“Who’s afraid of crit­i­cal race the­o­ry?” asked lawyer, legal schol­ar and Har­vard pro­fes­sor Der­rick Bell in a 1995 essay. Bell helped pio­neer the dis­ci­pline in the 70s, and until recent­ly, it remained most­ly con­fined to aca­d­e­m­ic jour­nals, grad school sem­i­nars and the pages of pro­gres­sive mag­a­zines. Now the phrase is every­where. What hap­pened? Did rad­i­cal schol­ars force third graders to read foot­notes? Or did con­ser­v­a­tives show up fifty years late to a con­ver­sa­tion, skip the read­ing, and decide the best way to respond was to lash out indis­crim­i­nate­ly at every iden­ti­ty and civ­il rights issue that makes them uncom­fort­able, start­ing with kinder­garten and work­ing their way up? Maybe Bell’s ques­tion has answered itself.

In the recent moral pan­ic over CRT, the term has become a denun­ci­a­tion, a shib­bo­leth that can apply to any his­to­ry, civics, or lit­er­a­ture les­son broad­ly con­strued, whether taught through cur­rent events, fic­tion, poet­ry, mem­oir, non­fic­tion, or any mate­r­i­al — to use the lan­guage of the “anti-CRT” Texas House Bill 3979 — that might make a stu­dent “feel dis­com­fort, guilt, anguish, or any oth­er form of psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­tress on account of the individual’s race or sex.” Con­nec­tions to Bel­l’s crit­i­cal race the­o­ry are ten­u­ous, at best. As Allyson Waller notes at the Texas Tri­bune, that aca­d­e­m­ic dis­ci­pline “is not being taught in K‑12 schools.”

This fact means lit­tle to right wing leg­is­la­tors, school board mem­bers and par­ents’ groups, who have found a con­ve­nient boogey­man on which to project their anx­i­eties. What the Texas bill means in prac­tice has been impos­si­ble to parse. Amer­i­can Civ­il Lib­er­ties Union lawyer Emer­son Sykes filed a fed­er­al suit over a sim­i­lar law in Okla­homa, argu­ing that it’s “so vague,” as Michael Pow­ell reports at The New York Times, “that it fails to pro­vide rea­son­able legal guid­ance to teach­ers and could put jobs in dan­ger.” A Black prin­ci­pal near Dal­las has already been forced to resign in the anti-CRT pan­ic, for writ­ing a pub­lic let­ter after George Floy­d’s death that declared, “Edu­ca­tion is the key to stomp­ing out igno­rance, hate, and sys­temic racism.”

In anoth­er part of the state, a dis­trict-lev­el exec­u­tive direc­tor of cur­ricu­lum has rec­om­mend­ed teach­ing “oth­er per­spec­tives” on the Holo­caust to meet the bil­l’s man­dates. Teach­ers and admin­is­tra­tors are not the only ones tar­get­ed by the bill and its sup­port­ers. “One minute they’re talk­ing crit­i­cal race the­o­ry,” says mid­dle school librar­i­an Car­rie Damon. “Sud­den­ly I’m hear­ing librar­i­ans are indoc­tri­nat­ing stu­dents. One library in Llano Coun­ty, about 80 miles north­west of Austin, shut down for three days for a “thor­ough review” of every chil­dren’s book. At the statewide lev­el, Texas Repub­li­can State Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Matt Krause launched an anti-CRT witch-hunt, in advance of a run for State Attor­ney Gen­er­al, by email­ing a list 850 books to state super­in­ten­dents, ask­ing if any of them appeared in their libraries.

The list, writes Dani­ka Ellis at Book Riot, is “a bizarre assort­ment of titles, for­mat­ted in a way that sug­gests it’s copy-and-past­ed from library list­ings.” It includes books about human rights, sex edu­ca­tion, any and every LGBTQ top­ic, race, Amer­i­can his­to­ry, and polic­ing. Iron­i­cal­ly, it also includes books about burn­ing books and bul­ly­ing (a prob­lem caus­ing stu­dent walk­outs around the coun­try). The books range from those for young chil­dren to mid­dle and high school stu­dents and col­lege-aged young adults. Most of them “were writ­ten by women, peo­ple of col­or and LGBTQ writ­ers.” It also includes “a par­tic­u­lar­ly puz­zling choice,” writes Pow­ell (prob­a­bly a mis­take?): Cyn­i­cal The­o­ries by Helen Pluck­rose and James Lind­say, two authors who have made careers out of expos­ing what they allege are ille­git­i­mate “griev­ances” in acad­e­mia.

You can see Krause’s full list here. The state rep’s “motive was unclear,” Pow­ell writes, but it seems clear enough he wished to flag these books for pos­si­ble removal. Giv­en that crit­i­cal race the­o­ry is not, in fact, a phrase that means “any­thing that makes con­ser­v­a­tives feel guilty and/or uncom­fort­able” but is fore­most a legal the­o­ry, we might ask legal ques­tions like cui bono? – “who ben­e­fits” from ban­ning the books on Krause’s list? Who feels uncom­fort­able and guilty when they read about racist polic­ing, healthy gay rela­tion­ships, or the civ­il rights move­ment– and why? Should that dis­com­fort pro­vide just cause for cen­sor­ship and the vio­la­tion of oth­er stu­dents’ rights to qual­i­ty edu­ca­tion­al mate­r­i­al? How can the sub­jec­tive stan­dard of “com­fort” be used to eval­u­ate the edu­ca­tion­al val­ue of a book?

Debates over free inquiry in edu­ca­tion seem nev­er to end. (Con­sid­er that the first book banned in Colo­nial North Amer­i­ca mocked the Puri­tans, who them­selves loved noth­ing more than ban­ning things.) As we approach the ques­tion this time around, it seems we might have learned not to ban books under vague laws that empow­er big­ots to hunt down an amor­phous ene­my so insid­i­ous it can lurk any­where and every­where. Such laws have their own his­to­ry, too, in the U.S. and else­where. Nowhere have they led to a state of affairs most of us want, one free from vio­lence, big­otry, dis­crim­i­na­tion and state repres­sion — that is, unless we need such things to make us com­fort­able.

via Book Riot

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

America’s First Banned Book: Dis­cov­er the 1637 Book That Mocked the Puri­tans

Read 14 Great Banned & Cen­sored Nov­els Free Online: For Banned Books Week 2014

It’s Banned Books Week: Lis­ten to Allen Gins­berg Read His Famous­ly Banned Poem, “Howl,” in San Fran­cis­co, 1956

When L. Frank Baum’s Wiz­ard of Oz Series Was Banned for “Depict­ing Women in Strong Lead­er­ship Roles” (1928)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

When did Amer­i­cans lose the abil­i­ty to think and act ratio­nal­ly? Or did they ever, on the whole, have such abil­i­ty? These are the ques­tions at the heart of the Big Think video above, a super­cut of inter­view clips from pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als — Neil DeGrasse, Michael Sher­mer,  Tyson, Kurt Ander­sen, Bill Nye, and Mar­garet Atwood — opin­ing on the state of the nation’s intel­lec­tu­al health. Unsur­pris­ing­ly, the prog­no­sis is not good, as Carl Sagan pre­dict­ed over 25 years ago.

Of inter­est here is the diag­no­sis: How did the coun­try get to a place where it is unable to defend itself against a dead­ly virus because mil­lions of cit­i­zens refuse to take it seri­ous­ly? How did Amer­i­cans let Exxon wreck the cli­mate because mil­lions of Amer­i­cans refused to believe in human-caused cli­mate change? How did a failed mogul and real­i­ty TV star become pres­i­dent? How did Qanon, Piz­za­gate…. How did any of it hap­pen?

The roots are long and deep, says writer and for­mer host of NPR’s Stu­dio 360, Kurt Ander­sen, who has spent a sig­nif­i­cant amount of time think­ing about the cul­ture of Amer­i­can irra­tional­ism. On the one hand, “Amer­i­cans have always been mag­i­cal thinkers and pas­sion­ate believ­ers in the untrue,” from the time of the Puri­tans, who were not per­se­cut­ed refugees so much as fanat­ics no one in Eng­land could stand. And the prob­lem is even old­er than the country’s found­ing, Ander­sen argues in his book Fan­ta­sy­land: How Amer­i­ca Went Hay­wire: A 500-Year His­to­ry — it dates to the foun­da­tions of the mod­ern world.

On the oth­er hand, and some­what con­tra­dic­to­ri­ly, it was those Puri­tans again who kept the worst of things in check. “We also have the virtues embod­ied by the Puri­tans and their sec­u­lar descen­dants,” Ander­sen writes at The Atlantic: “steadi­ness, hard work, fru­gal­i­ty, sobri­ety, and com­mon sense” — such virtues as helped build the coun­try’s sci­en­tif­ic indus­tries and research insti­tu­tions, which have been steadi­ly under­mined by the rel­a­tivism of the 1960s (Ander­sen argues), the effects of the inter­net, and a series of dev­as­tat­ing polit­i­cal choic­es. The delu­sion­al irra­tional­ism was built in — but hyper-indi­vid­u­al­ism and prof­i­teer­ing of the last sev­er­al decades super­charged it. “The Unit­ed States used to be the world leader in tech­nol­o­gy,” says Bill Nye, but no more.

Mar­garet Atwood, who is Cana­di­an not Amer­i­can, talks most­ly about the uni­ver­sal human dif­fi­cul­ty of let­ting go of com­fort­ing core beliefs, and the uses the exam­ple of the out­cry against Dar­win­ian evo­lu­tion. Yet her very pres­ence in the dis­cus­sion will make view­ers think of her most famous nov­el, The Handmaid’s Tale, in which she imag­ined what lies beneath the sup­pos­ed­ly enlight­ened com­mon sense of the coun­try’s gov­ern­ment. The stage was long ago set for a rev­o­lu­tion that could eas­i­ly turn the coun­try against sci­ence, she believed.

As Atwood wrote in 2018 of the novel’s gen­e­sis: “Nations nev­er build appar­ent­ly rad­i­cal forms of gov­ern­ment on foun­da­tions that aren’t there already.… The deep foun­da­tion of the Unit­ed States — so went my think­ing — was not the com­par­a­tive­ly recent 18th-cen­tu­ry Enlight­en­ment struc­tures of the Repub­lic, with their talk of equal­i­ty and their sep­a­ra­tion of Church and State, but the heavy-hand­ed theoc­ra­cy of 17th-cen­tu­ry Puri­tan New Eng­land — with its marked bias against women — which would need only the oppor­tu­ni­ty of a peri­od of social chaos to reassert itself.”

Rather than iden­ti­fy­ing the prob­lems with Puri­tans or 60s hip­pies, Neil DeGrasse Tyson — as he has done through­out his career — dis­cuss­es issues of sci­ence edu­ca­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion. On both fronts, there has been some improve­ment. “More jour­nal­ists who are sci­ence flu­ent… are writ­ing about sci­ence than was the case 20 years ago,” he says, “so now I don’t have to wor­ry about the jour­nal­ist miss­ing some­thing fun­da­men­tal.… And [sci­ence] report­ing has been much more accu­rate in recent years, I’m hap­py to report.”

But while the inter­net has ampli­fied our oppor­tu­ni­ties for sci­en­tif­ic lit­er­a­cy, it has also done the oppo­site, gross­ly mud­dy­ing the intel­lec­tu­al waters with mis­in­for­ma­tion and a com­pet­i­tive need to get the sto­ry first. “If it’s not yet ver­i­fied, it’s not there yet.… So be more open about how wrong the thing you’re report­ing on could be, because oth­er­wise you’re doing a dis­ser­vice to the pub­lic. And that dis­ser­vice is that peo­ple out there say, ‘Sci­en­tists don’t know any­thing.’ ”

There are also those who choose to side with hand­ful of con­trar­i­an sci­en­tists who dis­agree with the con­sen­sus. “This is irre­spon­si­ble,” says Tyson. “Plus it means you don’t know how sci­ence works.” Or it means you’re look­ing to con­firm bias­es rather than gen­uine­ly take an inter­est in the sci­en­tif­ic process. For all of their insights, the talk­ing head crit­ics in the video fail to men­tion a pri­ma­ry dri­ver behind so much of the U.S.‘s sci­ence denial­ism, a moti­va­tion as foun­da­tion­al to the coun­try as the Puri­tan’s zealotry: prof­it, at all costs.

Read a tran­script of the video here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

Carl Sagan Pre­dicts the Decline of Amer­i­ca: Unable to Know “What’s True,” We Will Slide, “With­out Notic­ing, Back into Super­sti­tion & Dark­ness” (1995)

An Ani­mat­ed Mar­garet Atwood Explains How Sto­ries Change with Tech­nol­o­gy

Neil deGrasse Tyson Says This Short Film on Sci­ence in Amer­i­ca Con­tains Per­haps the Most Impor­tant Words He’s Ever Spo­ken

Isaac Asi­mov Laments the “Cult of Igno­rance” in the Unit­ed States (1980)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness