One increasingly common political tactic is to claim that you’re not doing what you’re very clearly doing. Sometimes these rascals also claim that their opponents are doing what they themselves are doing.
Apparently Fairfax County (Virginia) has adopted this technique. Parents complain that their children are being taught critical race theory, and school officials scoff, mock and deny.
“What? That’s master’s level stuff. It’s what you might learn in the university. We don’t teach it in K-12.”
No, they actually do. Critical race theory is a ‘frame’ for ‘our work,’ Fairfax County Public Schools told teachers
If you can stomach it, you can watch the presentation for yourself. (The presentation doesn’t start until about 50 minutes in. And no, I didn’t watch the whole thing, but I skimmed it.)
John McWhorter did a good podcast on this. Yes, the origin of “critical race theory” is a higher level of analysis suitable to law school or humanities/social science grad school.
But you know, and I know, and Dr. McWhorter knows, and “they” know that’s not what’s being talked about and objected to. They’re hiding behind a technical definition of a term that everyone is using (in a pretty clearly understood way) to mean something else. And what they mean is, the conclusions about American history and culture that developed out of 30 years of application of critical race theory are being taught to kids as though they’re equivalent to names, dates, and primary source documents.
https://www.booksmartstudios.org/p/lexicon-valley-the-morphing-of-critical
It’s like “no, we’re not actually teaching historical criticism, but everything we teach is based on the conclusions of historical criticism.”
Precisely. But hiding behind “no, we’re not teaching historical criticism” to mean “there’s nothing to see here.”