratic slate. Don't let this Trumpist Republican mountebank win.

 

QOTD -- Betting On Dumb

 

"Conservatives in state legislatures across the country are pushing legislation to halt the teaching of 'critical race theory' in public schools. I put the term in quotes because genuine critical race theory, a dry and esoteric set of ideas debated in obscure academic journals, is not actually being taught in those schools at all. What’s being taught instead — and squelched — is American history, which happens to include slavery, Jim Crow repression and structural racism.

"I get it. The GOP has become the party of White racial grievance, and this battle against an imaginary enemy stirs the base. But the whole charade involves Republican officials — many of them educated at the nation’s top schools — betting that their constituents are too dumb to know they’re being lied to. So far, the bet is paying off." -- Eugene Robinson in today's Washington Post.  The well- organized and funded astroturfers disrupting and harassing local school boards are part of the Republican/ white racial grievance party's electoral game plan.  In the important off- year election in Virginia, the Republican weasel running for governor, Glenn Youngkin, is tying his campaign to this bogus issue in the hopes of energizing his sub- moron base.  We'll see in a few weeks whether his bet on the dumb has worked.

"A Very Talented Demagogue"

 

Michael Kranish's must read article today in the Washington Post explores the rise of Fox demagogue and white privilege poster boy Tucker "Mothertucker" Carlson, and it's worth a read. The article paints a picture of Carlson's use of white grievance to fuel his rise, especially during the former guy's term in office. 

One excerpt tells us much about Carlson's views. Eighteen years ago, he visited the infamous debarkation point in Ghana for Africans sold into slavery:

“'When we got to the castle and the dungeon, it had an emotional impact on all of us, as Africans in America,' said the Rev. Albert Sampson, a former associate of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Then there was what he called 'the tragedy of Carlson.'

'He did not cry,”'Sampson told The Washington Post in his first interview about the encounter. 'He did not have any intellectual response. He didn’t give any verbal response. It was a total detachment from the reality of the event.'  [snip]

'Sampson was trying to make me feel guilty,' Carlson wrote in an account for Esquire. 'It wasn’t obvious to me at the time. The idea that I’d be responsible for the sins (or, for that matter, share in the glory of the accomplishments) of dead people who happened to share my skin tone has always confused me. Racial solidarity wasn’t a working concept in my southern-California hometown.'"  (our emphasis)

The snotty, sociopathic rich heir to the Swanson frozen foods family took the experience in Ghana not as a time to reflect and to mourn the enslaved people, but as an attempt to "make me feel guilty." 

Carlson's latest white supremacy hobby horse is misrepresenting Critical Race Theory as a racist movement, instead of an examination of how race has influenced institutions and legal systems in the U.S. His racially outrageous commentary has caused some sponsors to drop him, while the Murdochs continue in their support. A former Fox official sums up Carlson's racist appeal in Kranish's article:

“'He has positioned himself as the presentable face of White grievance,' said Joseph M. Azam, who resigned in late 2017 as a senior vice president of News Corp., which, like Fox, was controlled by the Murdoch family, because he objected to the company’s tolerance for what he felt were Carlson’s hateful views and other commentary. 'He’s on mainstream media, he’s dressed in a suit, he speaks in a way that people see as eloquent and informed, and he’s super confident in what he’s saying.'” (our emphasis)

As one former mentor described him earlier in the article, Carlson's a "very talented demagogue." 

Racist History Texts Part Of Republican Schooling

Recently, corrupt human/turtle hybrid Sen. Moscow Mitch McConnell (Secession-KY) and 38 other Republican Senate colleagues sent a letter to the Secretary of Education expressing horror at the thought of a realistic history of slavery and Jim Crow being taught in America's public schools. They've been on a tear about the 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory, which counters the whitewashed version of American history that's been portrayed in history books for generations, ones which those Republicans learned from.

A revealing and thoroughly researched article in The Root looks at the kinds of textbooks that were used in the schools at the time these Republicans would have studied there. Not surprisingly, the history of African-Americans is rarely mentioned, and when it is, it's through the eyes of either paternalistic or outright racist authors. A small sample:

Sen. Marsha "Whiteburn" Blackburn (TN):

"In 1959, the year Sen. Marsha Blackburn would have entered kindergarten in Mississippi, the state legislature handed control of choosing textbooks to Gov. Ross Barnett. At the request of the Mississippi State Society of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), the state had already mandated a ninth-grade course in Mississippi history, which means Blackburn learned the history of her state from John K. Bettersworth’s textbook Mississippi: a History. 

The New York Times wrote in 1975 that Bettersworth’s catalogs 'treat blacks of old as complacent darkies or as a problem to whites.' When The Root reviewed the text, we noticed that the entire history of the 250-year institution of slavery was reduced to five pages. Bettersworth’s book was based on UDC propaganda that taught children that the slave master treated his slaves 'as his own,' but noted that most of the human chattel were so lazy that 'it took two to help; one to do nothing.'”  (our emphasis)

Sen. Ted "Cancun Ted Coup" Cruz (TX):                

"If Second Baptist High School adhered to the standards of the Texas Department of Education, we can surmise that Cruz had to learn speeches from Jefferson Davis, but not that slavery caused the Civil War, which wasn’t taught in Texas schools until 2018. Texas’ social studies curriculum 'deemphasized slavery, questioned New Deal entitlements and mandated study of the 'optimism’ of ‘thankful’ immigrants,' before 2010, according to the Texas Tribune. The state also believed Harriet Tubman was too sensitive a subject for third-graders but taught that slavery was the 'third-most-influential cause of the war.'"   (our emphasis)              

Sen. Lindsey "Huckleberry" Graham (SC): 

"Although Brown v. Board of Education officially outlawed segregation in 1955, Lindsey Graham’s school district in Pickens County, S.C., didn’t desegregate until 1970. So it’s understandable why he learned history from The History of South Carolina, published from 1840 until 1970 by three generations of descendants of pro-Confederate William Simms. While Simms’ early versions opined about the 'irresponsible, uneducated, unmoral and, in many cases brutish Africans,' Graham likely used the 1958 edition where Mary C. Simms Oliphant, Simm’s granddaughter, had a much more progressive view. [ed. -- snark!]

'Most masters treated their slaves kindly,' wrote Oliphant. 'Africans were brought from a worse life to a better one. As slaves, they were trained in the ways of civilization. Above all, the landowners argued, the slaves were given the opportunity to become Christians in a Christian land, instead of remaining heathen in a savage country.'” (our emphasis)

We should note that just learning from racist history books isn't the only factor in moulding a racist. Newborns aren't racist; children have to be taught racism by their peers, and more importantly their parents or guardians. But the point is that by introducing work like the 1619 Project into curricula would go a long way to eliminating this kind of overt racism being taught to students. Otherwise, we'll be getting more Huckleberrys, Coups, and white supremacists in the halls of Congress and state legislatures in the future.