Wokeness: What's It All About?

It's V.D.H., at R.C.P., "What Is American Wokeness Really About?":

Most Americans were as indifferent to the U.S. women's soccer team's recent loss to Sweden in the Olympics as they were excited about the team's World Cup win in 2019. In between was the team's nonstop politicking, from whining about compensation to virtue-signaling their disrespect for the United States. The celebrity face of the team, perennial scold Megan Rapinoe, is going the way of teenage grouch Greta Thunberg, becoming more pinched the more she is tuned out.

Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Marie Khan-Cullors Brignac used her corporate grifting to buy four homes. The one she bought in California's Topanga Canyon is surrounded by a new $35,000 security fence.

Critical race theory guru Ibram X. Kendi offers virtual, one-hour workshops for $20,000 a pop. He is franchising woke re-education kits -- in between bouts of damning capitalism as a catalyst of racism.

The woke movement is a slicker, more sophisticated and far more grandiose version of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson's shakedowns of the 1990s. Those, at least, were far more honest in leveraging cash with charges of racism -- and came without the academic gobbledygook of critical race theory.

Our freeways are jammed. Airports are crammed. Labor is short. Huge pent-up consumer demand for essentials and entertainment outpaces supply. Yet Major League Baseball's recent All-Star Game saw record low television viewership -- about a quarter of the audience of 40 years ago, when there were 100 million fewer Americans.

The Summer Olympic Games are getting anemic TV ratings. The NBA's crashing TV ratings have followed the downward trajectory of the NFL's ratings. Woke sports earn the same public disgust as the accusatory and boring Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards.

Cable news networks CNN and MSNBC fueled the story that former President Donald Trump allegedly colluded with Russia. They contextualized (to excuse) the summer looting and rioting of 2020. And they cheered on two impeachments as a prelude to their 24/7 woke drumbeat. Their ratings, too, have now dived.

Never has TV been more politicized. Sitcoms, dramas and commercials are designed more to resonate woke messaging than to entertain. So naturally, dismal TV ratings reflect the expected public boredom that ensues when art serves politics.

How many times will disingenuous Dr. Anthony Fauci swear that he never sent federal money to the Wuhan virology lab for gain-of-function research, or blame his critics for pointing out his gyrating advice on masks, or offer yet another noble lie on herd immunity?

In short, Americans are worn out from elite virtue-signaling and woke performance art from critical race theory capitalists, multimillionaire CEOs, revolving-door Pentagon brass, Malibu celebrities and credentialed elite...

The backlash is building, with a vengeance. My view, once again, is that issues involving C.R.T in education should be taken up at the local level, where parents and communities have the power to elect and remove members of local school boards. Education historically is local function and this is problem for the local communities to decide. 

In any case, still more.

 

Popular Revolt Against Critical Race Theory

At Law and Liberty, "How the Grassroots Are Resisting CRT":

The popular revolt against Critical Race Theory has shocked the woke establishment. We can see in its schizophrenic and unsteady reaction just how spooked it is. Consider, for example, how teachers’ unions have gone from denying that CRT is used in classrooms, to vowing in their next breath to promote it among the country’s 14,000 school districts, and threatening to do “oppo research” or sue anyone who opposes CRT.

You can’t have it both ways, guys...

RTWT.

 

Patricia Williams, Alchemy of Race and Rights

Patricia Williams, Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor.

The Year of the Woke Revolution

It's Lee Siegel, at City Journal, "Year Zero: The roots of the woke revolution":

On the day in March that eight people were murdered in a massage parlor in Atlanta, six of them Asian-American, a Cherokee County, Georgia, police captain gave a media briefing after the alleged murderer was caught. He described the suspect’s motivation as follows: “He was pretty much fed up, and at the end of his rope, and yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did.”

Indignation erupted. How, people cried, could the police captain attribute the murders to someone merely having a bad day? Having determined that the crime was motivated by anti-Asian hatred, the Internet furies concluded that the captain had spoken callously because of his own anti-Asian bias.

Leave aside that anyone who had seen a police movie could recognize as tough-guy talk the captain’s seemingly casual description of an unspeakable act. And never mind that just a few weeks later, President Biden described the slaughter of eight people in a FedEx facility not as a human tragedy but as a “national embarrassment,” as if it had been a messily disputed election. Consider instead what the policeman’s critics cared about. Imagine that the captain had appeared before the media and had said that he believed that the suspect was motivated by anti-Asian hatred and that this hate was the true virus ravaging us all. Would he have been lauded? Yes. But what if he gave this briefing while the suspect remained at large, giving him time to flee? In reality, the entire Atlanta police department was on the scene almost immediately. The suspect was caught shortly after the shootings, before he could harm anyone else. Even if the police captain had been insensitive, why should this matter more than his and his officers’ actions?

Words are crumbling under the weight of moral one-upmanship. One cannot, for example, call both Hitler and Donald Trump “fascists” without the term losing its meaning. But for four years, an imminent fascist revolution sponsored by the Trump movement was a liberal obsession. (Hard to make a fascist revolution, though, without having the military on your side, and Trump spent four years insulting both the military and the state’s intelligence apparatus.) Nor does the term “systemic racism” mean anything if it describes both the structure of apartheid in South Africa and slavery in the antebellum American South and the circumstances we live in today. Apartheid South Africa was systemically racist. Georgia in 1860 was systemically racist. But the New York suburb where I live—Montclair, New Jersey—has a black mayor who succeeded another black mayor; a black superintendent of schools; a black assistant superintendent of schools; several black school principals; a black deputy chief of police; a self-conscious enclave of wealthy black bankers and black lawyers; and accomplished black residents, from a world-famous jazz bassist to a former head of Homeland Security. Montclair is more racially, socially, and economically diverse than any neighborhood in New York City. Yet cries of Montclair’s systemic racism have now swept the town, as well as its public school curricula.... 

... We are now living in a new golden age of American racism. So long as you talk the proverbial talk—and, if you really need extra cover, make the obligatory accusations and issue the compulsory condemnations—you can actually indulge racist impulses. You can inveigh against racism at your local school board meeting and then, a year or two later, quietly move your children into the whitest private school you can find. You can fawn so fulsomely over your white daughter’s black friend that the friend will never return to your house. You can be so excessively polite yet calculatedly distant with black people that you will ensure that none will enter your life. If you are a Coca-Cola executive, you can declaim against the new Georgia voting laws, even as you market your product extra-aggressively in poor black neighborhoods, where the obesity and diabetes caused in part by regular soda consumption has by now afflicted generations of black children. Maybe the hope among Coca-Cola executives is that, thanks to the new rhetoric of morally superior denunciation, you can start addicting liberal white kids in the suburbs, too: “Woke Goes Better with Coke.” And why not? Apple tells me that in order to “protect the environment,” it will no longer include a power adapter and earphones at no extra charge with its new phones. However, Apple will gladly sell them to me.

Excellent piece (emphasis added).

Keep reading.

In Rhode Island, Parents Push Back Against Critical Race Theory (VIDEO)

It's a grassroots revolt.

At Legal Insurrection:

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow

At Amazon, Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. 

My High School Taught Me Critical Race Theory Six Years Ago and Tried to Reeducate Me When I Fought Back

From Spencer Lindquist, at the Federalist, "Critical race theory has just recently become one of the primary targets for the right, and for good reason. But CRT's presence in K-12 education isn't new":

One step backward. They asked another question. One step forward. The PA system buzzed back to life. Another question, another step forward. Then another, and another. It had been decided.

It was 2015 during my freshman year of high school. I had just been exposed to critical race theory for the first time. We were in the midst of a privilege walk, a racial shaming exercise that uses selective questioning to substantiate claims of privilege and oppression.

Now, six years later, critical race theory has just recently become a target for the right, with various different states outlawing it and parent groups forming to oppose it. This cancerous ideology has had a presence in our K-12 public schools for much longer than many realize, however. I know because my high school attempted to indoctrinate me with it and, when I fought back, to reeducate me.

Taxpayers Paying for Indoctrination

I went to high school at a mid-sized government school in the heart of the Silicon Valley. The student body was highly diverse, with large Asian and Hispanic populations and a white plurality. The Public School Review noted my school was in the top 20 percent of the most multiracial schools in California, a state that’s already far more multi-ethnic than most of the rest of the country.

My first encounter with critical race theory was in my freshman year, when we skipped our P.E. class to engage in a racial struggle session, hosted by a teacher and a special cadre of students who had been handpicked and placed in her equity advisory class.

I began to catch on when the presenters played a video titled “What kind of Asian are you?” The clip features a buffoonish caricature of an insensitive white man, the video’s antagonist, who becomes the subject of scorn after he commits several “microaggressions” as he attempts to relate with the video’s heroine, an Asian woman. She then humiliates him and trots off.

I was beginning to wonder if our conversation was really about advancing “equity,” or if it was about scapegoating those who pose an obstacle to progressivism’s long march. They didn’t leave me wondering for long. Shortly after the video, we were taken into the school courtyard, where chalk lines had been meticulously drawn on the pavement, where we were then told to stand on the center line. We then started our privilege walk.

The presenters asked us a series of questions, telling us to step forward or backward depending on our answers to inquiries like “Have you ever felt like you’ve been racially profiled?” or “Did your parents graduate from college?” By the time it was over, whites were in the front, then Asians, Hispanics, and finally African Americans. The verdict was in.

But while trivial questions like “Can you easily find Band-Aids that match your skin tone?” were used to substantiate sweeping claims of privilege and oppression, more pertinent inquiries that would’ve jammed the narrative were excluded.

We were never asked, for example, to take a step back if we’d be systematically discriminated against when we applied for college. Nor were we asked if we had ever felt that the media had ever weaponized our ancestry against us to brand us as oppressors, or if violence against us had been ignored because of our race, either in America or abroad.

Similar exercises held today likely don’t ask questions that account for recent developments, like multi-million-dollar organizations branding phrases like “It’s Okay To Be White” as hate slogans, critical race theory teaching white children to hate themselves, or the adoption of the language of genocide by academics who dub whiteness a “parasitic condition” without a “permanent cure,” or fantasize about committing acts of racial violence against white people.

The selective questioning was intended to create a certain outcome, a prime example of a conclusion in search of evidence...

Keep reading. 

Critical Witchcraft Theory

At American Greatness, "'Systemic racism' is not a sociological theory. It is theology. More precisely, it is a demonology: a theory of witchcraft."

Charles Mills, From Class to Race

At Amazon, Charles Mills, From Class to Race" From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism".

Growing Opposition to Critical Race Theory

At the Epoch Times, "CRT Opposition Grows Stronger, Bolder, and More Organized: ‘You Have to Fight Fire With Fire’":

Despite growing opposition to critical race theory (CRT) and a growing number of states passing laws to ostracize it from classrooms, edification and teachers’ cumulations are vowing to edify the controversial subject matter anyway. But one candid Florida mom verbalizes it’s time to “fight fire with fire.”

“I cerebrate parents have realized you have to fight fire with fire,” Quisha King told the Epoch Times. You have to be as vigorous, as forceful, and as unrelenting as they are.

King is the Florida mother who gained notoriety when she blasted the Duval County school board with vigorous opposition to CRT. In replication to the National Education Association’s threat to go after those who dared oppose CRT, King verbally expressed bring it on.

In an effort to avail denizens fight back against the behemoth inculcation system, Tea Party Patriots Action (TPPA) is now distributing a 46-page booklet (pdf) edifying parents and students how to get organized in their effort to fight back. As described on its website, the United We Stand toolkit is a component of TPPA’s campaign to inspirit people to attend their local school board meetings to oppose CRT, and to urge a full return to in-classroom ordinant dictation.

I cerebrate it’s good to avail parents understand how to apperceive (CRT) and how to detect it because they don’t genuinely understand how it’s being worked into the system, King verbalized. “It’s a great, handy guide so they’re armed with something.”

“I cerebrate we require more things like that,” she integrated, verbally expressing she has additionally endeavored to avail parents by engendering informative videos.

We embolden every parent and concerned denizen who cares about the future of our country to attend their local school board meeting, learn what is going on locally, and ascertain schools are plenarily open,

TPPA Honorary Chairman Jenny Beth Martin verbally expressed in a verbalization regarding their incipient anti-CRT campaign. Teachers should be edifying reading, inditing, arithmetic, and history without indoctrination.

I cerebrate there’s a sense of exigency with this because kids are in school for 12 years or 13 years if you include kindergarten, Martin explained to The Epoch Times. I don’t cerebrate it’s fair to wait just for the elections. We’ve got to understand what’s transpiring and work to unwind it at a policy level as well.

“Obviously the first thing is to commence peregrinating to school board meetings,” Vero Beach, Florida, activist Susan Mehiel told The Epoch Times. The second thing is to commence electing school board members who are true to their word. According to Mehiel, people need to commence electing “non-edifying people on those boards,” rather than perpetually pulling from the same barrel of rotten apples. She additionally suggests people establish a good relationship with their local representatives. In June, Mehiel organized the “Save our Students” town hall meeting in Vero Beach to rally community members to verbalize out against proposed edification materials that pushed critical race theory in K-5 English Language curriculum.

“If parents genuinely want to make a difference,” Mehiel exhorted, they have to have numbers and they have to have clout at the state level.

At Moms for Liberty, we believe that it is essential for every denizen to amalgamate together to avail parents reclaim their rights in America’s public-school classrooms,

Tiffany Justice, co-progenitor of Moms For Liberty told The Epoch Times. We applaud the work of organizations that give denizens resources and a roadmap for engagement with all levels of regime...

 

Great Review of Critical Race Theory

At the BBC, surprisingly, "Critical race theory: the concept dividing the US."

Defining Critical Race Theory and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

USA Today's got a freakin' glossary on CRT and DEI. 

Here, "Schools keep talking about critical race theory and DEI. What do those terms really mean?"

Biden Administration Walks Back Ties to Extremists Pushing Critical Race Theory in Schools

At Fox News, "Biden admin walks back ties to group pushing critical race theory in schools:'It was an error' to promote the critical race theory handbook said Biden's Department of Education."

An "error." Right. *Eye-roll.*

These ghouls totally back C.R.T., but for their rank political cowardice. 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Rails Against Opponents of Critical Race Theory

At Fox News, "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rails against CRT opposition: Teachers should be 'fluent in how to dismantle racism': 'Why don’t you want our schools to teach anti-racism?'"

Charles W. Mills, From Class to Race

 At Amazon, Charles W. Mills, From Class to Race.

'Critical Race Weary'

From Buck Sexton:

Much of the recent attention on Critical Race Theory (“CRT”) has been a result of the increase in Zoom teaching during the COVID-19 school shutdowns. Parents became aware of the kind of identity-politics indoctrination forced on their kids. Students who hadn’t even reached high-school age were being told that they were part of systematic oppression based on their skin color.

It has been known for a long time that academia is riddled with CRT nonsense, and college campuses have been demanding that students worship at the altar of “Diversity and Inclusion.” But corporate America has also been infiltrated with similar politically correct brainwashing.

The Marxist rot of CRT has spread into the executive suites of the biggest and most powerful companies in the world. Case in point: Raytheon Technologies. It’s the second-largest defense contractor in the world, with around 181,000 employees and revenue over $56 billion in 2020.

It’s not the kind of place one might expect to be nagging employees about “checking their privilege” or “confronting historical oppression.” This is a place that makes missiles that blow people up, among other things.

Yet thanks to an industrious think-tank scholar at the Manhattan Institute named Christopher Rufo, we know that when Raytheon isn’t coming up with new ways to drop bombs on the Third World, its employees sit through some of the most absurd and offensive racial sensitivity training imaginable.

Rufo got his hands on the actual training materials from Raytheon’s version of CRT training. He writes in City Journal about some of the most insane PC training modules, such as when:

“Raytheon asks white employees to deconstruct their identities and identify [their] privilege. The company argues that white, straight, Christian, able-bodied, English-speaking men are at the top of the intersectional hierarchy – and must work on recognizing [their] privilege” and step aside in favor of other identity groups. According to outside diversity consultant Michelle Saahene, whites “have the privilege of individuality,” while minorities “don’t have that privilege.”

Divisive Diversity

Deconstruct their identities? Intersectional hierarchy? These are Leftist absurdities, but they have to be taken seriously in so far as they’re part of a vast and growing “diversity and inclusion” complex. There are frauds who travel around from company to company to preach this nonsense, and they’re shockingly well-compensated and culturally influential.

In fact, there’s real power now behind CRT. As anyone who has been called into human resources at a Fortune 500 company for a “sensitivity” issue will be able to tell you, the HR policies of major companies now reflect the philosophy of CRT. Employees are expected to abide by the ever-changing dictates of these Diversity Czars or face the consequences.

These expectations even extend to the way colleagues are allowed to speak to each other...

Still more.

Yet again, contra Sexton, C.R.T. is not Marxist. See Kimberley Crenshaw, Critical Race Theory.

Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge

At Amazon, Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado, Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge.

What Arizona's 2010 Ban on Ethnic Studies Could Mean for the Fight Over Critical Race Theory

At Politico, "As states across the country impose new rules on the teaching of history and race in schools, a messy, drawn-out battle over a Mexican American studies program in Tucson could offer a preview of what’s to come."

As states across the country impose new rules on the teaching of history and race in schools, a messy, drawn-out battle over a Mexican American studies program in Tucson could offer a preview of what’s to come.https://t.co/5QBI9CjGit

— Coalition for Academic Justice at UArizona (@CAJUArizona) July 17, 2021

Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory

This is the key introductory text. It's pitched, really, at the undergraduate level. 

At Amazon, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction.

(For the advanced graduate-level, nearly impenetrable text, see Kimbery Crenshaw, Critical Race Theory.)

Ben Carson Slams Critical Race Theory

This is excellent, except for Carson's claim that critical race theory is "Marxist." 

There's plenty of Marxism in the schools, especially in the humanities and social sciences, but this ain't it. 

It's not so, according one of the leading founders of critical race theory, Kimberly Crenshaw, in her foundational anthology, Critical Race Theory.

And Carson's at Fox News, "Dr. Ben Carson: Fighting critical race theory – this is how we stop this blatantly racist ideology: We cannot allow CRT to rob American children of that same hope that was instilled in me."