[rayiner]

DeBoer is just describing the phenomenon: We needed terms for ideas which are increasingly prevalent but resist labeling. So we appropriated “CRT” for that purpose. Words mean things, of course, but they can mean multiple things according to popular usage. “Nicole Hannah-Jones thought” is the dominant meaning of “CRT” today. Almost nobody means to refer to some obscure branch of legal academia.

[tptacek]

I'd be much more amenable to that if the people "appropriating" terms like CRT weren't doing so to tar actual CRT theorists, but they are, so I'm not at all amenable to it in this case.

[skissane]

If you don't agree with using the term "CRT" to label the kind of views espoused by people such as Nikole Hannah-Jones – is there another label you'd support instead?

[tptacek]

It depends on how specifically Hannah-Jonesian the critique is. Is the issue here 1619ism? That's a fair label for what she represents. Is it more broadly Kendi-style "anti-racism"? I think if you put scare quotes around "anti-racism", that's fine too. Is it political correctness? The modern term for that is "wokeism" (no quotes needed).

"Woke" is also an appropriated term. But it's original meaning is actually pretty close to its current meaning; I remember a Lexicon Valley episode where one of McWhorter's academic guests observed that "woke" is what you'd call your crazy uncle at Thanksgiving who thought the flouride in your toothpaste was a government mind control system.

[skissane]

Did you see this article containing screenshots of an ethnic studies course at a California high school, with slides about "Critical Race Theory"? https://reason.com/2022/01/31/critical-race-theory-taught-in... Some might accuse the "whistleblower" of being a "grifter", now that she's swapped her teaching career for the conservative speaking circuit – but, I doubt the screenshots are faked, because if they weren't real, surely the school would have come out and said that to rebut her criticism of them.

Maybe that course is an outlier, but it does serve as a counterexample to the narrative that "CRT is not being taught in K-12 schools". But, if they are teaching CRT (even by name) in some schools, how close is the CRT they teach to the original academic theories? Given my personal experience at how badly schools can mangle things – I still remember the bizarre errors in my high school computing studies textbook, and the interactions I had with teachers in which I tried to explain why the textbook was wrong, and they couldn't understand anything I was saying – it wouldn't surprise me if high school CRT had little in common with the scholarly version.

But if that's true – wouldn't it just show that critics are not the only people appropriating the term "CRT"? In which case, if people on "both sides" are appropriating "CRT", how is its appropriation any worse than that of "woke"? If you'll accept the appropriation of the latter, why refuse it for the former? With "scare quotes", if need be.

[tptacek]

Can you be more specific about which slides you want me to respond to? CRT does have a position about what nominally race-neutral school board policies mean when reframed through race. That's unsurprising, because since Buchanan v. Warley, most racial policy in the US has been nominally race-neutral.

I don't think CRT should be taught to grade schoolers. It's complicated and all you can give students who barely understand civics is a bunch of fortune cookies.

[skissane]

These two slides in the article: https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/q60/uploads/2022/0... https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/q60/uploads/2022/0...

Neither slide contains much content, so they don't really tell us how Rancho San Juan High School (Salinas, CA) has been teaching Critical Race Theory – but they are evidence that they have been teaching it.

Were they teaching it accurately? We don't have enough information to say. But, it wouldn't surprise me that, even if the original scholarly theories have some legitimacy, a high school tasked with teaching them would mangle them into something else entirely.