Republicans' memory laws against "critical race theory" (their current favorite bogeyman concept and conspiracy theory)

I've been saying that the "critical race theory" (CRT) slogan the Republicans are using as their political battle cry right now, and which they are using to try to ban any mention of white racism from school curriculums, is a code phrase for, "Scary Jews! Scary black people!"

Because that's what it is. The thin conspiracy theory narrative on which it is based blames German Jewish Marxists of 90 years ago for making white people in America have to reconsider their racial attitudes in 2021.

Henry Abramson discusses the impact of the anti-CRT laws Republican legislatures are passing in Banning critical race theory will gut the teaching of Jewish history JTA 07/08/2021:

The bans on teaching with a critical race theory framework aren’t really against history per se, which is in the past and therefore stubbornly resists regulation. Rather, these decrees fall more precisely within the category of what are called “memory laws.” Historian Timothy Snyder described these laws as “government actions designed to guide public interpretation of the past… by asserting a mandatory view of historical events, by forbidding the discussion of historical facts or interpretations or by providing vague guidelines that lead to self-censorship.” [my emphasis]

Abramson argues that the anti-CRT laws are similar to laws currently being used to promote jingoistic, ehnonationalist history by rightwing authoritarian governments, including Vladimir Putin's in Russia:

Putin ... pioneered a new approach to memory laws: Rather than protecting the weak, they also can be weaponized to strengthen the powerful. In the context of Russian history, the counterpart to American slavery is the Holodomor, a terrible famine that killed millions of Ukrainians from 1932-1933. Beginning in 2008, Russia’s Duma assembly passed legislation that forbade the discussion of Russian government policies that contributed to the genocidal nature of the famine, and established entities like the “Presidential Commission of the Russian Federation to Counter Attempts to Falsify History to the Detriment of Russia’s Interests” (an ideological antecedent to the now-defunct 1776 Commission, then President Trump’s last-minute attempt to promote a “pro-American curriculum”).

This is the intellectual home of the CRT bans. They share educational space with Poland’s ridiculous, offensive and dangerous 2018 law that criminalizes the suggestion that Poland bears any responsibility for the crimes committed by the Germans during World War II. The object of Poland’s memory law is not to prevent the resurgence of extremist antisemitism; it is to prevent Poles from confronting the complex legacy of collaboration with the Nazi occupation. [my emphasis]

I posted about Poland's memory laws in The "historical policy" of the ruling Polish rightwing party PiS 07/31/2020, in which I also note Timothy Snyder's phrase for such narrow nationalist approaches to history, "the 'politics of eternity': a displacement of the real challenges of the actual world with a myth of a sacred past that must be protected."

Abramson explains how the Trumpista approach now becoming embedded in state laws by Republican legislatures would affect teaching about anti-Semitism:

Despite the 1776 Commissions promise to “unite, inspire, and ennoble all Americans,” these laws will chill honest engagement with hard truths, forcing teachers to lie to their students, even if only by omission.

Furthermore, anyone teaching Jewish history will be challenged to find a way to present the legacy of antisemitism without running afoul of these regulations. The historical linkage between Catholic theology and the persecution of Jews, for example, is rife with difficult topics. They range from the medieval charges of host desecration and the horrendous blood libel to the pope’s kidnapping of 6-year-old Edgardo Mortara in 1858 (we could, unfortunately, continue at length). Protestants would also be discomfited by Martin Luther’s anti-Jewish screed, “On the Jews and their Lies” (1543). The list of countries where Jews have lived in their diaspora is pretty much identical to the list of countries that have discriminated against Jews. [my emphasis]

Another JTA article (Eleanor Stern, When Holocaust education meets critical race theory: A partisan history debate unfolds in Louisiana 07/07/2021) describes how rightwing Republicans proposed a law that nominally advocated teaching about the Holocaust in Louisiana schools as a stalking-horse for a rather singular view of history:

The Holocaust education bill seemed potentially uncontroversial when Hodges introduced the measure in April. The original text simply called for “instruction regarding World War II and the Holocaust for middle and high school students and training for teachers relative to such instruction.”

Many Jewish groups have called for exactly that kind of requirement, arguing that education is the key to increasing tolerance and preventing genocides in the future. Currently, 17 states require some form of Holocaust education in schools. Louisiana, which one study pegged as having one of the lowest percentages of Holocaust-aware young people in the U.S., is seen as especially in need of similar mandates. The state also recently became the new home of the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience, boosting the visibility of Jews in the region.

But as lawmakers held hearings on the bill, it became clear that many of its supporters had a different vision — starting with [Valerie] Hodges, an evangelical ex-missionary and prominent conservative who has served in the Louisiana State Legislature for a decade. Hodges initially accepted, then declined, an interview with JTA.

On her professional Facebook page during the bill’s debate period, Hodges shared an image of Hitler with a caption calling him “everything today’s liberal craves.” Another post compared Nazi Germany to critical race theory and the New York Times’ 1619 Project, writing, “World War II was about RACE, yet liberals objected to it being included in my bill … Hitler had been laying the groundwork for at least 15 years before the Holocaust. It began with the organization of college students who would be the ones to help him implement his reign of horror.”

During hearings, Hodges made her arguments while seated beside David Barton, founder of the Texas-based advocacy group Wallbuilders, which aims to promote the idea that the U.S. is an inherently Christian nation founded on biblical principles. The Southern Poverty Law Center identifies Barton as an “extremist” who is “a key bridge between the mainstream political right and radical-right religious ideology.” [my emphasis]

If you design things around crackpot notions, it shouldn't surprise anyone that results wind up being cracked pottery.

Christian white lady from Blaze TV explains how Mean Libruls and their "critical race theory" are forcing polite white folks to form a "White Identitarian movement"

Allie Beth Stuckey is part of Glenn Beck's Blaze TV operation, which of course is highly ideological and very conservative, even radical rightwing. She has a podcast in which she presents conservative views from a Southern Baptist perspective. In the recurring schisms in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) she currently seems to be on the right wing of the SBC, which is by general American standards, already very rightwing.

I'll start out by giving her credit for criticizing the creepy idea that Tucker Carlson recently proposed on his FOX News White Power Hour that public school classes should all be recorded on camera. In order to make sure the innocent white en aren't being poluted by "critical race theory" (CRT), the Republicans' latest bogeyman conspiracy theory, of course. "Critical race theory" as it used by the Republicans actually is code for "Scary Jews! Scary black people!"

The Republicans didn't go all in on the CRT conspiracy theory until this year. But now it's become the Republican "Tea Party" of 2021.

Stuckey had this to say, though (07/08/2021 YouTube post):

But she's with Blaze TV, and she's all in on pumping up the CRT scare, so I'm not going to take that as any sign of emerging liberalism on her part. Maybe she's just enough of an adult to recognize some of the ways that children could be hurt by this, including in ways that have nothing to do with what's being taught.

I'm linking to her recent video on CRT, not because it contains anything substantive, but because it shows a couple of things about the limitations of the CRT slogan that I found a bit surprising to see: Critical Race Theory: The Left Loves It ... But Doesn’t Understand It 07/09/2021.

The rightwing meme on CRT is a sleazy conspiracy theory, which not only incorporates another longtime conspiracy theory on the far right called "Cultural Marxism," but seems to be pretty much just a rebranding of it. I've posted numerous times about both on this blog. Here I'll just summarize the narrative. It claims that a group of Jewish Marxists in Germany in the 1930s came up with a theory about culture that later spawned something called "postmodernism" and Political Correctness and now CRT, and it's all about destroying capitalism and undermining White Pride.

As with any conspiracy theory, refuting it can have the unfortunate effect of spreading it. But when the US Republican Party makes a slogan like CRT central to their political identity as they are doing in the current moment, it's also not really possible for non-Republicans to completely ignore it.

The two things that most strike me about this presentation are (1) she seems to recognize that that some of the pushback from even mainstream liberals is likely to be effective for people who aren't besotted true believers in the Glenn Beck Republican Gospel, and (2) in trying to explain in more detail how terrible CRT is to give her listeners additional arguments to use, she winds up making the Republican CRT meme actually sound like the silly mush that it is.

Because once you get beyond CRT being scary anti-white-people stuff and start talking in the slightest detail about what the concept of "whiteness" means among the theorists she's condemning, you have to at least hint at the idea that race is a social construct that does is applied to defining and reinforcing social power relations. And that already starts to dilute the message of, "scary Jews! Scary black people!"

Once she starts actually laying out the arguments of the fairly narrow legal academic field whose advocates themselves call "critical race theory," she quotes arguments that involve more serious points than "white people are all evil," for instance in citing the book Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (Third Edition, 2017) by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. She uses the term "liberal order" as something she defends, which is sure to befuddle most of her audience. She says, "CRT rejects the idea of judging people by their individual actions and rather judges people by group and by the systems they uphold either actively or just complicitly [sic]." (29.00 in the video)

Anyone who reads a few pages of the Delgado-Stefancic book is likel to see right away that the critical race theory that actually identifies with the name will see that it's an introduction to a specialized academic field. But Stuckey in that podcast spends a lot of energy into repeating that this is some kind of a comprehensive ideology that is Communism and Marxism in thin disguise. Maybe she didn't get to the page in the book that says, "Critical race theory has yet to develop a comprehensive theory of class." (Hint: Class is kind of a key concept in Communist theory. But, hey, class, race, oppression, colleges - it all sounds like icky Commie stuff, amirite?)

She repeats again and again with an arrogant smile that the CRT bugaboo is aimed at creating racial discrimination against white people, which FOX News viewers of course hear constantly, so most will just hear that and say, "Yeah, that's what I already knew." And if you're a self-righteous scold looking for ways to complain about black people in a respectable middle-class way, you might pick up a useful phrase or two.

But, apart from sporadically citing a couple of books published within the last 20 years, it's not really a whole lot different than what a Bircher or White Citizens Council fan would have been saying in 1960, or 1965, or any time since. In other words, the Mean Libruls are all Commies who are helping the Jews and black people take over. And, oh yeah, public schools are dangerous for nice white children, so better to send them to a Christian private school or homeschool them with fundamentalist Christian texts.

In other words, even a presentation that tries to expose CRT as a dangerous new menace in what would count on the right as an intellectual presentation - Stuckey does speak in complete sentences with understandable syntax - it winds up as mainly a list of all the white nationalist fears that segregationist-minded white people have been passing on from generation to generation. Stuckey's presentation is too sad and boring to be infuriating, although it does rise to the level of mildly annoying at points. Still, it's deeply dishonest rightwing propaganda.

She manages to stay on her dreary script most of the time. But near the end, just after 54:00 in the video, she warns her audience that CRT is meant to be "anti-White Power." She thinks that is a bad thing. She assures her listeners that CRT is "anti-white," but mealy-mouths around that point a bit, because that make it sound like she's being thoughtful, or nuanced, or something.

To make sure she summarizes the key points at the end, she explains that how CRT "manifests itself is in the explicit condemnation of white people as a whole." And then not-too-subtly suggests that it's time for a "White Identitarian movement" to counter CRT ("Scary Jews! Scary black people!") - not that she's advocating it, you see, it's just that some white people will "inevitably" take that as a necessary response to CRT ("Scary Jews! Scary black people!"). "White solidarity is going to come together as a reaction to [white] people being constantly maligned," she says.

This is nasty stuff. Seriously boring, but nasty.