[kennywinker]

>> Revisionist interpretations of American civil rights law and progress.

> this doesn't sound like teaching objective historical facts.

A revisionist means "examining and trying to change existing beliefs about how events happened or what their importance or meaning is"

I.e. we've understood the facts incorrectly, let's take another look to try to understand them correctly. This is literally what people who study history do every day. I read a great blog recently dispelling myths about what medieval life was like. Definitely revisionist, super interesting.

[vorpalhex]

Revisionism:

> noun Advocacy of the revision of an accepted, usually long-standing view, theory, or doctrine, especially a revision of historical events and movements.

> noun A recurrent tendency within the Communist movement to revise Marxist theory in such a way as to provide justification for a retreat from the revolutionary to the reformist position.

Via https://www.wordnik.com/words/revisionism

CRT, Critical Racial Theory, is a Marxist tradition. I don't mean Marxist as "bad" or "scary" but I mean as in descended from the Frankfurt School of thought which focused on the Marxist tradition.

CRT uses Revisionist reading as a tool to formulate reform of an existing system or dialog. It is a Trotsky-esque tactic of reading material with a preconceived notion to find a new end.

[kennywinker]

The second definition doesn't mean "revisionist" has some different meaning within marxist thinking. It means communists call people who back pedal the revolutionary language of marx to make it less radical "revisionists". The meaning is the same, it's just a special context where what you are revising and why are clearly defined.

> CRT uses Revisionist reading as a tool to formulate reform of an existing system or dialog.

The only way that re-interpreting the past as a tool to figure out how to change current systems is a bad thing, is if current systems are good. Given how things are for non-white people in america, I think it's clear that changing current systems is needed.

If you're worried because they are interpreting historical fact to fit their preconceived notion, well... yes, so are we all. We all have preconceived notions. Romans were clean and noble, while medieval people were filthy and never bathed. Every story I hear about either of those times is slotted into my preconceptions about romans or medieval people. Then one day an activist historian with an agenda teaches me that romans didn't have soap, but medieval people did... the facts support their idea that medieval people were cleaner than we portray them in movies and tv. Just because they had an agenda (the medieval period is maligned in culture) when they went looking for those facts, doesn't mean they're wrong.

[vorpalhex]

The romans had soap and were well aware of both lye and unrefined ammonia for cleansing. They actually used ammonia for laundering clothes. Medieval people had soap too, but probably used a different process for making it than romans. (As to who was cleaner, it depends heavily on class, region and specific year.)

That's the problem with preconceived notions, they lead to bad scholarship. It's what made so many victorian era analysis of historic artifacts so poor - they were trying to reconstruct them with Victorian values.

No person can be truly neutral but you do your best to set aside preconceived notions. CRT argues that in some cases we shouldn't do that and reinforces storytelling - a fictional process - as an interpretive lens. That is not aligned with traditional scholarship and part of why Critical Theorists (at large) reject traditional scholarship. CRT is not a fact based tradition. (Crits would say it is a "critical" one)

Revisionism in the marxist dialogue is a distinct phenomenon from revisionism in general, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revisionism_(Marxism) and https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/apr/03.htm

CRT is a Marxist tradition but instead of a class divide it views through the fundamental lens of a racial divide. Just as the class divide is innate in Marxism so it is too in CRT. Re-reading existing texts to "contextualize" them and reframe them in alignment with this racial divide is the usage of Revisionism in the CRT (and likewise for fellow Critical Theories) nomenclature.

You can reject CRT wholesale AND still petition for better racial equality or the correcting of faults in any given country. CRT is not the only solution, nor does a rejection of CRT mean you accept the world as it is currently.

[kennywinker]

So... my point was that we have a cultural bias towards representing the romans as clean and medieval people as dirty - "As to who was cleaner, it depends heavily on class, region and specific year." So you agree with the core of the idea I was presenting, but you then immediately dismiss it as bad scholorship. Apologies, I didn't think I needed to google the details for this conversation - but let's correct the record: romans didn't have soap during the republican era, but they did during the roman empire. At least by 200CE, perhaps as much as a century earlier. Happy?

> That's the problem with preconceived notions, they lead to bad scholarship

I agree. E.g. missing the forest for the trees. As you just did.