February 19, 2020
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
Children’s Books,
the American Library Association, and Critical Race Theory
Friends,
Something
just a bit different today. A very good friend of mine—he used to be my superior
when I worked at the North Carolina State Archives—writes occasional pieces and
sends on items, usually about education and how our educational system has been
corrupted. He holds a doctorate and is also a qualified architectural historian
of some note. Today I copy something he sent out about the state of education
in primary grades, specifically in early reading and what the American Library
Association is doing to assist in revolutionizing the United States by
popularizing critical race theory and the destruction of traditional
male/female distinctions among young children (and their educators).
Every
parent—every grandparent or uncle and aunt—should be deeply concerned by this
process, for those young children are our future, and we have seen what happens
when impressionable minds are molded at an early age.
As I have
written on numerous occasions in the past, we face a multi-faceted cultural
revolution which is extremely active and operative on many levels. This
revolution encompasses dedicated acolytes seemingly with inexhaustible energy
and quasi-religious drive, with monetary funding coming—perhaps ironically—from
some of the biggest and most wealthy moneybags in America (e.g., Tom Steyer,
Michael Bloomberg) and in the world (e.g., George Soros). Driven by an
inculcated ideological zeal, I have labeled these activists “insaniacs,” for
their frenetic passion is fueled by a kind of diabolical insanity, with its own
set of beliefs, its own worldview, and they are its apostles—fanatics programmed
almost like those popularized zombies on such television programs as “The
Walking Dead” and dozens of cult movies.
Except
these revolutionaries, these post-Marxist zombies are very real: they inhabit
most of our college campuses, occupy most faculty chairs (and college administration
posts) at those universities, almost totally dominate Hollywood, control our
publishing industry, lurk about on all the major television networks, have made
serious inroads into Wall Street finance, and increasingly make their presence
known politically. Most academic professional organizations now, whether the
American Historical Association, the Modern Language Association, or the
American Library Association have become occupied bastions, mouthpieces for
their propaganda and indoctrination…and continued subversion of older inherited
American traditions and values.
They
shape our culture, our language, how we see ourselves, and, largely, our
political culture.
My
correspondent also attaches a copy of a recent Wall Street Journal article on this situation, and I also copy
parts of that, plus an essay on Critical Race Theory, which is mentioned by him.
I do not
name my friend—some of you may be able to figure out who he is. His comments and what
follows merit close attention…and action.
------------------------------------------
I attach a January 31, 2020, article by Meghan
Cox Gurdon, the Wall Street Journal children's book
reviewer. Ms. Gurdon reports on the recent ideologically-slanted book awards of
the American Library Association (ALA). By way of overview, Gurdon warns of the
capture of children's literature by the left:
Members of the general public may be unaware
of the degree to which identity politics are pervading the world of children’s
literature. Books are increasingly assessed as much for the racial and ethnic
backgrounds of those creating the art as for the excellence of the art itself.
As Gurdon acknowledges, not all of the ALA's
book award choices are off the chart in regard to political correctness. Undefeated and
the New Kid are positive and not weighed down by grievance
mongering.
An important take-away from Gurdon's piece,
however, is that the academic racism of Critical Race Theory (taught in the UNC
System) is bearing fruit in our libraries.
Who knew that Laura Ingalls Wilder of Little
House on the Prairie fame and May Hill Arbuthnot, author of the
old Dick and Jane readers, were such reactionary troglodytes
that they needed to be erased by the ALA from the literary stage. One is
reminded of Soviet politicians who fell into disfavor and tossed by Stalin down
the memory hole.
Most chilling--as noted by Ms. Gurdon--is the
story, Dig, by A.S. King, a popular fiction writer for young
adults. Ms. King, a white woman, brings Critical Race Theory to life in her
award-winning book. Like Soviet children who were lauded for reporting on their
parents, King's white teen subjects are apparently glorified for hating and
"coming for" their own parents and grandparents.
Where will all this stoking of racial resentment
and shaming end?
Are our libraries--and schools--becoming
hatcheries for the deconstruction of American history and culture?
PS: What is Critical Race Theory (CRT) you may
ask? I attach a description from the Harvard Law Record. If not
being undertaken now, there is need for an educational Manhattan Project to
refute or at least give balance to the corrosive doctrine of CRT in our
university classrooms.
Wall Street
Journal
Children’s
Books: All Woke—and All Winners
0On
hue, heritage and the American Library Association’s Youth Media Awards for
2020.
By Meghan Cox Gurdon Jan. 31, 2020 11:14 am ET
Members of the general public may be unaware of the degree to
which identity politics are pervading the world of children’s literature. Books
are increasingly assessed as much for the racial and ethnic backgrounds of
those creating the art as for the excellence of the art itself. A social-media
commentator caught the zeitgeist this week with unintentional comic brilliance.
During the American Library Association’s initial announcements of its biggest
accolades on Monday, this plaintive tweet went out: “Love the ALA awards and
seeing so many worthy books recognized. But if I were a female/non-binary
illustrator, I imagine I’d feel a little discouraged right now.”
The ALA awards already include encomia for specific types of
people. There are awards for books by Latino and African-American writers and
illustrators. There’s an award newly brought under the ALA mantle that
celebrates “the very best writing and illustrations by and about American
Indians.” There are awards for books that portray and affirm the “Jewish
experience,” the “disability experience” and the “gay, lesbian, bisexual, and
transgender experience.” So the idea of categorizing books and their creators
is not new. And at its best, this approach represents an earnest and welcome
effort to raise the profile of writers and artists whose work might otherwise
escape broad attention and to expand the variety of stories and characters that
children encounter in literature.
But what’s happening now goes much further. The industry that
produces the baby books, picture books, chapter books and novels read by America’s
children and teenagers is undergoing ideological capture by the intersectional
left. The ALA continues to purge itself of association with individuals from
the pre-woke past. Recently, May Hill Arbuthnot (1884-1969), a pioneering
scholar of children’s literature who also co-created the “Dick and Jane” books,
joined Melvil Dewey (inventor of the library classification system) and Laura
Ingalls Wilder (author of the “Little House” books) in having her name stripped
from an ALA distinction, in this case a prestigious annual lecture.
Authors and illustrators are being flamed online and having
their reputations traduced and their careers threatened for transgressing the
capricious new standards of ideological purity. One of these is a preoccupation
known as #OwnVoices, in which authors of a specific race, heritage or
disability are held to be the only valid portrayers of characters of that
particular race, heritage or disability. Anyone of a differing race, heritage
or disability—say, a woman of Puerto Rican descent who writes about Mexicans,
or a Native American Pueblo writer who draws on Navajo culture—may be slammed,
or worse, for appropriation. A recent much-talked-about “diversity in
publishing” survey conducted by Lee & Low Books (the second since 2015)
bemoans the pallor, heterosexuality and general able-bodiness that prevails in
the industry. The 2019 survey asks: “If the people who work in publishing are
not a diverse group, how can diverse voices truly be represented in its books?”
Well, one way is for those voices to be singled out for
accolades, which is what happened on Monday: Most of those who won outright or
received secondary honors for the three most prestigious ALA awards happen not
to be white. All three of the winning books deal explicitly with race, one of
them in a mode of bitter polemic. Given the high quality and enormous range of
new books for young readers in 2019, the choices suggest that artistic quality
is not the only criterion at work.
[….]
A.S. King’s young-adult novel “Dig” (Dutton, 392 pages,
$17.99), which won the Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young
Adult Literature, vibrates with the retributive anger of critical race theory.
In an afterword, the author, who is white, describes the book as
“uncomfortable.” That’s one word for it. Pitiless and cold-blooded are others.
Five white teenagers are connected in ways that only one of them understands in
this story of awful wealthy white grandparents, their awful and feckless white
adult children, and the woke grandchildren who regard their elders with
contempt. The writing is strong, but the whole thing is soaked in venom.
Indeed, near the end, Ms. King makes a chilling promise about her young
characters: “They are coming for their parents. They are coming for their
grandparents. They are coming for you.”
In fact, they’re already here.
---------------------------------------------------------
INDEPENDENT AT
HARVARD LAW SCHOOL SINCE 1946
·
Racism,
Justified: A Critical Look at Critical Race Theory
Posted by Bill
Barlow on February 29, 2016 in Opinion
By now, most of you have
heard of Critical Race Theory. Its narrative, ideology, and even vocabulary
have become a familiar refrain. “Systemic oppression,” “institutional racism,”
and “white privilege” have become common topics of debate. At Harvard Law, a
group of protestors calls for $5 million and three tenure-track faculty to
establish a program on Critical Race Theory at HLS. But, beneath the demands,
there remains a lack of clarity about what Critical Race Theory actually means.
Critical Race Theory Calls for
Permanent, Codified Racial Preferences
At the heart of Critical Race
Theory lies the rejection of colorblind meritocracy. “Formal equality overlooks
structural disadvantages and requires mere nondiscrimination or “equal
treatment.”[1] Instead,
Critical Race Theory calls for “aggressive, color conscious efforts to change
the way things are.”[2] It
contemplates, “race-conscious decision making as a routine, non-deviant mode, a
more or less permanent norm”[3] to
be used in distributing positions of wealth, prestige, and power.[4]
Critical Race Theorists
wish to move beyond the narrow scope of current American affirmative action policies,
“which strangles affirmative action principles by protecting the property
interest of whiteness.”[5] Instead,
Critical Race Theorists argue for a “conception of affirmative action where
existing distributions of property will be modified by rectifying unjust loss
and inequality.”[6] “Property
rights will then be respected, but they will not be absolute; rather, they will
be considered against a societal requirement for affirmative action.”[7] “In
essence this conception of affirmative action is moving towards reallocation of
power.”[8]Race-conscious
decision making is necessary to “deliberately structure institutions so that
communities and social classes share wealth and power”[9] where
race is seen as “a rough but adequate proxy for connection with a subordinated
community.”[10]
Meanwhile, Critical Race
Theory treats the idea of meritocracy—or the idea, in this context, that the
law can and should treat all equally regardless of the color of their skin—as
“a vehicle for self-interest, power, and privilege”[11] This
“myth of meritocracy” is merely a tool to perpetuate the existing power
structures that are based on white supremacy and white privilege. Thus, the
myth of meritocracy marginalizes people of color.[12] The
only alternative, then, is to use racial preferences to “delegitimize the
property interest of whiteness—to dismantle the actual and expected privilege
that has attended ‘white’ skin.”[13]
Critical Race Theory Rejects
Liberalism
Along with meritocracy,
Critical Race Theory “rejects the traditions of liberalism.”[14] As
described by Critical Race theorist Richard Delgado, “[Critical Race theorists]
are suspicious of another liberal mainstay, namely rights.”[15] “Particularly
some of the older, more radical Critical Race Theory scholars…believe that
moral and legal rights are apt to do the right holder much less good than we
like to think.”[16] “In
our system, rights are almost always procedural (such as due process) rather
than substantive (for example, to food, housing, or education).”[17] “Moreover,
rights are said to be alienating. They separate people from each other ‘stay
away, I’ve got my rights’—rather than encouraging them to form close,
respectful communities.”[18]
As a result, Critical Race
theorists tend to be less protective of traditional liberal rights, most
notably those involving speech. Critical Race theorists have called for “tort remedies
for racist speech”[19] and
some theorists believe that “formal criminal and administrative sanction—public
as opposed to private prosecution—is also an appropriate response to racist
speech.”[20] These
debates, once academic in nature, have become increasingly salient with the
recent wave of campus protests.[21] Concerns
about free speech are interpreted by some Critical Race theorists as an
expression of “white fragility,” which is “in and of itself an expression of
white supremacy.”[22]
Critical Race Theory’s
Narrative Approach to Truth
Critical Race Theory is
uniquely reliant on narrative to substantiate its claims. “An essential tenant
of Critical Race Theory is counter storytelling.”[23] Narrative
analysis can be used “to reveal the circular, self-serving nature of particular
legal doctrines or rules.”[24] “Most
mainstream scholars embrace universalism over particularity, and abstract
principles and ‘the rule of law’ over perspectivism.”[25] “Clashing
with this more traditional view, Critical Race Theory emphasizes the opposite,
in what has been termed the ‘call to context.’”
“For Critical Race
Theorists, general laws may be appropriate in some contexts (such as, perhaps,
trusts and estates, or highway speed limits), but political and moral discourse
is not one of them.”[26] Narratives
need not necessarily be true to prove their point. “In order to appraise the
contradictions and inconsistencies that pervade the all too real world of
racial oppression, I have chosen in this book the tools not only of reason but
of unreason, of fantasy.”[27]
Narratives are employed to
shore up other basic premises of Critical Race Theory, such as the notion that
“racism is a permanent component of American life” and that racism continues to
play a “dominant role” in American society.[28] For
instance, Critical Race Theorists use individual narratives of hate crime
incident to explore the import and impact as hate speech in order to argue for
the inadequacy of current punishment.[29] Salient
to the current campus debate, campus protestors often employ narratives to
argue that Harvard today engages in “systemic racism and exclusion.”[30]
A Brief Critique
Critical Race theory offers
a potent mix: rejecting racial neutrality in the law, rejecting the liberal
emphasis on individual rights, rejecting the possibility of objectively neutral
legal analysis and embracing “the tools not only of reason but of unreason.”[31] It
is an unusual combination for a theory originating on the far left.
If Critical Race theory
were just about affirmative action, perhaps we could let such indulgences
slide. But Critical Race theory not only directs how to structure the
university, but also how to structure the relation of the individual to the
state. Racially-based taxes, racially-based employment quotas, racially-based
redistributions of wealth: none would be beyond the theoretical horizon of
Critical Race theory. All are justified by an appeal to inadequate racial
justice, an appeal that can neither be proved nor disproved, an appeal that can
just as easily be used for naked racial subordination. All fall within a
context where speech labeled as “hurtful” and “racist” could be punishable by
law, and opponents of the racial regime would be silenced.
To teach Critical Race
Theory is to teach the latest in a sad line of theoretical justifications for
legally-codified racism. As a proponent of academic freedom, I have no problem
with this, just as I would have no problem for studying the legal
justifications for other regimes that have codified race into law. But let’s
not pretend that we are doing anything else, and let’s certainly not mandate
the teaching of any such ideology.
Bill Barlow is a 3L.
[1] Harris, Cheryl. “Whiteness As Property”. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed The Movement.
Kimberle Crenshaw. 1st ed. New York: New York Press, 1995. 289
[3] Kennedy, Duncan, “A Cultural Pluralist Case for Affirmative
Action in Legal Academia.Critical Race Theory: The Key
Writings That Formed The Movement. Kimberle Crenshaw. 1st ed. New
York: New York Press, 1995. 164
[4] Guinier, Lani, “Groups, Representation, and Race-Conscious
Districting: A Case of the Emperor’s Clothes”. Critical
Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed The Movement. Kimberle
Crenshaw. 1st ed. New York: New York Press, 1995. 215, making the case that
“race is as effective as geography in functioning as a political proxy.” The
article defends certain principles behind race-conscious districting. This
article does not, however, call for explicit transfer of political power on the
basis of race, only race conscious decision making in districting.
[5] Harris, Cheryl. “Whiteness As Property”. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed The Movement.
Kimberle Crenshaw. 1st ed. New York: New York Press, 1995. 290
[6] Harris, Cheryl. “Whiteness As Property”. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed The Movement.
Kimberle Crenshaw. 1st ed. New York: New York Press, 1995. 290
[7] Harris, Cheryl. “Whiteness As Property”. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed The Movement.
Kimberle Crenshaw. 1st ed. New York: New York Press, 1995. 290
[8] Harris, Cheryl. “Whiteness As Property”. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed The Movement.
Kimberle Crenshaw. 1st ed. New York: New York Press, 1995. 290
[9] Kennedy, Duncan, “A Cultural Pluralist Case for Affirmative
Action in Legal Academia.Critical Race Theory: The Key
Writings That Formed The Movement. Kimberle Crenshaw. 1st ed. New
York: New York Press, 1995. 162
[10] Kennedy, Duncan, “A Cultural Pluralist Case for Affirmative
Action in Legal Academia.Critical Race Theory: The Key
Writings That Formed The Movement. Kimberle Crenshaw. 1st ed. New
York: New York Press, 1995. 162
[11] “What is Critical Race Theory?” Form the UCLA School of
Public Affairs, seehttps://spacrs.wordpress.com/what-is-critical-race-theory/
[12] See “What is Critical Race Theory?” Form the UCLA School of
Public Affairs, seehttps://spacrs.wordpress.com/what-is-critical-race-theory/. See also Godsey, Mark A., “The Myth of Meritocracy, and the
Silencing of Minority Voices: The Need for Diversity on America’s Law Reviews”
(1995). Faculty Articles and Other Publications. Paper 84.http://scholarship.law.uc.edu/fac_pubs/84
[13] Harris, Cheryl. “Whiteness As Property”. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed The Movement.
Kimberle Crenshaw. 1st ed. New York: New York Press, 1995. 288
[14] See “What is Critical Race Theory?” Form the UCLA School of
Public Affairs, seehttps://spacrs.wordpress.com/what-is-critical-race-theory/. See also Anthology, xix-xx, on the divide between Critical Race
Theory and traditional liberalism.
[20] Mari J. Matsuda, Public Response to Racist Speech:
Considering the Victim’s Story, 87 Mich. L. Rev. 2321 (1989).
[21] For a short review of some recent conflicts between
protestors on issues of free speech, see “Fascism
at Yale”. http://hlrecord.org/2015/11/fascism-at-yale/
[22] “Free speech, Black lives, and white fragility” by Bennett
Carpenter, Duke Chronicle, January 19, 2016. http://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2016/01/free-speech-black-lives-and-white-fragility
[23] “DeCuir, J. T., & Dixson, A. D.. (2004). “So When It
Comes out, They Aren’t That Surprised That It Is There”: Using Critical Race
Theory as a Tool of Analysis of Race and Racism in Education. Educational Researcher, 33(5),
27.
[24]Richard Delgado & Jean Stefancic, Critical race theory: THE
CUTTING EDGE (2000)https://www.temple.edu/tempress/chapters_1100/1169_ch1.pdf xvii
[25] Richard Delgado & Jean Stefancic, Critical race theory:
THE CUTTING EDGE (2000)https://www.temple.edu/tempress/chapters_1100/1169_ch1.pdf xvii
[26] Richard Delgado & Jean Stefancic, Critical race theory:
THE CUTTING EDGE (2000)https://www.temple.edu/tempress/chapters_1100/1169_ch1.pdf xvii
[28] “DeCuir, J. T., & Dixson, A. D.. (2004). “So When It
Comes out, They Aren’t That Surprised That It Is There”: Using Critical Race
Theory as a Tool of Analysis of Race and Racism in Education. Educational Researcher, 33(5),
27
[29] “DeCuir, J. T., & Dixson, A. D.. (2004). “So When It
Comes out, They Aren’t That Surprised That It Is There”: Using Critical Race
Theory as a Tool of Analysis of Race and Racism in Education. Educational Researcher, 33(5),
28
[30]See https://reclaimharvardlaw.wordpress.com/ for the point that Reclaim Harvard Law believes that Harvard
engages in systemic racism and exclusion. The import of personal narratives to
this conclusion is evident in the community meetings as well as personal
discussions with members of the protest movement.
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