USA At Critical Mass

The latest trend in PC/WOKE educational circles in the US .....

Critical Race Theory Is A Veritable Industry

.... is called Critical Race Theory (CRT) ...

As you can imagine, coming from that section of a society, already in racial turmoil, its proved to be very divisive, and anathema to many Republicans. The theory proposes that discrimination endures, due in part to the ​continued existence of structures of white dominance that are enmeshed in the American legal (and socio-economic) system.

At its core, it simply it propose that there are just two groups in America (or the West, as we shall see) - those who are oppressed and discriminated against, and those who are privileged and oppressors. This is basically communist theory with an added racial dimension, and states that one group, the privileged, is always a 'bad' one, and the other group, the oppressed, is always a 'good' one. This translates in the US context as being that if you are white, then you are privileged and therefore an oppressor, while if you are non-white, then you are irrevocably one of the oppressed and being discriminated against. 

Critical Race Theory also teaches that an individual from one group, is in some manner responsible for the actions of other people from their group .... although not, ironically, for crimes such as murder or rapes, committed against members of other races, unless of course the perpetrator is from the aforementioned privileged group.

Being a very simple, if albeit fundamentally false concept, its very easy to get over to young children, which makes it even more dangerous or useful, depending on your point of view, as a indoctrination tool. So the interest groups inside the Democratic caucus in the USA have been pushing hard for it being taught in schools at federal and local state levels. 

CRT Feels Threatening To Some ....

Conversely many Republicans are up in arms, and so its currently the main battlefield between the opposing sides. Many, largely Republican US states, are now specifically banning it from being taught in public schools, with laws that bans schools from any spending, that in some way forces students to “adopt” or “adhere to” the belief that an individual is responsible for the actions committed by members of their race or identity group in the past. In other words trying to stop the cancel culture taking hold.

One of the main objections to CRT is that by not teaching equality, but instead teaching that white privilege and institutional racism runs in every facet of society, it is both divisive and racist. But even where there have been incidents of past societal racism, these incidents cannot be reconciled by formally implementing and teaching racism, into the present society.

Now you might think that apart from the Anglo-Saxon, English speaking societies (who are already infected to some degree or other with this stupidity), the rest of the world could ignore this madness as being an Anglo problem. However you would be wrong ... France has long laid claim to a national identity, that is based on a common culture, fundamental rights and its core values, such as equality and liberty, while rejecting diversity and multiculturalism. 

But this year of insanity has seen these new theories wash across the Atlantic, and up on to the beaches of France, where it has established a bridgehead. There has been a counter reaction, with many politicians and prominent intellectuals saying that social theories from the United States on race, and gender and post-colonialism contamination, created by an out-of-control woke leftism and its attendant cancel culture from American campuses, are a real existential threat to French identity and the French republic. 

This fear is being fuelled by events, such as at the Sorbonne, where activists prevented the staging of a play by Aeschylus to protest the wearing of masks and dark make-up by white actors, under the auspices of what is called cancel culture. A veteran social scientist, Gérard Noiriel, has said that race had become a “bulldozer,’’ crushing other subjects. 

While Gilles Kepel, an expert on Islam, said that American influence had led to “a sort of prohibition in universities to think about the phenomenon of political Islam, in the name of a leftist ideology that considers it the religion of the underprivileged.’’

President Emmanuel Macron has said that “Certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States’’ are threatening to undermine French society. The threat is said to be existential. It fuels secessionism. gnaws at national unity, and abets Islamism. This they say, attacks France’s intellectual and cultural heritage.

Pierre-André Taguieff, a French historian, and a leading critic of the American influence, said in an email that researchers of race, Islamophobia and post-colonialism were motivated by a “hatred of the West, as a white civilization. The common agenda of these enemies of European civilization can be summed up in three words: decolonize, demasculate, de-Europeanize. Straight white male — that’s the culprit to condemn, and the enemy to eliminate.”

America has its own peculiar history on race, but even so, it tried to correct that history via a costly civil war, and the civil rights bills .... that struggle is still seemingly still being played out. Europe and the rest of the world, has a different history, and different issues, which should not be infected by the US experience. 

But we live in global times, where misinformation travels across the globe just as fast as the truth. So the madness in one part of our world, soon infects the other parts without regard to logic or reason. It all seems a long way from Dr Martin Luther King Jr's idea that it all simply came down to equality.

Some of the educationalists who are busy stirring the race pot, might want to ponder on something else he also taught on education ...“Intelligence plus character—that is the goal of true education.”