[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.

[tptacek]

No, because, again, you haven't shown that schools are teaching something that isn't CRT while appropriating the term "CRT" to describe it. In fact, we have no idea what these schools are teaching, so we have not all that much to discuss.