[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.

[tptacek]

I don't dispute that there are misguided K-8 schools that have been teaching CRT, or what they think CRT is. They shouldn't be.

There would be a more compelling argument here if either of those slides said something outré. But neither does, so I don't know what I'm supposed to do with this.

[skissane]

> I don't dispute that there are misguided K-8 schools that have been teaching CRT, or what they think CRT is. They shouldn't be.

Okay, that was my whole point though – "CRT" has been appropriated to mean something different from the original academic theory – and not just by the "anti-CRT" crowd, by "pro-CRT" folks too. So why not just accept that "CRT" now has two meanings, the original scholarly meaning, and a colloquial meaning, and they are different, even though the later grew out of (distortions of) the former?

The appropriation of "CRT" isn't really any different than the appropriation of "woke", which you seemed more okay with.

[tptacek]

If those slides had said something that contravened CRT rather than summarizing it, I think that'd be a valid argument. But they say almost nothing at all.

[skissane]

Let's forget the slides for now. In hindsight I think I made a mistake in bringing them into the conversation, since I was just trying to use them to demonstrate something which you agree with anyway–but I didn't realise that when I brought them up.

This is your comment to which I was responding:

> 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.

And then you said (my emphasis):

> I don't dispute that there are misguided K-8 schools that have been teaching CRT, or what they think CRT is

Doesn't your statement support the idea that "CRT" has evolved in popular usage to mean something different from the original academic theory, and that evolution hasn't purely been due to CRT critics, people who promote/teach "what they think CRT is" have also played a role in that evolution? And hence, that evolution can't be solely blamed on people trying to "tar actual CRT theorists"? Which undermines your argument for resisting it.